James Joyce and the Difference of Language

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J A M E S J OY C E A N D T H E D I F F E R E N C E OF LANGUAGE

James Joyce and the Difference of Language offers a fresh look at Joyce’s writing by placing his language at the intersection of various critical perspectives: linguistics, philosophy, feminism, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism and intertextuality. Combining close textual analysis and theoretically informed readings, an international team of leading scholars explores how Joyce’s experiments with language repeatedly challenge our ways of reading. Topics covered include reading Joyce through translations, the role of Dante’s literary linguistics in Finnegans Wake, and the place of gender in Joyce’s Modernism; two further essays illustrate aspects of Joyce’s cultural politics in Ulysses and the ethics of desire in Finnegans Wake. Informed by current debates in Joyce scholarship, literary studies and critical theory, and addressing the full range of his writing, this volume is the first to examine comprehensively the critical diversity of Joyce’s linguistic practices. It is essential reading for all scholars of Joyce and Modernism. l aure nt mi le s i is Lecturer in English and American Literature and Critical Theory at Cardiff University, and a member of the Joyce ITEM-CNRS Research Group in Paris. He is the author of numerous essays, mainly on Joyce and related aspects of Modernism, twentiethcentury American poetry, postmodernism and poststructuralism.

J A M E S J O YCE A ND T HE DI F F E R E NC E O F LA NGU AGE ed ited by L AURENT M IL ESI

   Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , United Kingdom Published in the United States by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521623377 © Cambridge University Press 2003 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2003 ISBN-13 978-0-511-06818-8 eBook (EBL) ISBN-10 0-511-06818-2 eBook (EBL) ISBN-13 978-0-521-62337-7 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-62337-5 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Extracts from the oeuvre of James Joyce as well as, exceptionally, from the letters are reproduced with the permission of the Estate; © the Estate of James Joyce.

For Simina

Contents

List of contributors Acknowledgements List of abbreviations 1

page viii xi xiii

Introduction: language(s) with a difference

1

Laurent Milesi

2

Syntactic glides

28

Fritz Senn

3

‘Cypherjugglers going the highroads’: Joyce and contemporary linguistic theories

43

Benoit Tadi´e

4

Madonnas of Modernism

58

Beryl Schlossman

5

Theoretical modelling: Joyce’s women on display

79

Diane Elam

6

The lapse and the lap: Joyce with Deleuze

97

Marie-Dominique Garnier

7

‘sound sense’; or ‘tralala’ / ‘moocow’: Joyce and the anathema of writing

112

Thomas Docherty

8

Language, sexuality and the remainder in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

128

Derek Attridge

9

Border disputes

142

Ellen Carol Jones vi

Contents 10

Errors and expectations: the ethics of desire in Finnegans Wake

vii 161

Patrick McGee

11

Ex sterco Dantis: Dante’s post-Babelian linguistics in the Wake

180

Lucia Boldrini

12

No symbols where none intended: Derrida’s war at Finnegans Wake

195

Sam Slote

Works cited Index

208 225

Contributors

derek at tridge is Leverhulme Research Professor in the English Department at the University of York. He has published books on both Joyce and literary language, including Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Methuen and Cornell University Press, 1988) and Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History (Cambridge University Press, 2000). He edited The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (1990) and co-edited Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French (Cambridge University Press, 1984), The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature (Manchester University Press and Routledge, 1987), and Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge University Press, 2000). lu c i a boldrini is Senior Lecturer in English at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations: Language and Meaning in Finnegans Wake (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and of Biografie fittizie e personaggi storici: (Auto)biografia, soggettivit`a, teoria nel romanzo inglese contemporaneo (Pisa: ETS, 1998), and the editor of Medieval Joyce (Rodopi, 2002). th o mas dochert y is Professor of English at the University of Kent, and former Professor of English at Trinity College, Dublin. He is the author of a number of books, including most recently Alterities: Criticism, History, Representation (Oxford, 1996), After Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 1996) and Criticism and Modernity (Oxford University Press, 1999). He is currently working on a book about the cultural ethnography of European modernisms. di a ne el am is Professor of English Literature and Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University. She is the author of Romancing the Postmodern (Routledge, 1992) and Feminism and Deconstruction (Routledge, 1994), as well as co-editor with Robyn Wiegman of Feminism viii

Contributors

ix

Beside Itself (Routledge, 1995). She is currently working on a book entitled ‘The Injustice of Truth: Notes Toward a Feminist Politics’. ma r ie-dom iniqu e garnier is Professor of English Literature at the University of Paris VIII, where she lectures on seventeenth-century poetry, drama and Modernism. She has published articles and book chapters mostly on Shakespeare, metaphysical poetry, Joyce and T. S. Eliot, co-authored a translation of The Diary of Samuel Pepys (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1994), and published George Herbert: The Temple (Paris: Didier, 1997). She is the editor of Jardins d’Hiver (Paris: P.E.N.S., 1997), a collection of essays on literature and photography. She is currently working on a book project on Deleuze and literature, and a translation of selections from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (Gallimard). ellen carol jones is Associate Professor of English and International Studies at Saint Louis University, where she teaches Irish Studies and Women’s Studies. She has published articles on Holocaust representation and memory, Virginia Woolf, and especially James Joyce. She is coediting Twenty-First Joyce for University Press of Florida (provisional date: 2003), and has edited Joyce: Feminism / Post / Colonialism (Rodopi, 1998) and four volumes for Modern Fiction Studies: Feminist Readings of Joyce (1989), The Politics of Modernism (1992), Virginia Woolf (1992), and, as a co-editor, Feminism and Modern Fiction (1988). patr ick m C gee is a Professor in the Department of English at Louisiana State University. His most recent publications include Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race (St Martin’s Press, 1997), Cinema, Theory, and Political Responsibility in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Joyce beyond Marx: History and Desire in ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Finnegans Wake’ (University Press of Florida, 2001). l au rent m ilesi teaches Twentieth-Century American Literature and Critical Theory at Cardiff University (Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory), and is also a member of the Joyce ITEM-CNRS Research Group in Paris. His essays are mainly on Joyce and related aspects of Modernism, twentieth-century American poetry, postmodernism and poststructuralism (Lacan and Derrida). He is currently completing two monographs, on Jacques Derrida (in French) and on Post-Effects: Literature, Theory and the Future Perfect. bery l schlossm an is the author of several books of literary criticism: Joyce’s Catholic Comedy of Language (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985),

x

Contributors The Orient of Style: Modernist Allegories of Conversion (Duke University Press, 1991), and Objects of Desire: The Madonnas of Modernism (Cornell University Press, 1999), as well as Angelus Novus, a collection of poems published by Ulysse Fin de Si`ecle (France) in 1995. A story entitled ‘Tableaux a` l’´etranger [Foreign Pictures]’ is forthcoming in France. She teaches at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh.

fr i tz sen n is in charge of the James Joyce Foundation in Zurich. As an amateur scholar he has written essays, articles and notes, almost exclusively on Joyce or translation problems (with forays into ochlokinetics or Sambal). Some of them are collected in Nichts gegen Joyce: Joyce versus Nothing (Zurich: Haffmans Verlag, 1983), Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce (Lilliput Press, 1995) and Nicht nur Nichts gegen Joyce (Haffmans Verlag, 1999). s a m slote is the Joyce scholar in residence at the Poetry/Rare Books Collection, SUNY-Buffalo. He has written The Silence in Progress of Dante, Mallarm´e, and Joyce (Peter Lang, 1999) and has co-edited two volumes of Joyce criticism: Probes: Genetic Studies in Joyce (1995) and Genitricksling Joyce (1999), both for Rodopi. benoit tadi e´ is a lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle. He has translated Dubliners into French (Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1994) and is the author of L’Exp´erience moderniste anglo-am´ericaine 1908–1922 (Paris, Didier, 1998).

Acknowledgements

Since its timid beginning in the distant wake of a panel on ‘Joyce and Linguistics’ at the 1992 International Joyce Symposium in Dublin and, more decisively, its conception as a publication project some four and a half years later, the present collection has undergone so many of the vicissitudes of what is usually called ‘life’ that drawing up a list of those who have at various stages showed their support and encouragement would be an impossible task. Yet a few names deserve special mention, without whose help the volume would never have come to fruition. Pride of place has to be given to the contributors themselves, for their patience during the too many frustrating postponements and, in some cases, their permission to republish earlier or different versions of their work: Derek Attridge’s essay first appeared as chapter 5 of Joyce Effects. On Language, Theory, and History (Cambridge University Press, 2000); Lucia Boldrini’s study was developed at greater length as chapter 3 of Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations: Language and Meaning in ‘Finnegans Wake’ (Cambridge University Press, 2001); Patrick McGee’s contribution is a concise version of chapter 7 of Joyce beyond Marx: History and Desire in ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Finnegans Wake’ (University Press of Florida, 2001); and Beryl Schlossman’s piece appeared in a different form in Objects of Desire: The Madonnas of Modernism (Cornell University Press, 1999). Extracts from the oeuvre of James Joyce as well as, exceptionally, from the letters are reproduced with the permission of the C the Estate of James Joyce. Estate;
I also wish to thank especially Ray Ryan, the Commissioning Editor at Cambridge University Press, for never relinquishing his support throughout the book’s difficult gestation, even when more than belief must have been required. Colleagues and friends at Cardiff University, especially Catherine Belsey and the congenial staff at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, have also played their part in keeping up the little concentration of a defeated editor in the all-too-numerous sombre moments. More recently, Tom Dawkes, from the ASSL Library at Cardiff University, has been up to xi

xii

Acknowledgements

his usual helpful and resourceful self by volunteering to chase up last-minute elusive references. Last and first, I wish to acknowledge the unflinching support of my wife, without whom I know that this book would never have had a chance to see the light of day – and to whom therefore it is dedicated.

Abbreviations

Unless otherwise specified, the following editions of Joyce’s works or studies on Joyce have been used and abbreviated. References to Ulysses are given by chapter and line, those to Finnegans Wake by page and line (or, occasionally, book and chapter); those to other works are by page only. D FW JJ JJA Letters I, II III P SH SL U

Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Viking Critical Library. Ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Viking, 1969. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber, 1975. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce. New and rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. The James Joyce Archive. 63 vols. Gen. ed. Michael Groden. New York: Garland, 1977–9 (volume citation conforms to the one given in the James Joyce Quarterly). Letters of James Joyce. 3 vols. London: Faber. Vol. I, ed. Stuart Gilbert, 1957; Vols. II, III, ed. Richard Ellmann, 1966. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Viking Critical Library. Ed. Chester G. Anderson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Stephen Hero. Ed. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon. New York: New Directions, 1955 ed. Selected Letters of James Joyce. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1975. Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior. 3 vols. New York: Garland, 1986.

Whenever appropriate, abbreviations of other editions or texts frequently referred to will be introduced in individual essays. xiii

chapter 1

Introduction: language(s) with a difference Laurent Milesi

There is a delicate empiricism which so intimately involves itself with the object that it becomes true theory. (Goethe)

joyce’s linguistic poetics/ polit ics Joyce’s attempts to harness the effects of language and, increasingly with time, languages, may arguably be selected as the feature of his writing which mostly conditioned its technical transformations. Indeed, it is hard for a newcomer to the ever-expanding world of Joyce studies to miss the several time-worn pronouncements made by Joyce himself or, vicariously, by friends and fictional alter egos about his felt need to transcend the barriers of expressiveness set by the systems of existing languages.1 Though such neat polemical slogans have too often been taken as programmatic, to the detriment of the elements of chance and fluidity that Joyce was increasingly willing to admit into the mechanics of literary composition, there is no denying that Joyce’s oeuvre is best seen as constantly trying to inform an evolutive linguistic poetics – one which, I wish to contend, conditions, and therefore should remain central to, whatever interpretive avenue we choose to explore. (R)evolutions Although Joyce seemed to embark with each new work on a radically different experiment in literary language, it is more helpful to see the whole Joycean output as a discrete continuum in which apparently new departures in fact redeployed earlier narrative-linguistic habits in a different guise. Just as the structure of Joyce’s various literary productions is more or less explicitly circular,2 the ‘technical’ evolutions that they each enacted within an ongoing creative process must equally be seen as revolutions, in the 1

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etymological sense of coming round full circle – and not merely as an acclaim a` la Jolas of Joyce’s linguistic breakthroughs. To give a succinct, yet convenient, illustration: the early selective epiphanic treatment of linguistic material and plot, which had presided over the composition of Dubliners and the reworking of the verbose Stephen Hero into A Portrait, was extended to the beginnings of Ulysses, still haunted by the joint classical principles of economy and intensity. Yet, as Joyce’s ‘stylistic odyssey’ wrote more of itself, the discarded plenitude slowly found its way back, metamorphosed as the all-inclusive technique of composition that would likewise prevail in Finnegans Wake, where accretions, prompted by earlier lexical cues, dilate a narrative sequence to the extreme and shape dense thematic networks through narrative and linguistic recyclings. One may even still register something of the former epiphany in the multi-layered portmanteau word or syntactico-rhythmic modulations of the Wake’s nonce-idiom, and what was once inconspicuous lexical sophistication ‘simply’ gave way to the more extroverted verbal eccentricities of ‘Wakese’, with the discreetly apophantic turning into the more overtly performative.3 Similarly, Joyce’s ‘Blue Book of Eccles’ (FW 179.27) turned, past its half-way mark, from a sequel to A Portrait mixing stream of consciousness with third-person narration, into an increasingly self-reflexive work in which the narrative technique ascribed to each chapter is foregrounded as subject through linguistic, metadiscursive strategies. In A Portrait, the narrator’s language, which gradually becomes more articulate and analytic as Stephen’s intellect and capacities for abstraction develop, still serves as a focal point for the reader’s access to the hero’s maturation at choice moments. With Ulysses, however, Joyce felt the need to supplant the homely ‘initial style’, with its relatively (if deceptively) more conventional narrative agencies and unobtrusive stylistic devices, by a versatile style so as to render the protagonist’s circuitous wanderings away from home in a single day poised between myth and realism (see SL 242: letter dated 6 August 1919). This in turn caused Joyce to recast and amplify most of the earlier episodes towards the end of his own Ulyssean peregrinations through forms and styles, as fiction writing shifted into a more metafictional gear, exploring new expressive forms for their own sake. Matching the Bloomian yearnings for Ithaca, the dialectic of such a (re)composition is best seen in the Nostos episodes, corresponding to the Telemachia in narrative modes but filtered through ‘decharacterized’ language and climaxing with the ‘pure’ enunciation of Molly Bloom’s infinitely revolving thoughts. This evolution is thus inseparable from an increasing dissolution or, at least, problematization of neat entities like character and voice, as well as the boundaries between them, and, consequently, from the emergence of more polyphonic voices

Introduction: language(s) with a difference

3

which, in the ‘pollylogue’ (FW 470.9) or ‘drama parapolylogic’ (FW 474.5) of Finnegans Wake, will ultimately combine with shifting enunciative poles and a pliable linguistic medium to create erring discursive effects ascribable to a ‘side’ or ‘role’ in a many-faceted ‘character complex’.4 If the growing tendency in Ulysses was to parody and perform operations on itself, or to satirize previous stylistic poses in some of its sections as the novel’s composition progressed, the most encompassing gesture of this kind was to come with Joyce’s ultimate creation. It has been repeatedly pointed out, on the basis of the headings in the Scribbledehobble or VI. A notebook matching chapter divisions in Joyce’s previous works, that the Wake’s first design possibly included a thorough parodic reworking of the major stylistic attitudes struck so far, although more recent studies have challenged this canonical view of what Connolly’s early transcription subtitled The Ur-Workbook for ‘Finnegans Wake’ by questioning its chronological priority.5 With no first-step narrative guideline such as the Odyssey to follow, and thus no definite idea of what structure and thematic principles should frame his new project, Joyce picked from rough lexical jottings and embryonic story elements compiled in the now familiar notebooks, often exploring anew old concerns from various narrative approaches, and composed disconnected sketches, later to become the work’s anchoring points, scattered evenly throughout the book in order to ensure its cohesiveness. Whereas the Homeric wanderings of Joyce’s Ulyssean heroes had made possible a fairly sequential mode of writing, the architectural problems that necessarily arose from the elaboration of random episodes entailed a less linear approach to composition and may have played a part in suggesting a cyclical structure for the new work as well as a novel linguistic system capable of informing it.6 In its panoramic one-day trip taken through discourses, idioms, techniques and styles available in the history of English language and literature up to the early 1920s, Ulysses had already featured a dozen foreign languages, mainly used to enhance motifs or for purposes of characterization. As a deepening continuation of the closing nocturnal mood of Ulysses, the linguistic babel of Finnegans Wake will extend the diachronic dissection of literary Englishes performed in ‘Oxen of the Sun’ to the much broader spectrum of seventy-plus of the world’s idioms. The linguistic politics of Hiberno-English Don’t talk to me about politics. I’m only interested in style.7

Yet Joyce’s desire to fashion a language that would transcend all languages, beyond the reach of tradition and subduing all linguistic and historic

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nationalisms and ideologies, cannot simply be seen as a purely aesthetic gesture proffered from the top of a lofty ivory tower by an elitist modernist ‘self exiled in upon his ego’ (FW 184.6–7). The cross between a highly particularized literary idiolect and polyglottal strands could only modulate into a politicized pluridialectal ‘idioglossary’ (FW 423.9) with a universalist, translinguistic as well as transcultural, slant – ultimately receiving the form of a xenolalic Dublin family microcosm in Finnegans Wake. The Irish capital as the particular city from which the essential universal could be extracted a posteriori provided the literal anchoring for the peculiar Joycean blend of ‘nationalism’ (if the linguistic politics of his Irishness can still be so called) and supposedly more typical modernist cosmo-politanism in his ‘im aginable itinerary through the particul ar u ni versal ’ (FW 260.R3).8 The fictional ‘programme’ of narrating the nation as a ‘nonation’ (FW 36.22), of reconstructing ‘Irishness’ down to its regional, local inflections9 within a literary practice redefining Realism, should be clearly set against a ‘merely’ parochial patriotism reared on the myth of an originary nativeness and cultural supremacy to be restored. Indeed it is Joyce’s ‘regional internationalism’ – manifest in his interest in dialects or obscure idiosyncratic cants as much as forgotten or still dominant national languages – which enabled his imagined recreations of the detailed lineaments of a distanced nation to be shaped by a healthy spirit of localism, rather than lapsing into provincialism. Already in A Portrait, Stephen’s non serviam was aimed at the nation’s inability to extricate itself from reproducing the complicitous logic and structure of religious (or mythological), political oppression, and replacing external colonization by the internal tyranny of an artificial ‘Celtic revival’. As Joyce himself put it to Arthur Power in 1921, in a typical aphoristic outburst indicative of his customary sense of literary grandeur but which could also summarize his own trajectory: ‘[The great writers] were national first [. . .] and it was the intensity of their own nationalism which made them international in the end [. . .]. For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal’ (quoted in JJ 505). The crucial moments in Joyce’s search for a transnational literary language, at once prising open the complicity between the national and the natural and countering it through defamiliarization and babelization, have long been well documented, but some may be worth recapitulating here for the sake of our argument. Quite early in his novelistic career, Joyce the po`ete manqu´e opened up the language of narrative to the poetic effects of the foreignization or ‘alienation’ of English, from the latent lexical

Introduction: language(s) with a difference

5

defamiliarization in Dubliners, growing to an overt questioning of the ‘so familiar and so foreign’ tongue of tradition and subjection in the famous ‘tundish’ scene with the Dean of Studies in A Portrait (P 188–9), to a systematic attempt at depleting styles, idioms and idiolects, which will culminate in the carnival of linguistic vivisection and mimesis pitted against the foetus’ growth in ‘Oxen of the Sun’. The opening story of Dubliners has been said to diffuse its trinity of ‘paralysis’, ‘gnomon’ and ‘simony’, with their diverse degrees of uncanny foreignness consensually noted by critics, to the structure of the whole collection, and its symptomatic attention to the sonority of the signifier can be traced down to such barely noticeable elements as the boy-narrator’s fascination with the arcane terms of distillery, ‘faints and worms’ (D 10; see Tadi´e’s essay). Throughout Dubliners, seen as an ordered collection of short stories, Joyce’s ‘poetic’ writing channels the ‘remainder’10 of/within language and foregrounds linguistic material at once on an individual, anagnoristic level – even in the soft irony of the detached narrator’s etymological pun on ‘generous’ and ‘general’ as a possible undercut of the tragic moment of Gabriel’s self-epiphany towards the end of ‘The Dead’ – or as a ritualistic stage in a curbing process of socialization. All the more subversive since it wreaks its effects more subtly than in the later verbal eccentricities of Ulysses and the ‘nat language’ (night+not language) of Finnegans Wake, the ephemeral (etymological, phonetic, etc.) pun or linguistic slippage provides the aesthetic counterforce to this symbolic process of individual and collective formation or repression, whether in the dramatized, deflationary confusion of the diseased rheumatic with a desanctified pneumatic in ‘The Sisters’, the uncontrolled venal undertones of the preacher in ‘Grace’, or the cork’s monosyllabic debunking in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’. Similarly, the famous incipit of A Portrait, with its resistant infantile babble and heightening of the sensuality of language as acoustic material, further analysed by Attridge and Docherty here, or the subversive dominance of presemantic sounds (‘slop’; ‘pick, pack, pock, puck’ (P 41): earlier avatars of similar rhythmic tags in Finnegans Wake), are distant predecessors of the more complex babel of voices and tongues from which the ‘purer’ strains of a more demotic parlance can be extracted in the Wake. This joint poeticization and foreignization of normative English cannot be seen outside a ‘political’ awareness of the coerciveness of the ‘native’ tongue, and exposing its own repressed foreign dimension through etymological recalls or syntactical manipulations conveying the idiosyncratic rhythms of Dubliners’ speech was Joyce’s way of devising a middle course of literary action between the imposed rigours of an English tradition and the

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artificially revived nationalist orthodoxies of Irish Gaelic (cf. Letters II 187). As Joyce’s texts incorporated a growing number of foreign tongues or emphasized the quaintly alien nature of defamiliarized English within English itself and not only through the miscegenation with foreign idioms, a synthetic idiom, questioning the analogy between the national and the natural, emerged whose only ‘model’ could be the linguistic compromise or ‘middle voice’ of Hiberno-English as well as various forms of creolization of English (see below): linguistic decolonization could be satisfactorily achieved only through hybridity.11 Thus, by Finnegans Wake, ‘purity’ has paradoxically become a matter of mediation, with its political, ethical and even critical extensions. Joyce’s implementation of a linguistic desire to exile the (familiar) language both from within and without and turn the familiar ‘in-law’ of language into a barbaric ‘outlex’ (FW 169.3), ultimately paved the way for a middle ground between aesthetics and ethics, poetics and politics. Far from the earlier conception of an idealized aestheticism a` la Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s mature literary idiom took on a more fully rounded Bloomian generosity and acceptance, a more enlightened, anti-Cyclopean ‘half and half’ (U 12.1052–5), gradually reconciling itself with the joint poetics and politics of the vernacular in order to become a ‘universalised Hiberno-English’ in Finnegans Wake.12 The ‘critical literary’ in Joyce Joyce’s exposition of the limitations of literary-critical beliefs in organicity (the analogy between biological (Darwinian) and linguistic evolution), character, representation and mimesis, context and exemplarity (see Elam’s essay) in several chapters of Ulysses and throughout Finnegans Wake should be viewed alongside his all-round linguistic relativism and undermining of theories by subversive literary counterpractices. Although he was firmly entrenched in historical linguistics and, from his student days, ‘read Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary by the hour’ like his fictional counterpart (SH 26), the way he ransacked and ironically thematized a whole array of linguistic theories13 or his more conservative readings,14 as much as his more structurally important ‘trellis’ like Vico and Jousse, shows an awareness of the theoretical naivety of unqualified adherence to explanatory, analogical systems, historical etymologism as a foundation of linguistic truth, classifications into families, and the lure of taxonomies.15 Perhaps the common denominator under most of Joyce’s tropic turns of creativity is a desire for ‘signifying practices’ that would lay bare the

Introduction: language(s) with a difference

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weaknesses of linguistic categorizations for a truly innovative literary praxis, overreach Modernism’s critique of the representational inadequacies of ‘Realism’ in order to venture into new stylistic territories – from the faithfulness of a rigorous mimeticism/mimesis to the antics of mimicry (e.g. Bloom’s worn hat ironically masquerading as a ‘high grade ha’; U passim) – and would ultimately lead to growing incomprehension from fellow modernists and former admirers like Pound. Rather than grope for the style(s) that would best capture a mood and be attuned to a theme in a restricted context, Joyce’s fluid literary language allowed itself to become more and more freely magnetized by the subject matter, both at micro and macro levels (cf. e.g. the floral environment and tea motif surrounding Leopold Bloom as Henry Flower in ‘Lotus Eaters’; the ubiquity of river names in the fluvial atmosphere of the ‘Anna Livia’ episode, etc.), and to operate in between literary practices and languages’ taxonomic territories. It is arguably the cultivation of such a critical mood within an increasingly ‘porous’ literary idiolect that urged the necessity of a shift (back) to the aesthetics of expansion mentioned above – and eventually took Joyce beyond the modernist project of challenging the realist novel’s traditional assumptions about/claim to verisimilitude and faithfulness through the ‘scrupulous meanness’ of the carefully crafted Dublin microcosm which his realist critics later froze into a kind of literary hyperrealism avant la lettre. One major form that the critical within Joyce’s literary experiments took was the exploitation, to the point of explosion, of a given ‘programme’ in order to probe the limits of its viability as a literary technique or as an interpretive framework. For instance, Joyce’s deft parodic treatment of the catalogue, distended until its purposeful exemplariness collapses under the strain of overblown nominalization (‘Cyclops’, the titles of the ‘mamafesta’ in FW I.5, etc.), explores the breaking point past which a digressive technique engulfs the mainstream body of the text, and normative patterns of readerly recognizability and expectations cease to operate critically.16 Or else, still in Finnegans Wake, the implicit boundaries of any critical hermeneutics are questioned within the larger economy and signifying practices of the Wakean portmanteau idiom. In particular, the possibility of arresting the number of languages used in the ‘final’ text, from manuscript (notebook) evidence as well as a reconstruction of intentions from several conflicting echoes scattered throughout the Wake, must be set in a constant ‘dialectical’ tension with the work’s irrepressible drive to exceed any such assignable bounds, its programmatic tendency towards encyclopaedic all-inclusiveness, and the untameable slipperiness of

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its portmanteau idiom. More generally, it is our literary-critical preconceptions of acceptable stylistic, syntactical, lexical norms, as well as our critical choices – and their underlying cultural ideologies – that Joyce’s out-and-out war on (literary) language and the strictures of its academic interpretations came to attack frontally, forcing us to ceaselessly discard ‘institutionalized’ theses and instead fashion a critically inventive d´emarche and idiom. joyce’s critical id ioms and the critics’ joycean idioms Joyce’s foresights: his critics’ afterthoughts One of the most original, ‘self-reflexive’ traits in Joyce’s last novel is its ability to pre-empt – or, as Derrida aptly argued of Joyce more generally, hypermnesically pre-program17 – the interested speculativeness of our various interpretive biases and the ideologies that underpin them. In particular, Finnegans Wake, and more specifically its metafictional ‘mamafesta’ chapter (FW I.5), tantalizingly offers a foretaste of some of its future critical receptions and commentaries from historical (Marxist), psychoanalytic (Freudian/Jungian), philosophical-aesthetic and textual-bibliographical (or, now, genetic) perspectives, dispatching any one argument and its contraries under the fictionalized law of coincidentia oppositorum and satirizing their respective critical jargons and biases in choice prismatic distortions. (Particularly emblematic of the critical desire of Joyce’s postulated ‘ideal readers’ is the ‘Brotfressor’s’ compulsion to recuperate the four pricks inflicted by his fork on the precious manuscript at his breakfast table, which compromise the integrity of the letter to be analysed as they tamper with an originally unique signature; FW 123.29ff.) In that respect, it is tempting to chart the evolutions of critical attitudes and adjustments to Joyce’s linguistic/literary innovativeness as so many uncanny afterthoughts elaborating his own ‘historical’ itinerary recalled above. Such a course would go from a more traditional conception of fiction and literature, literary language (e.g. the role of punning and the hybridization of ‘English’), and literary criticism (whose staunch, ‘authorized’ exponents were Gilbert and Budgen), to more recent views of literary language as a mixed medium of self-ironic, self-reflexive and self-critical expressiveness; from, for example, the confident conception of a presencing mimesis to the relativistic distrust of it as distant mimicry and ironic performance at the service of ‘style’.18 Thus generations of Joyce scholars and readers have gradually shifted from an earlier focus on the mimetic powers and programme

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of/in Joyce’s fictional language – as supposedly embedded in the writer’s several (sometimes conflicting) schemata – to an awareness of the assumptions underlying such a naive belief in language’s illusory mimetic and organic ability, including the ability to be the spearhead of fictional experimentation. At stake here is the latter-day realization that, within the inbuilt critical dimension of Joyce’s texts, representation ‘itself ’ – a felicitous word which can be made to acquire aesthetic as well as political overtones – comes under scrutiny and is exposed, beyond its canonizable techniques and resources, to a reflexion on representability and representativity alike. Product (signification, oeuvre) therefore has given way to production or process (signifiance, ‘text’ or ´ecriture) – including in the sense of the fascination of Joyce’s ‘embodied’ language for the materiality of bodily productions; the mirror traditionally held up to nature has revealed the tain that enables its (self-)reflexions. Joyce’s own itinerary would have thus uncannily anticipated the overall drift of (Joycean) literary criticism towards (self-reflexivity and productivity in) ‘theory’, and revealed the essentially historical constitution of our joint processes of reading and writing. More fundamentally perhaps, another similarly metacritical retrospective could assess, in an equally, uncannily mimetic measure, the impact of the increasing problematization of self-reflexiveness in Joyce’s compositional techniques and ‘finished’ works on writers and thinkers alike influenced by the ‘critical’ opening up within his literary idiom: for example, the selfconscious rewriting of Stephen Hero, the self-recyclings of Ulyssean prose in the novel’s ‘second half’, the Scribbledehobble Notebook and the Ur-project of reworking earlier texts as well as their critical receptions for Finnegans Wake. Especially (though not exclusively) in the formative phases of their critical or creative careers, Derrida, Kristeva, Cixous and, belatedly, Lacan (to name but these) have turned their attention to the teasing complexities of Joyce’s prose and have built on the subversive, self-conscious resourcefulness of the pliable Joycean text to elaborate new invigorating modes of discourse. To start with one inevitable example: the radical ambiguity and polyvalence of the liberating pun deployed in a versatile syntax dramatizes the ‘pre-critical’ moment of the interpretive choice in ways that have empowered Cixous’s early feminist writings (mainly via Finnegans Wake), Lacan’s own ‘theoretical style’ reflecting (on) jouissance, and strategies in Derrida’s deconstructive practices.19 Or else, Joyce’s constant probings into the mechanics of authority and ideology (national, domestic, etc.) and especially the fiction of paternity could be construed as having empowered his subsequent readers to read against the tradition of literary filiation,

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including that within the Joycean corpus (from later to earlier text, from Joyce back to the Homeric source, etc.), patriarchy (feminism), political oppression (postcolonialism), etc. What the multi-faceted resilience of Joyce’s fabrications has made possible – and why his novels have long been a privileged testing ground for new theoretical agendas and thus themselves stood the test of time – is his readers’ (self-)empowerment through the very medium and fabric of his works, beyond the mere academic mapping of different theoretical grids onto his fiction. Joyce’s linguistic dramatization of issues impacts the reader’s own (pre)conceptions of them in ceaselessly renewed, dynamic fashion, forcing him/her each time to renegotiate how Joyce’s idiom operates but also what the aesthetic and ethical implications of their critical positions are: what has best been described by two of the contributors to the present volume as ‘Joyce the Verb’ (Senn) and ‘Joyce Effects’ (Attridge; see Works Cited). Thus there arises for us readers, poised half-way between Joyce’s narrative foresights and our critical afterthoughts,20 between production and consumption (cf. FW 497.1–2), the necessity to set up a dialogue or ‘translation’ between Joyce’s writing and our reading practices, a ‘middle voice’ plying between Joyce’s ‘critical idiom’ and our own Joyceanized idioms – of the kind that would prolong Senn’s established practice of readingas-translation (which does not merely elucidate the ‘original’ through a recourse to the lapses in existing translations).21 In such a strategic middle course of action, the limited gains from the showcasing of Joyce’s texts for the stereotyped application or sounding out of the latest theories, soon to become new-fangled critical orthodoxies, would be profitably offset by the rewards from paying heed to the specifically Joycean exempla, which not only ‘oblige’ us to devise methodological tools from the Irish writer’s own verbal arsenal (rather than the stock-in-trade of academic ‘-isms’) but also empower us to do just that to creative and critical ends for theory ‘itself ’, in ways that overreach the usual osmotic moulding of one’s critical language on the chosen writer. Only on these conditions can literature bounce back on/against ‘theory’ – as is evidenced here by Garnier’s and Slote’s performative redeployments of (respectively) Deleuzian and, to a smaller extent, Derridean verbal strategies shot through with Joyceanisms – and can one be, critically as much as creatively, in memory of James Joyce.22 In Joyce’s wake: critical idioms beyond themselves It is not surprising, in the light of Joyce’s constant ironic tilt at the metalinguistic and metafictional dimension of writing, that his texts have fostered

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ever-renewed critical developments ultimately capable of taking the reading of the Joycean corpus beyond the imposition of preconstructed analytic grids and allowing the ‘theory’ to be influenced and permeated by Joyce’s own sophisticated idiom. In what follows I will select and briefly document in turn three of these generic, yet interrelated, ‘critical idioms’ within the panoply of the interpretive frameworks available to the Joyce scholar – gender, nation (but also class and race), history – to illustrate how these have profitably developed from application to implication after Joyce’s example.23 What I hope will emerge from this succinct panorama is the Hermetic cruciality of Joyce’s ‘language with a difference’ as a heuristic tool, not only for the ‘source text’ but also in the reader’s own idiom and procedure: just as Hermes stood at the crossroads as a mediator, messenger and agent of the Gods, holding the key to communication and interpretation, so can Joyce’s innovative literary language be placed at the intersection of various critical fields (philosophy, linguistics/philology, gender (feminism, queer theory), psychoanalysis, politics, postcolonialism, intertextuality, etc.) in order to challenge their demarcations and, to use Elam’s theme word, cast their exemplarity into a different light. ‘mind your genderous’ ( FW 268.25) No broadly historicizing survey of critical reconfigurations could afford not to give pride of place to the ‘question of woman’ as a pioneering matrix for the reopening of issues of (critical mediations of ) literary representation – and how it itself inaugurated the broader study of gender and, later, stretched to those of race, which in turn played an interactive part in the more recent emergence of ‘post-feminist’ critical discourses.24 Illustrative of the shift towards a disseminative plurality – the diversification of feminism into feminisms and towards a more global critique of the constructedness of gender – Joycean feminist criticism has evolved from early considerations of women’s representations within the Joycean corpus (and the categorization of these on a scale ranging from an emancipatory feminist programme avant la lettre to a more reactionary patriarchal one) to more rounded analyses of the whole palette of plural gendered and sexual positions occupied by both sexes in Joyce’s texts. Here again, such a broad trajectory is on a par with an overall drift throughout Joyce’s oeuvre: from the problematic relationship between man and woman within still recognizable gender patterns or roles (the oversymbolized figure of the oppressive mother, the inadequate/idealized young female lover) to an exploration and valorization of ambivalence (Bloom as a ‘half and half’ versus the Citizen’s Cyclopean politics of gender, nation and race; the epicene

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‘heladies’ and ‘shehusbands’ (FW 386.15, 390.20) of Finnegans Wake as the grammatical counterpart to Bloom the androgynous ‘womanly man’ (U 15.1799)), reversals (Bloom’s phantasmagoric feminization or transsexualism in ‘Circe’ versus Molly’s ‘virility’) and interchangeability (not only the twins’, as in the ‘Prankquean riddle’ of Finnegans Wake (see McGee’s essay), but also the lipoleum boys’ and the jiminies’ in the ‘Museyroom’ episode; FW 8–10) – all contributing ultimately to the polymorphy of character roles and poles in the last novel.25 It is therefore not fortuitous that Joyce should feature high on the list of male writers who have been eulogized for their generous depiction of femininity or their precocious exposition of clich´ed, patriarchal constructions of woman and female narratives (as in ‘Nausicaa’) – despite the more recent corrective dissatisfaction with the limitations of the gender politics of male-dominated modernist aesthetics, its ‘prescriptive erudition and formalistic rigor’, as well as the radicalized view of avant-garde linguistic-literary experimentation tout court as elitist ‘gender aggression’.26 But the radicalization of sexual positions and gender constructions could not have been achieved without an exposure of stereotyped gendered language and the ruse of pronominal and syntactical indirections. As a selfconscious performance ironically flaunting assumptions about gender and sexuality in language, Joyce’s later prose sets traps of recognizability and identification (e.g. the ostentatious play on ‘male’ (consonantal) versus ‘female’ (vocalic) rhythmic patterns in Finnegans Wake), making the reader aware of distinctions, as much as overlaps, between language and discourse (or langue as a system of reference versus parole as ideological praxis; cf. Tadi´e’s essay), ‘natural’ repository and ‘cultural’ implementations. It is these subtler inscriptions of ‘femininities’/‘masculinities’, homo- or bisexuality as performative effects in/through textuality which, once over the crest of early theoretical celebrations of the semiotic/presymbolic in Joyce in terms of irrational, fluid, female babble or as ´ecriture f´eminine, a more mature feminist and broader gender criticism had to take into account.27 This overall simplified trajectory is well captured in the editors’ preface to Gender in Joyce, whose aim is ‘not so much to argue whether Joyce has or has not bought into the ideology of gender stereotypes as to illuminate the process through which Joyce consciously and scrupulously (as evidenced by his abundant rewritings and manuscript additions/deletions) constructed his language – the vehicle of his criticism of the very ideologies he encodes and/or subverts through its use’ (ix). In that sense (which also departs from the concerns of fellow modernists like Pound with kinetics and energy, and perhaps shows more affinity with Woolf’s research into

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narrative flux), Joyce’s experimental programme of character deconstruction, and his groping for a textual movement destabilizing fixed points of reference, increasingly registered the spuriousness of such historical and cultural figments – including a history of the nationalist politics of linguisticgrammatical gendering.28 ‘The eirest race, the ourest nation’ ( FW 514.36) A nation is the same people living in the same place. Or also living in different places. (U 12.1422–3, 1428)

At a juncture when the consolidation of the 1990s’ critical shift towards issues of culture, history, ethics and politics, away from aesthetic reflections or considerations of ‘textuality’, has sometimes sadly entailed a waning attention to/awareness of the political constructedness of discursive effects in literature, reaffirming the centrality of language may wrongly be perceived as a reactionary step back to the heyday of a supposedly depoliticized ‘poststructuralism’.29 While there is no denying the validity and urgency in a recent project like van Boheemen’s to look at ways in which the body has been dematerialized into discourse, including in postcolonial approaches to Joyce’s texts,30 it is equally imperative to remember that, for Joyce, politics (or ideology and history, for that matter) first and foremost materializes as ‘style’, and to note how his exploration of the plurality of discourses within his fiction’s intracritical vein – just as one speaks of intralinear translation – evinces the inescapably ethico-political dimension of artistic experimentation.31 As Joyce put it – originally in French to an unidentified addressee – somehow echoing how Stephen Dedalus’ Icarian flight in order ‘to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’ (P 253) is inextricably bound up with the inventiveness of fiction, fabrication or even counterfeiting (cf. ‘Forge ahead!’; P 12):32 ‘the problem of my race is so complicated that one needs to make use of all the means of an elastic art to delineate it – without solving it’ (Letters I 118; letter dated 5 August 1918; translation mine). No politics (of race, nation, but also of language) for Joyce without meditating on the language of politics which narrates it – according to a double tropic movement which we will also observe in relation to history. Prominent in this reorientation is the forceful return to issues of nationalism and colonialism, within which Joyce’s (via Stephen Dedalus’) non serviam in A Portrait and ultimate disdain towards the concrete world of Irish (nationalist) politics came to occupy an uneasy position for those critics who more recently attempted to reinscribe his Irishness at the intersection

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of the jointly emerging fields of Irish studies and postcolonialism. In the context of the denounced complicity between Western modernity (and, within it, the particular expression of male-dominated modernist aesthetics) and colonialism – as much as, in some of its cruder instances, the unqualified rejection of postmodernity/postmodernism along similar lines (despite the emergence of postcolonialism partly from some of the former’s more provoking openings) – the relation between Joyce’s fictional recreations of his motherland/fatherland within an overpoweringly aestheticized language and the real-world politics and ideology at work in a colonized state, then a new emerging nation dismissed by the artist, came to take centre stage. There is perhaps no better succinct illustration of the uneasiness of this conjunction than in the trajectory which goes from Seamus Deane’s pioneer essay on ‘Joyce and Nationalism’ (1982), in a poststructuralist context, to Emer Nolan’s full-blown James Joyce and Nationalism (1995) in a postcolonial one. Whereas Deane could unequivocally put forward the view of Joyce’s need to translate the ideological limitations of national politics (and history) into the aesthetic of a linguistically versatile fictional medium, thus repudiating nationalism in order to become a cosmopolitan modernist, Nolan problematically attempts to conceive Joycean Modernism and Irish nationalism as ‘significantly analogous discourses’ (xii), in ways that could sometimes be aligned with a more recuperative project of reclaiming Joyce back into a more recently sympathetic Irish tradition and heritage, within a complexified framework of relationships between (local) Irish nationalism and (global) cosmopolitanism, modernity and Modernism.33 Such awkward aporetic overlaps, in the shifty history of academic discourses, between Modernism (with its felt tensions between cosmopolitanism and localism) or modernity (and its complicity with colonialism), and postcoloniality’s ambivalent appeal to a politically problematic nationalism for purposes of emancipation, leave untouched the issue of the ‘linguistic politics’ of Joyce’s increasing polyglottism within his imagined fictions of an Irish community. In this perspective, it can be helpful to recast the now well-established view of Joyce’s literary language as translinguistic (and transcultural) babelization into a more politicized framework, as a manifestation of (and reflection on) processes of creolization in language. The manifold syntax of Wakese would thus be seen to allow parallel narrative strands to unfold and compete simultaneously, dramatizing how issues of (post)colonial supremacy are indissociable from linguistic domination and emancipation in a multi-tiered narrative. Yet, conversely, Joyce’s

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synthetic idiom, especially in Finnegans Wake, can also be seen to perform the ambivalent condition of a lingua franca (cf. FW 198.18–19), at once bearing an uncanny affinity with the artificial tongues whose reductionist claims to universalism it also derides in the name of an avant-garde (modernist) aesthetic and recalling the dominant status of the English ‘language of the oppressor’ for communicative, trading purposes.34 Like the ‘middle voice’ of Hiberno-English – whose internal lexical order interestingly reverses that of the older, ‘colonial’ appellation: Anglo-Irish35 – the punning products of hybridization or linguistic crossbreedings and diaspora become valorized, in keeping with Joyce’s own early celebration of the creative hybridity of the Irish race and nation in his 1907 lecture on ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’ (see Jones’s essay). Thus, more recently, the ‘limited compatibility’ (in the editors’ words) between the neo-canonized postcolonialist agendas and Joyce’s texts fostered the need to inflect the mature Joycean advocacy of middle grounds in yet another direction: the Wakean semicolonial.36 Taking a leaf, or rather a felicitous nonce word, out of Joyce’s (last) book once again (cf. FW 152.16), Attridge and Howes felt enabled to put questions to a more clear-cut flavour of postcolonial criticism as it cannot simply be mapped onto the local, historical specificities of Ireland, stressing the inherent interdependency of traditionally opposed terms like native and foreign, colonialist and colonized, etc. rather than ‘merely’ endeavouring to promote the marginal and the ‘subaltern’37 in an insistence on the emancipation of a subjugated nationstate. What Joyce’s ‘semicolonial’ language creations testify to, from the ‘so familiar and so foreign’ of A Portrait to the cyclical history of foreignerbecome-native and son-become-father-overthrown-by-son(s) in Finnegans Wake, is the ultimately indissociable imbrication, from inside and/or outside, of the colonial and the national(ist), or authority and subjection, once accession to the fullness of an ‘independent’, self-authorizing voice is achieved. Paradoxically for a writer still too often regarded as an elitist experimentalist on account of the dense language of his later works, the vernacularization of Joyce’s idiom and interpenetration of the mixed parlances of all social classes through the joint resources of a poetics and politics of style also works towards a democratization of the literary voice. Within the shift from textuality to culture noted above, this has led to a revaluation of Joycean Modernism’s relation to (the economics of ) so-called ‘popular/low culture’ or mass culture, from the pioneer historicist work of the 1980s to a more recent focus on ‘commodity culture’ or a ‘psychoanalysis’ of

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culture through the dissection of (representations of ) objects of everyday consumption, and ultimately registering, in the prefatory words of the editors of the 1993 ‘Joyce and Culture’ Conference proceedings, the shift from ‘the force of culture on the writer’ to ‘the force of the writer on our own contemporary culture’.38 In this domain too, the inward tensions and reorientations of critical debates have somehow mirrored Joyce’s own evolution, from Stephen Dedalus’ more detached, incorporeal aestheticism – deliberately aloof from the socio-cultural environment – to an openness towards, and re-embodiment of, popular or consumer culture through a more earthy ad canvasser (who dominates the ‘second half’ of Ulysses), culminating in the generalized collapse of low- and highbrow spheres in the transcultural polyphony of Finnegans Wake.39 In this context, Bloom and Stephen’s often debated mystical ‘union’ can be read as the reconciliation of (the languages of ) economics and culture, of the ephemerality of the ‘commodious’ with the eternity of (high) art and the latter’s embedding in history, production and social reality. Whereas the misogynist, homophobic young aesthete had pitted beauty in the literary tradition against its value in the market place (P 213),40 Joyce’s overall career from polemic (narrative-stylistic discrimination) to tolerance (linguistic and cultural allinclusiveness) – best captured in the symbolic oscillations of the mother from a colonized yet repressive figure (Dubliners, A Portrait, Ulysses) to her acceptance as a primordial, though forgotten, social force (Finnegans Wake, especially ALP’s concluding monologue) – gestured towards the more accomplished personality of the androgynous artist whose rounded versatility is staged through pronominal (impersonal) obfuscations.41 Yet there remains a more ‘linguistic’ flavour of culture that new concerns with the socio-historico-economic realities of everyday consumption and popular culture fail to acknowledge: the indissociability of the culturalideological substrata from Joyce’s processing of them through variously thematized languages and idioms in Finnegans Wake – what I would like to call the ‘geopolitical’ nature of Joyce’s international polyglossary, which goes beyond the ‘radical historicity of words’ and ‘the inescapably textual nature of our understanding of ourselves and our place in culture and history’.42 This fact alone would help explain Joyce’s renewed attention, for the composition of Work in Progress, to the Vichian philosophy of history and to Michelet’s interest in it as an experimental tool to rejuvenate the language of (French) historiography. Vico’s conception of language as a palimpsest of historical traces which encapsulate culturally dense etymological networks could be profitably harnessed as a ‘trellis’ in the vastly uncharted territory Joyce set out to explore from 1923 onwards.43

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‘Languishing hysteria? The clou historique?’ ( FW 528.14–15) History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it – and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it.44

Whether in Haines’s patronizing apology – soon echoed by an ironic Stephen in ‘Nestor’ (U 2.246–7) – that ‘It seems history is to blame’ (U 1.649), or in the hallowed ‘History [. . .] is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ (U 2.377), the (self-)imposed strictures, from inside or outside, of l‘Histoire avec sa grande hache have lent a wider backcloth to Joyce’s verbal pyrotechnics than such outbursts have been construed to yield at face value. Indeed, as Spoo reminds us in his introduction to James Joyce and the Language of History, which details how nineteenthcentury ideologies, rhetorics and styles of history impacted Joyce’s early intellectual formation and are both figured and resisted in the Joycean text, ‘Joyce’s writings [. . .] are exemplary of, though unique within, the larger phenomenon of modernist historiography, which might be defined as the attempt to extend practices of aesthetic innovation to the representation of the past’ (8). Redeployed between the ambivalence of French histoire (history and story), implementations in narrative, and representations of gendered writing, the category of history may be placed at the crossroads of the recent explosion of discourses on the excluded (sexual, colonial, racial, class, etc.) ‘Other’, inter- or trans- disciplines/perspectives, hybridity and difference, and, in a more simplistic, dualistic scheme, envisaged as a patriarchal, imperialist logos to be subverted by the muthos of a reinventive writing by an androgynous artist (see above). Thus, according to Fairhall, ‘History, in Ulysses, is always masculine, always a chronicle of power and control whose paradigm is colonization. Feminine writing, then, becomes for the colonized subject the language of liberation’ – turning teleological his(s)tory into a more epicene, cyclical ‘hissheory’ (FW 163.25).45 Joyce’s perceived evasiveness, on the strength of his protagonist’s pronouncements, might account for the confident dehistoricization of Joycean aesthetics in earlier criticism, which the recent trend of critical revaluations has attempted to rectify. Within the fashionable current of New Historicism or of any ‘culturalist’ perspective over the last fifteen years, the 1990s saw cumulative endeavours to revitalize the concept and category of history, and how it can be set to work in the (re)reading of literary texts beyond Joyce’s own positions and fictional (re-)enactments.46 As the editors of Joyce and the Subject of History dutifully noted: ‘[H]owever evasive Joyce himself may have been in relation to historical categories, his texts ceaselessly enact and reenact the problems of history and history writing’ (8). The various

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inflections to the several collective or individual projects that were conceived in the last decade reflect the ‘interdisciplinary’ miscegenation of history with the other dominant period debates, such as postcolonialism and especially Irish studies, and the ‘return to subjectivity’ or identity. To paraphrase the words of Thomas Whitaker, with which the preface to the selected proceedings of the Yale Conference on Joyce and History concludes: re-doing history means placing Joyce’s texts and, within them, their characters in their socio-historical dimensions, at the crossroads of the ceaselessly renewed experiences of generations of readers in ‘a more inclusive history of histories’ whose assumptions have to be examined.47 Such an overarching perspective – at a time when the ‘subject’ did not know any longer whether it had been successfully superseded48 or whether it was after all coming back into fashion (namely via a renewed interest in autobiographies and constructions of identity) – may arguably account for the seductively ambivalent title of the later extended collection Joyce and the Subject of History already mentioned, with its ability to encompass at once our primordiality as subjects of a process shaping our ‘life stories’ and the individuation of history ‘itself ’ as subject beyond the prismatic distortions through which it is reductively apprehended. What has been rediscovered, in short, is the act of (personal or collective) (re)invention, of finding out for oneself through a process of enquiry that Charles Olson called ‘istorin, testing and contesting its factual sedimentations as historical narratives through the force of the subjective refashioning of truth as poein (poetics) or fiction, as much as the traditional distinction between historical truth (logos) and fictional fallacy (muthos).49 However, in endeavouring to disenfranchize ourselves from the validations of Joyce’s models of historical reconfigurations, we have been unwittingly following in his footsteps – or, to echo Derrida’s words once more, our attempted liberations have in strange anamorphic ways been read in advance by Joyce – by extending to our own self-(re)empowerment as readers the very means whereby the Irish writer set out to free (his) art from the similar constraints of an exclusionary history in the first place (cf. Russell’s opposition between history and art/life in U 9.46–53). What had afforded Joyce the self-dramatized ‘subject of/in history’ an emancipation from its determinist strictures was the minute probing into the mechanics of its oppressive narratives and into the language of history as truth-founding factuality at the service of a national, etc. ideology, away from the dry records codified by the pedagogical (nationalist) school textbooks in ‘Nestor’ (see U 2.46–7) to the reintroduction of the ‘ousted possibilities’ (cf. U 2.52) of ‘[c]ountlessness of livestories’ (FW 17.26–7), which the serial, paradigmatic

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narrative counteracting the teleological unfolding of plot in ‘Wandering Rocks’ had subsequently explored.50 Joyce’s storytelling operates at the critical junction between a language of history and a history of language, by framing various historical-linguistic theories as well as philosophies of history with a linguistic slant (such as Vico’s and Michelet’s). More specifically, the Wakean idiom thematizes the need for a historical dimension to language as well as the impossibility of a satisfactorily historicized linguistics, as its portmanteau idiom enacts the tension between synchronicity (system) and diachronicity (history). Seen from another, complementary, perspective, Joyce at once introduces a sense of historical stratification into the texture of Wakese through Vico’s ages, yet uses their cyclicality to anchor the plural narrative and relativize the sense of teleological, historical ‘progress’. What Joyce’s texts reveal is the paradoxical historicity at the core of the experience of fiction writing, which demonstrates how history is indissociable from its recreations as/in fictional narratives.51 History may well be (also) language but language is definitely not history . . . Whether these increasingly hybrid theoretical reconfigurations of Joyce’s fiction were the ‘natural’ extension of a broadly interdiscplinary, more pluralistic, critical climate, or whether Joyce’s own texts demonstrably stimulated such fruitful cross-fertilizations, is perhaps an unsolvable issue beyond the scope of this collection. However, while the current miscegenation of discourses generously tries to live up to the more ethico-political spirit of their times, their thematic gain is sometimes achieved at the cost of a more performative practice: even when they are admittedly centred on Joyce’s textuality, such studies risk reducing the issue of performance and process back to thematic representations and reference, no matter how problematized and pluralized these might be. Even Valente’s edited collection Quare Joyce, which set out to query the dichotomy between ‘queer’ and ‘square’ in Joyce via the Hibernicism quare – ‘a kind of transnational/transidiomatic pun’ (4) used to inscribe the erotic indirections of Joyce’s texts in critical language – while pointing out that such a strategy is in accordance with Joyce’s ‘much-celebrated subversion of the stylistic and generic proprieties of novelistic representation’ (4), remains operative at the level of a singular programmatic catchword. It is such a performative gap or ‘difference’ that in particular Garnier’s essay attempts to address and bridge here, in a critical style that incessantly plies between Joyce’s idiosyncratic language and a ‘becoming-Deleuzian’ – without sacrificing the awareness that stylistic emulations, if not backed up by a sound ‘analytic’ procedure, may lapse into the symptomatic glorifications of Joyce’s ‘[j]ouissance

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opaque d’exclure le sens’ occasionally evinced by Lacan’s own canny linguisteries.52 Perhaps the best way (not) to ‘conclude’ an ‘introduction’ – or to conclude ‘differently’ – is to adumbrate a series of questions whose centrality and relevance should have emerged, even if implicitly, from the previous pages and will form the distant critical horizon of the following essays: – What does Joyce’s encyclopaedic ransacking and interbreeding of discourses have to teach history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, gender studies, postcolonial issues of race and nation (etc.), as much as teach about (processes of ) translation, issues of textual transmission, marginality and canonization, and how these lessons can best be enrolled to cut across the aforementioned ‘disciplines’? – In what ways does Joyce’s language(s) constitute a privileged test-case of the ‘difference’ of/in language, and what are its effects on criticism’s or theory’s own idioms, including their ability to intervene in criticaltheoretical debates (as in Slote’s rereading of Derrida’s interventions on Joyce and translation in the light of Joyce)? The prominence of Joycean scholarship in the latest fashionable academic trends ultimately puts unanswered – and perhaps unanswerable – questions to the nature of (re)reading as a historically motivated act of external (re)appropriation, itself not devoid of ethico-political or at least ideological implications, or ‘genuine’ heuristic discovery. Indeed, Joycean scholarship can be said to offer a representative instance of how a writer’s given texts are ceaselesly thrown under a revisionist light, begging the question as to whether, in renewed protocols of reading, each generation of critics domesticates literary works in order to vindicate its own critical agendas or whether it (also) exhumes so far hidden traces inherent in the artist’s productions that had gone unnoticed until the emergence of the appropriate critical slant. Whichever way one inclines to solve this crux, I hope to have shown, in charting parallels between the literary turned ‘critical’ in Joyce’s texts and the critic’s own responsive fictions shaped by Joycean textuality, how Joyce’s verbalizations are performative acts prompting his readers to promote his coinages into critical tools offering an intrinsically more suitable leverage on the writer’s prose (cf. Senn’s essay and longstanding work). It is our ambition in this volume to further document this necessity from a diversity of approaches and critical styles and to contribute to putting the critical language(s) of Joyce’s fiction, as much as our subsequent fictional endeavours as critics, at such Hermetic crossroads of difference.

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n otes 1 Some of these by now consecrated remarks include: ‘I’d like a language which is above all languages [. . .]. I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition’ (quoted in JJ 397), and, while composing Work in Progress: (to August Suter) ‘je suis au bout de l’anglais’; (to another friend) ‘I have put the language to sleep’; (to Max Eastman) ‘When morning comes [at the end of Finnegans Wake] [. . .] I’ll give them back their English language. I’m not destroying it for good’ (all quoted in JJ 546); (in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver dated 11 November 1925) ‘What the language will look like when I have finished I don’t know. But having declared war I shall go on jusqu’au bout’ (Letters I 237); and, towards the end of the composition of Work in Progress: ‘I have discovered I can do anything with language I want’ (quoted in JJ 702). 2 Thus – to summarize time-worn findings by Joycean critics – ‘The Sisters’ and ‘The Dead’ are partly interchangeable as to title and subject matter; A Portrait starts on the protagonist’s attempt at self-inscription in memorized childhood rhymes and ends on a return to the fully-fledged lyrical autobiographical form of a first-person diary; Ulysses connects the final ‘s’ of Molly’s recurrent ‘Yes’ (itself the beginning and end of ‘Penelope’) back to the novel’s initial word ‘Stately’; and Finnegans Wake, as is well known, is a ‘book of Doublends Jined’ (FW 20.15–16) whose ‘final’ ‘along the’ meanders back to the source ‘riverrun’ (FW 628.16, 3.1), with several intermediary sub-cycles and Vichian ricorsi. 3 In ‘I Think Her Pretty: Reflections of the Familiar in Joyce’s Notebook VI.B.5’, Hayman ventures the concept of ‘epiphanoid’ for the similar, yet less aesthetically oriented units recorded in Joyce’s preliminary notetaking, especially at an early stage of the genesis of Work in Progress. See also his more recent ‘The Purpose and Permanence of the Joycean Epiphany’. 4 As Attridge has noted, in ‘Joyce and the Ideology of Character’ (reprinted in Joyce Effects, 52–8), Finnegans Wake holds at bay character identifications and relations while tantalizingly dramatizing patterns of recognizability. 5 In his genetic study of the Wake’s early stages, Hayman sees the notes under Ulysses headings as remnants rather than projections (The ‘Wake’ in Transit, 21). In his review essay of Hayman’s book, Danis Rose goes further and claims that the VI.A notebook ‘was compiled over a period of a few weeks in July, 1923, that is, after Joyce had drafted the first three sketches and while he was engaged in revising these and composing others’ (‘The Beginning of all Thisorder of Work in Progress’, 958). For Hayman’s counter-arguments, see his ‘Transiting the Wake: A Response to Danis Rose’. 6 Joyce expressed the divergence in compositional needs in a (now famous) letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver dated 9 October 1923 (Letters I 204). 7 Quoted by Richard Ellmann in his introduction to Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 23 (cf. also 104). For the convergence of style and politics in Joyce (which this introduction is also tangentially exploring), see McGee, Paperspace. Style as Ideology in Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ .

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8 In a similar way, Hofheinz argues that ‘[b]y viewing Ireland internationally, Joyce extends a critique of Irish nationalism into a critique of nationality in general’ (Joyce and the Invention of Irish History, 42). 9 On the verso of the letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver dated 12 October 1923, Joyce penned a schema with correspondences between the ‘Four Old Men’ or ‘Mamalujo’ and the four provinces of Ireland (SL 297). 10 See Attridge’s essay. This is analogous to Lawrence’s ‘surplus’ as the excess which resists incorporation into our interpretive schemes (The Odyssey of Style in ‘Ulysses’ , 208). 11 See Boldrini’s and, for a more postcolonial framework of analysis, McGee’s essays in the present volume. See also my ‘The Perversions of “Aerse” and the Anglo-Irish Middle Voice in Finnegans Wake’. 12 The phrase is Katie Wales’s in The Language of James Joyce, 33. See also my ‘InLaw and Out-Lex: Some Linguistic Aspects of “Barbarity” and Nationalism in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake’. 13 See especially FW 378, and Carole Brown, ‘FW 378: Laughing at the Linguists’. This extends to a critique of so-called ‘artificial’ concoctions, such as Basic English, Esperanto and Volap¨uk, against which Joyce’s own ‘artificial tongue with a natural curl’ (FW 169.15–16) would hope to set an aesthetic standard alongside a ‘political’ one. Joyce’s ultimate synthetic brew aims to eschew both the excesses of the naturalization of the national and the depoeticized, ‘basic’ aridity of artificial universalist creations. 14 Let us cite in particular: Jespersen (Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin, 1922; An International Language, 1928), Mauthner (Beitr¨age zur einer Kritik der Sprache, 1923 ed.), Meillet and Cohen (Les Langues du monde, 1924), C. K. Ogden (Debabelization with a Survey of Contemporary Opinions on the Problem of a Universal Language, 1931), Sir Richard Paget (Babel, or The Past, Present, and Future of Human Speech; Human Speech, both 1930), Webster Edgerly (The Adam-man Tongue: The Universal Language of the Human Race, 1903), and Richard Chenevix Trench’s several books. 15 Studies on the above include: Kenner, ‘Joyce and the 19th Century Linguistics Explosion’; McHugh, ‘Jespersen in Notebooks VI.B.2 and VI.C 2’; van Hulle, ‘Beckett–Mauthner–Zimmer–Joyce’, and Ben-Zvi, ‘Mauthner’s Critique of Language: A Forgotten Book at the Wake’; Vincent Deane, ‘Les Langues du Monde in VI.B.45’; Milesi, ‘Supplementing Babel: Paget in VI.B.32’; Hart, ‘Adam-man’; Downing, ‘Richard Chenevix Trench and Joyce’s Historical Study of Words’; Weir, ‘The Choreography of Gesture: Marcel Jousse and Finnegans Wake’, and Milesi, “Vico . . . Jousse. Joyce . . Langue’. For a recent reassessment of issues of babelism versus debabelization in relation to Ogden’s 1931 book, see Rabat´e, James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism, passim. 16 An analogously ‘Shandean’ argument could be developed about the relation of marginalia and footnotes to the central, authoritative column in FW II.2. In this respect, see Shari Benstock, ‘At the Margin of Discourse: Footnotes in the Fictional Text’, and Lipking, ‘The Marginal Gloss’.

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17 Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’; originally delivered as a major address at the 1984 James Joyce Symposium, where the notion of the competence of Joyce’s industrious critics in the Joycean critical industry, including its self-seeking legitimation through (linguistic, psychoanalytic, philosophical, etc.) ‘theory’, was also challenged. See especially: ‘nothing can be invented on the subject of Joyce. Everything we can say about Ulysses, for example, has already been anticipated, including [. . .] the scene about academic competence and the ingenuity of metadiscourse’ (48). 18 One key text in this maturing process is Karen Lawrence’s The Odyssey of Style in ‘Ulysses’ . See also the collection of essays on ‘Sirens Without Music’ in Beja et al., eds., James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium, 57–92 (and the counterpart on ‘“Aeolus” without Wind’ in Beja and Norris, eds., Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis, 177–201); Attridge’s ‘Lipspeech’ section in his Peculiar Language, 160–72; and my review of such a trajectory for this particular chapter of Ulysses in ‘The Signs the Si-ren Seal: Textual Strategies in Joyce’s “Sirens”’. More recently Attridge’s introduction to his later collection has cast a retrospective light on the phenomena I am trying to articulate here ( Joyce Effects, 1–21). 19 These writings often take Joyce as a critical focus as much as a ‘pretext’ authorizing novel experiments, as in Cixous’s Wakeanized writings, which use the destabilizing power or ‘ruse’ of the pun to elaborate a new sexual politics; see in particular Pr´enoms de personne, 231–331; ‘La Missexualit´e, o`u jouis-je?’; ‘Freincipe de plaisir ou Paradoxe perdu’. See also ‘Joyce le symptˆome’ (Lacan), and, more problematically, Glas (Derrida) – cf. The Post Card, 142: ‘Never have I imitated anyone so irresistibly.’ 20 On this double theme, see my ‘The Poetics of “The Purloined Letter” in Finnegans Wake’. 21 Cf. in particular the collection Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation, and, for the ‘middle voice’, ‘Joyce the Verb’. To some extent, see also Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark, for an original attempt to fashion a critical methodology from, and ‘written through’ by, Joyce’s own lexical inventions. 22 The phrase is Derrida’s in ‘Two Words for Joyce’, 147, and is briefly taken up in Slote’s essay. The strategic pervasiveness of the Joycean approach to language in Derrida’s style has received numerous treatments, among which see especially Roughley, Reading Derrida Reading Joyce, and, to a minor extent, Sailer, On the Void of to Be: Incoherence and Trope in ‘Finnegans Wake’ , 55–108. Although these are more commendable than Lernout’s unsympathetic, nit-picking summaries in The French Joyce, I feel that a greater degree of analytic sophistication is still required to approach the vast topic of Joyce’s ‘influence’ on Derrida. Such a reassessment clearly lies beyond the scope of this volume, though Slote’s essay here is a step in the right direction, along deftly combined Joycean and Derridean lines. 23 I am redeploying here within a larger, different context – and without subscribing to her original thesis on Lacan’s insightful methodology with regard to the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis – a conceptual opposition central to the d´emarche of Shoshana Felman in ‘The Case of Poe:

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l aurent milesi Applications/Implications of Psychoanalysis’, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight, 27–51. For a recall of the past orientations of Joycean feminism(s), see Elam’s essay, and, for a fuller synthesis of its mixed Anglo-American and French flavours, see Roughley, James Joyce and Critical Theory, 74–174. What follows is meant as an updated supplement to the latter within my own framework of analysis. Derrida’s ‘polysexual signatures’ in ‘Choreographies’, 76. Margot Norris’s choice words in her introductory essay to Wawrzycka and Corcoran’s Gender in Joyce, 5. One of the turning points is the special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on ‘Feminist Readings of Joyce’, edited by Ellen Carol Jones; see in particular Attridge, ‘Molly’s Flow: The Writing of “Penelope” and the Question of Women’s Language’ (reprinted in Joyce Effects, 93–116). This collection of essays could be said to occupy a comparable position on issues of thematic representations in the specific field of feminist readings of Joyce to the ‘Sirens Without Music’ panel at the 1984 Centenary Symposium referred to above. See also van Boheemen, ‘“The Language of Flow”: Joyce’s Dispossession of the Feminine in Ulysses’. See Baron, Grammar and Gender. Some of the more recent theoretical openings, especially towards issues of homosexuality and plural ‘masculinities’ or ‘femininities’, have paid heed to such wider postcolonial and cultural frameworks. In their introduction to Masculinities in Joyce: Postcolonial Constructions, van Boheemen-Saaf and Lamos point out how the gender construction of a feminized Ireland is intricately bound up with the history of Ireland as a colonized nation (9). Apart from the titles discussed or referred to below, see also Valente’s edited issue on ‘Joyce and Homosexuality’ ( James Joyce Quarterly 31.3); his own James Joyce and the Problem of Justice: Negotiating Sexual and Colonial Difference; Devlin and Reizbaum, eds., ‘Ulysses’: En-Gendered Perspectives. Jones’s introductory essay to her edited volume on Joyce: Feminism/Post/Colonialism (‘Borderlines’, 7–22) articulates such a (Derridean) logic of the in-between and liminality of spaces, and forms a counterpart to the one included here. However, see MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word , 133–71, in the wake of Sollers’s intervention at the Paris Joyce Symposium (1975) to underline the political effects of Joyce’s writing (see his ‘Joyce & Co.’), and, in a more classical vein, Manganiello, Joyce’s Politics, and ‘The Politics of the Unpolitical in Joyce’s Fictions’ (which also charts the rise of the consciousness of the political nature of Joyce’s texts in Joyce criticism). See van Boheemen-Saaf, Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History, which suggestively articulates Joycean textuality and the traumatic history of colonialism in Ireland at the same time as it attempts to reinscribe Joyce’s impact on Lacanian psychoanalysis or Derrida’s deconstruction within a postcolonial framework. In their introduction to Semicolonial Joyce, Attridge and Howes likewise stressed the view that Joyce’s writing does not ‘reduce politics to language’ but rather ‘use[s] linguistic forms to stage political issues with an openness to manifold outcomes that is impossible in the purely pragmatic sphere’ (3).

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32 On that point, see e.g. Gillespie’s introduction to his edited volume on James Joyce and the Fabrication of an Irish Identity, 4. 33 Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism, especially the Preface (xi–xv) and Introduction on ‘Modernism and Nationalism’ (1–22) – though in many other respects her study is more convincingly aware of Joyce’s radical ambiguities and ambivalence on the subject. More balanced are the views expressed by Cheng, especially in Joyce, Race, and Empire, for whom Joyce was ‘anti-colonial and nationalist in sympathies but resistant to certain forms of Irish nationalism’ (‘Of Canons, Colonies, and Critics’, 82; pp. 81–4 give a serviceable account of the gamut of critical positions available). See also his ‘“Terrible Queer Creatures”: Joyce, Cosmopolitanism, and the Inauthentic Irishman’, which recasts the issue within the larger question of culture’s identity and authenticity, either local and national, or global and transnational. Joyce’s resistance, I am arguing here, had to do with the ‘politics of language’ as well as the language of (hegemonic, nationalist) politics, and led him to introduce refined gradations, in particular between the local and the national (see above). 34 Cf. Paul L´eon’s comment to his brother, in a letter dated 3 June 1930, about Joyce writing the Wake in a ‘kind of “petit n`egre” [i.e. pidgin (lit.: nigger) English]’; quoted in JJ 630. On the issue of English and Wakese as lingua franca, see Wales, James Joyce and the Forging of Irish English, 10, 21. The crossing points between the Wake’s idiom and the universalist version of English produced by Ogden as Joyce was composing Work in Progress are analysed in Sailer, ‘Universalizing Languages: Finnegans Wake Meets Basic English’. 35 See e.g. McHugh’s Annotations to ‘Finnegans Wake’, xiv, and Wall, An AngloIrish Dialect Glossary for Joyce’s Works. See also my ‘The Perversions of “Aerse” and the Anglo-Irish Middle Voice in Finnegans Wake’, especially 99 n.5 for a ‘historical’ justification of my own decision to stick to the colonial term in that particular essay. 36 Attridge and Howes, eds., Semicolonial Joyce. The introduction (1–20) retraces some of the debates that centred on issues of colonialism and postcoloniality in the last decade. 37 For a Joycean exploration of Spivak’s notion – which would have gained in critical sharpness and relevance if it had dispensed with its sometimes silly sloganeering – see Duffy, The Subaltern ‘Ulysses’ . 38 Cheng, Devlin, and Norris, eds., Joycean Cultures/Culturing Joyces, 11. These works include: Herr, Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture; Kershner, Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature; Wicke, Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading; James Joyce Quarterly 30.4/31.1: ‘Joyce and Advertising’, ed. Leonard and Wicke; and Leonard, Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce (the latter, a spirited study shot through with commercial quips, which deftly intertwines Stephen’s aesthetic theory and advertising). 39 For this notion, and how it can profitably correlate issues of cultural reception/influence and linguistic translation, see Lawrence, ed., Transcultural Joyce. See also Kershner’s study, already mentioned, for a Bakhtinian view of Joyce’s combination of literary classics and popular culture as a dialogue of voices and

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l aurent milesi ideologies – a perspective especially well suited to the carnivalesque pot-pourri of styles in ‘Oxen’. Compare with Pound’s near contemporaneous ‘We see t¼ kal»n/Decreed in the market place’ in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Selected Poems, 99). For the philosophical (Platonic) foundations of modernist conceptions of beauty, see Schlossman’s essay. However, in A Portrait, Tusker Boyle paring his nails and scoffed at as Lady Boyle (P 42) had ironically anticipated Stephen’s famous conception of the Godlike artist engaged in a similar ‘feminine’ activity (P 215; followed by Lynch’s deflation), thus turning the omnipotent aesthete into an androgynous figure at best. For another reading, see Dean, ‘Paring His Fingernails: Homosexuality and Joyce’s Impersonalist Aesthetic’. Wollaeger, Luftig, and Spoo, eds., Joyce and the Subject of History, 8. I am redeploying Norris’s serviceable notion of the ‘geopolitical’, in ‘The Critical History of Finnegans Wake and the Finnegans Wake of Historical Criticism’, 180, to a different context than hers – the Wake’s interlinguistic translatability. See, e.g., the various contributions on the language of Vico’s philosophy in Verene, ed., Vico and Joyce; Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark, 174–215; and Reichert, ‘Vico’s Method and Its Relation to Joyce’s’. A fuller listing is given in a separate section of Spoo’s excellent critical bibliography on Joyce and History; Wollaeger, Luftig, and Spoo, eds., Joyce and the Subject of History, 211–39 (233–9). Barthes, Camera Lucida, 65. Fairhall, James Joyce and the Question of History, 254. See the editors’ introduction to the James Joyce Quarterly special issue (28.4) devoted to the ‘Joyce and History’ Yale Conference (October 1990), 745. To my knowledge, the first attempt by any Joycean critic to follow Jameson’s injunction to ‘[a]lways historicize!’ (The Political Unconscious, 9), while rightly criticizing the divorce between the Real (history) and textuality in the latter, is Attridge in ‘Joyce, Jameson, and the Text of History’ (reprinted in Joyce Effects, 78–85), for whom ‘Joyce’s texts [. . .] seem to imply that all versions of history are made in language and are, by virtue of that fact, ideological constructions [. . .]’ (186). James Joyce Quarterly 28.4, 748. See e.g. the influential volume edited by Cadava et al., Who Comes After the Subject? See especially Olson, ‘On History’, 3. See Lawrence, The Odyssey of Style in ‘Ulysses’ , 88. As Hofheinz reminds us, the connivance of narrative recycling and perpetuated oppressive social patterns is foregrounded in the Wake’s structuring by the repetition of historical and narrative patterns ( Joyce and the Invention of Irish History, 6). ‘Joyce le symptˆome II’, 36. Lacan’s begrudged acknowledgement of Joyce’s linguistic ascendancy over analytic discourse and its symptomatic outlet in his own emulative coinages would deserve a careful, comprehensive treatment well beyond the remit of this introduction. Joyce’s well-known impatience with stringently biosexual (Freud) or archetypal ( Jung) psychoanalytic models

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bypassing individual and societal idioms, and his substitution of a literary-linguistic procedure or even ‘writing cure’ for a more canonical therapy, as in FW II.2 – see my ‘Toward a Female Grammar of Sexuality: The De/Recomposition of “Storiella as she is syung”’ and also the claim that ‘I can psoakoonaloose myself any time I want’ (FW 522.34–5) – are almost a byword in the annals of psychoanalysis’s efforts to (fail to) impose itself as an overarching interpretive model for literature. For ways in which Joyce extends Freud’s conception of sexuality by showing the sexual charge of (material, physical) language itself, see Attridge’s essay in this volume.

chapter 2

Syntactic glides Fritz Senn

Joyce’s contemporaries were struck with the unruly nature of his works, quite apart from their strident indecency and irreverence. In 1915 as perceptive a critic as Edward Garnett considered A Portrait ‘too discursive, formless, unrestrained’, the author’s ‘pen and his thoughts seem to have run away with him sometimes’, and he advocated revision, ‘time and trouble spent on it, to make it a more finished piece of work, to shape it more carefully’ (reprinted in P 320). His pronouncements look fairly euphemistic compared to what was levelled at Ulysses some seven years later. It would be easier to dismiss such judgements as short-sighted expressions of an earlier period if novice readers did not still have to wrestle with similar impediments, though the struggle is often bypassed by instant recourse to an-aesthetic assistance in the form of summaries, annotation or guide books or, increasingly, electronic aids. Initial consternation may relate to the many words Joyce used that cannot be found in standard dictionaries and to the fact that grammatical rules appear frequently suspended. Joyce often did not edit his chaotic material into the spheres of sanctioned, correct, periods. ou r pat tern sent! ( f w 472.25) Which is the topic of this probe: it highlights a few irregularities, sentences that have gone askew, passages that would have to be marked by school teachers. Maybe the term ‘sentence’ is already inappropriate, for a sentence is a finished verbal construct, fashioned according to rules, and it is easier to achieve in (revisional) writing than in impromptu speech. Writing is, among other things, a translation of mental bursts and jumbles or spoken disarray into a systematic shape. In order to distinguish such fragments of pre-articulation, that is to say, verbal clusters that may yet come to cohere to a full-scale sentence, they will be termed ‘sents’ – not full-scale, complete or unruffled sentences, but their rudimentary potential. That the non-word 28

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squints at Latin sentire (feel, experience, perceive, think) is appropriate: Joyce tends to focus on chancy processes of becoming rather than finished results. A sentence is, after all, ‘a way of thinking’ (as some dictionaries define it), a way of thinking that has reached a conventional shape. ‘Mouth dry’; ‘Curious mice never squeal’; ‘Or kind of feelers in the dark, perhaps’, all taken from the passages that introduce Leopold Bloom (U 4.14, 28, 41–2), are sents, in the parlance adopted here. At issue are not so much sents strung together associatively (‘How will you pun? You punish me? Crooked skirt swinging, whack by. Tell me I want to. Know. O’ (U 11.890–2)), nor slightly substandard colloquialisms as in Dubliners, or direct transpositions from spoken questions like ‘Miss Beirne expected them any minute and asked could she do anything’ (D 142). Subordinations like ‘At first she wondered had she mistaken the hour’ or ‘Both of them [. . .] said she must be perished alive and asked was Gabriel with them’ (D 139, 177) recur; they may indicate underlying Gaelic patterns or social distinctions, while literary English usage would prefer a conjunctional link. It was Hugh Kenner who first pointed out such peculiar sentences: ‘She asked me was I going to Araby’ (D 31).1 Conceivably the lamest sentence in the whole story introduces a magic name and sets the plot in motion. Joyce chose not to intervene or to improve on his characters’ diction, and less so where he transcribed, as accurately as alphabetic symbols permit, what passes through a mind, like Bloom’s meditations about Martin Cunningham’s marital affliction: Setting up house for her time after time and then pawning the furniture on him every Saturday almost. (U 6.350–1)

The unstated subject has mutated under the surface: it is he (husband) who sets up house and she (wife) who pawns the furniture. Readers may not even notice the shift as shift and adjust automatically. In our own private thoughts we do not have to specify what or who it is we are thinking of at any fleeting moment; one good reason why Molly need not spell out the multiple he’s and him’s in her monologue. The phrasing, as it stands, is in part psychologically realistic: in some such way we may well verbalize internally, but once our thoughts are uttered, expansive elucidation is required. As it happens, the sent just quoted is also a rumour, a piece of Dublin gossip frozen into a formula, for already in ‘Grace’ it was known that Cunningham ‘had set up house for her six times: and each time she had pawned the furniture on him’ (D 157). Almost identical expressions show up foreshortened in Bloom’s memory.

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The mind has its own grammar and does not have to explain itself to the outside world. ‘Very good for the brain’ thinks Bloom, and hardly a reader is mystified even though we find no proper antecedent in a series that is triggered off by the recall of a ‘luminous crucifix’: Phosphorus it must be done with. If you leave a bit of codfish for instance. I could see the bluey silver over it. Night I went down to the pantry in the kitchen. Don’t like the smells in it waiting to rush out. What was it she wanted? The Malaga raisins. Thinking of Spain. [. . .] The phosphorescence, that bluey greeny. Very good for the brain. (U 8.21–6)

It is not phosphorus or ‘phosphorescence’ nor the smells nor Malaga raisins that are good for the brain, and certainly not bluey greeny codfish, but, according to popular lore, fish in general. Reading Ulysses, like reading (as well as listening) in general, requires minor logical adjustments of fragmentary imprecision. This is a third-person description of Bloom with a ‘throwaway’ in his hand: His slow feet walked him riverward, reading (U 8.10)

In classical inflected languages ‘him’ could easily be tied to or, more likely, fused with ‘reading’,2 but in English the construction is askew and inept.3 An uncouth sentence matches an awkward coordination of reading eyes and walking feet. Moreover, if hearts can talk, as we read a few beats before (‘Heart to heart talks’; U 8.7), feet may be able to read, and the reading feet seem to be in correlation to Bloom’s hand towards the end of the chapter, in another moment of confusion: ‘His hasty hand went quick into a pocket, took out, read unfolded Agendath Netaim’ (U 8.1183–4). wei ghing up the pros and cons Sentences are constructs that can be examined as verbal architecture. Periods often need finishing touches (‘A POLISHED PERIOD’ is held up for inspection in ‘Aeolus’; U 7.766). In real spoken life even the short time of an utterance tends to shift the focus. Joyce, who often compared verbal creations to biological processes, tried to catch thoughts in statu nascendi, before articulation. Stephen Dedalus has a highly developed verbal consciousness (Daedalus was an architect/engineer), his mind seems to aim at instant enunciation. His most convoluted, Protean speculations on the beach are formally perfected. Bloom, on the other hand, lacking the gift of instant gab, is continually groping. Some of the best manifestations of

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a wobbling, Bloomian focus emerge in the ‘Eumaeus’ chapter, which maladroitly fuses an as-you-go-along drift of wayward thoughts and an attempt at elevated, literary composition. The episode abounds in minor dys-taxes precisely because it toils so strenuously to amalgamate stray burgeoning sents into classical coherence. Structures are out of plumb, or the sense often is ‘what you would call wandering’ (U 16.4): To think of him [Stephen] house and homeless, rooked by some landlady worse than any stepmother, was really too bad at his age. (U 16.1565–7)

What is too bad is not, of course, to think of Stephen, but the condition itself. Tracks have been changed. In writing one would revise the logic of such common glides, and so, frequently, do translations. They are ‘control groups’ and will be adduced for illustration. This is how the composition appears in faultless French: Penser qu’il e´tait sans toit et sans famille et estamp´e par quelque logeuse pire qu’une belle-m`ere, c’´etait trop triste a` son aˆge. (F 582)

At least here ‘c’´etait’, after a pause, is less stringently tied to ‘Penser’ than is ‘To think [. . .] was really too bad’. From the continuation – ‘Les choses inattendues qu’il vous envoyait impromptu [. . .]’ – no one would guess at a very oddly interfering adverb: ‘The queer suddenly things he popped out with [. . .]’ (U 16.1567); ‘queer suddenly things’ tend to pop up in Eumaean expression and interfere with its syntax. ‘Eumaeus’ features structural mismanagement as its trademark: Anyhow upon weighing up the pros and cons, getting on for one, as it was, it was high time to be retiring for the night. (U 16.1603–4)

There is little question that it is Bloom who is ‘weighing up the pros and cons’, but it is not Bloom, as we would inevitably suspect on a first run, who is ‘getting on for one’,4 but an abstract ‘it’, which refers to time, as is borne out with some redundancy in the sequel. So we backtrack and can now contemplate the various changes of a grammatical subject, from an implied Bloom to a first ‘it’ which is not quite identical with the next one: ‘it was high time’. The initial ‘upon weighing [. . .]’ is left dangling. Without great effort (in fact we may not even perceive our adjustment) we can straighten out the muddle into logical coherence, which is once more what translations accomplish. Joyce may not even have known that he was following classical precedent, for Homer’s syntax at times is less logical than implied. But it also seems as though the ‘Eumaeus’ chapter were taking Stephen’s gruff response, ‘Let us

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change the subject’ (U 16.1171, 1172) at grammatical face value. In ‘Eumaeus’ subjects frequently glide out of vision and attention. The instability of the subject or topic is characteristic of thought – and therefore of the interior monologue – but, in a larger sense also, of dialogues (‘Aeolus’, ‘Scylla and Charybdis’), and it affects the infra-structure of an episode like ‘Eumaeus’ which offers a telling sample of a vague, extremely frequent and erratic subject (‘it’) as it is annotated and supplemented on the fly: – It will (the air) do you good, Bloom said, meaning also the walk, in a moment. (U 16.1718–19)

This also indicates a Bloomian haunting sense of his own imprecision; similarly many Eumaean afterthoughts are hindsight rectifications of the disarray in progress. The sentence also confesses its inherent problems with semantic displacement (‘meaning also’). syn tactic oblivion and new foothold syntax At times a sort of extended Uncle Charles Principle5 seems to operate – not characters but topics at hand affect the expressions so that phrases picked up and isolated may serve as thematic or stylistic labels within their context. A few such possible labels will be tried out. In a previous sample, ‘weighing up the pros and cons’ remained unresolved, swept from memory, forgotten as the mind moves on. A Eumaean period may start out as a complete sentence in itself: Another thing just struck him as a by no means bad notion

The striking notion needs to be revealed in the sequel, as indeed it is: [. . .] was he might have a gaze around on the spot to see about trying to make arrangements about a concert tour [. . .] (U 16.516–18)

The new predicate ‘was’ does not fit. It is as though the introductory statement were reduced to just ‘Another thing’ (or ‘a by no means bad notion’) as a possible subject, or as though the opening were something like ‘Another thing that just struck him’. The initial construction has been lost sight of in what looks like an attempt to frame a possible plan. A certain mental vagueness has affected the structure, and the initial fumble (about nascent, not yet coherent ideas) is in tune with the multiple indirection (‘have a gaze around [. . .] to see about trying to make arrangements about [. . .]’), the opposite of purposeful action. Syntactic derangement ushers

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in a plan about an arrangement that is unlikely to come to fruition. As expected, translations do not change subjects in the middle of the stream but offer streamlined constructs like: Il lui venait aussi une autre id´ee qui lui ne paraissait pas mauvaise du tout: c¸a serait qu’il [. . .] (F 552) Eine andere Sache noch kam ihm dabei ein, n¨amlich, daß es doch gar kein schlechter Gedanke w¨are [. . .] (Wo 780)

Inchoate associations have been replaced by controlled syntax, a different state of mind. How is conjecture based on limited ongoing perception to be put into words? When the sailor leaves the cabmen’s shelter, those inside, and again mainly Bloom, are interpreting sounds: the sailor [. . .] eased himself closer at hand, the noise of his bilgewater some little time subsequently splashing on the ground where it apparently awoke a horse of the cabrank. A hoof scooped anyway for new foothold [. . .] (U 16.938–41)

What is the noise of the bilgewater doing? Splashing on the ground. But noises don’t splash (though a splash can be a noise), so perhaps we should take ‘the noise of his bilgewater [. . .] splashing on the ground’ as a new subject and not as part of an absolute construction; but a relative clause takes over: ‘where it [. . .] awoke’, whose subject ‘it’ links up with noise or splashing bilgewater. The more the misconstruction is examined, the less it seems to conform (‘the ground’, for example, is certainly not the place ‘where’ a horse is woken up). Tentative perceptional process can be posited: a noise is heard and identified as water splashing, we move from acoustics to something like an image of the event, and the next sound (horse stirring) is again brought into causal relation with the noise. The sentence seems to act out what is noticed: it is scooping away for new foothold. Studying glides might tell us something about the complex cerebral processing of language input as we read along a linear track with all its delayed re-adaptations. The many instances of wobbling or vanishing subjects link up with the pervasive problem of chancy identification in ‘Eumaeus’. For once nobody seems to know Bloom, not even the newspaper. It is hard to tell who is who; the ‘Simon Dedalus’ in Stockholm who is eulogized as a master marksman is hardly identical with Stephen’s father. Whether the keeper of the shelter is Skin-the-Goat of historical fame is left in suspense; we cannot know if the sailor Murphy is the sailor Murphy, just as Bloom strives to become a guide, philosopher and friend (as at U 16.281), a counsellor, a father with motherly leanings, forcing food upon Stephen, as well

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as a potential reporter on the events, all of this on top of his fictional roles as Odysseus, Wandering Jew, Moses, Elijah and all the rest. Bloom also becomes at times a momentary fake subject, as in the sample quoted above: ‘Anyhow upon weighing up the pros and cons, getting on [. . .]’, where we may be misled to read that Bloom is getting on until ‘getting on for one, as it was’ jerks the phrase into a different, temporal, context. stirred, or fl uster fied The following quotation is appreciated more if we attend to its potentially heroic vocabulary (in the Homeric backdrop arrows are often shot, we find brave ventures and the fighters stirred to action) but also its less than orthodox construction. This is Bloom once more mentoring Stephen: – Have a shot at it now, he ventured to say of the coffee after being stirred. (U 16.807)

Homeric Greek would provide a concise participial phrase for ‘coffee after being stirred’, but in English it has turned into a misaligned postscript, which can be read as either Bloom’s reflection or else a narrative correlation to ‘Let me stir it [. . .] Mr Bloom thought well to stir or try to the clotted sugar from the bottom’ (U 16.785, 790–1). Appropriately, Bloom’s stirring efforts were of little avail and the grammatical ineptitude is in tune. Troubled syntax may indicate perceptional overload, inattention, interferences. As classical Fehlleistungen they may signal conflicting motives, embarrassment, hidden drives that look at times partly recoverable, on occasion not. They are samples of ‘flusterfied syntax’. This is Bloom noticing a prostitute for the second time: ‘The face of a streetwalker glazed [. . .]’ (U 16.704), with a slightly disturbing effect: the face glazed what? But no, the sequence ‘glazed and haggard’ post-defines the critical word as an adjective, not a verb. The sentence quoted is as Joyce wrote it first (Rosenbach, ‘Eumaeus’ 186 ) and as it found its way into the Ulysses edition established by Hans Walter Gabler; but long ago a typist had put in the explicatory comma and the author had never bothered to delete it. But this is the effect: Mr Bloom, scarcely knowing which way to look, turned away on the moment, flusterfied but outwardly calm, and[,] picking up from the table the pink sheet of the Abbey street organ which the jarvey, if such he was, had laid aside, he picked it up and looked at the pink of the paper though why pink? (U 16.706–10)

Reduced to its simple illogical form this runs: Bloom turned away and, picking up a newspaper, picked it up. Grammar here looks psychologically

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determined and internally contradictive: if Bloom scarcely knows where to look, turns away and is flusterfied, it is hard to believe that he was, a true Odysseus, ‘outwardly calm’. Once more in the book we catch him at a failed attempt at nonchalance, so that the repeated picking up looks like fuzzy awkwardness, a syntactic translation of discomfiture. What would a French translator do with such a botched construction? ‘M. Bloom [. . .] ramassa sur la table le journal [. . .], il ramassa la feuille et regarda le rose de la feuille’ (F 557). This is a different story, much more orderly: a simple repetition, as though to resume a tale which might have been forgotten. The Italian rendering resorts to variation: ‘e raccogliendo [. . .] il foglio rosa [. . .], lo prese e guard´o il rosa’ (I 817): picking it up, [. . .] he took it, and the narrative surface remains unruffled. Speculative justification of battered syntax takes up a lot of space and is never adequate. A troubled surface reveals submerged turmoil. Psychofumbles affect language, this is in part imitative form, diction mirroring the perturbed soul. Beyond such (basically realistic) functions, a signal reduplicated picking may draw attention to itself and potentially to other occurrences. It is in fact strange to see that ‘pick’ is featured quite a lot: ‘picking up the scent of the fagend’, ‘congratulate himself on his pick’, ‘he might very easily have picked up the details from some pal’, ‘far and away the pick of the bunch’, ‘to be picked out by their facial expressions’ (U 16.971, 1292–3, 1346–7, 1477–8, 1688–9). Such nit-picking should not lead to hasty conclusions and can be grossly overdone, yet a pattern of reduplication emerges (‘he is what they call picking your brains’, ‘anyone with a pick of brains’; U 16.298–9, 1195). One of the uses appears in Bloom’s historical exploit, handing the great Parnell back his hat (‘Bloom was the man who picked it up in the crush’; U 16.1414), and this is the most prominent twice-told tale (U 16.1488, 1494, 1515). It was unnecessary repetition of certain formulaic passages that led Homeric scholars of the analytic schools to suspect clumsy botches by later editors of the epics. These were termed interpolations and easily dismissed as illegitimate insertions, to be elided (athetized) from the standard text. It is easy to imagine a proofreader or copy editor of Ulysses regulating the passage under discussion (analogous to tendencies in translation). One of Joyce’s subsidiary intentions for the gaucheness, inconsistencies and malapropisms of the ‘Eumaeus’ episode may well have been to fabricate an imitative second-rate Homeric text, especially in a chapter which both aims at classical diction (‘that muchinjured but on the whole eventempered person’; U 16.1081–2) and highlights ‘genuine forgeries’ (U 16.781).

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Multiple simultaneous impressions do not really ever lend themselves to grammatical lucidity, though literature had a way of pretending they did until writers like Joyce came along who refused to be content with habitual simplification. Syntax presupposes more order than is generally made out in real-life situations. The two famous sentences that Joyce revealed to Frank Budgen as the outcome of one productive day in 1919 were at that stage: Perfume of embraces assailed him. His hungered flesh obscurely, mutely craved to adore (Rosenbach, ‘Lestrygonians’ 15)

‘You can see for yourself in how many different ways [the words] might be arranged’7 – manifestly a matter of syntax. In further revision a few slight touches changed the arrangement again: Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore. (U 8.638–9)

Once the brain yields it also can stray from clear-cut grammar, so that it would be tricky to articulate the impression of a very delicate ‘all him assailed’ or to figure out what exactly ‘obscurely’ qualifies. Such instances may go to show how perception coupled with simultaneous actions (like walking) and intermingled with associative processing is not amenable to established linguistic discipline. If anything, impeccable well-balanced sentences to describe brain processes are encoded, habitual reductions. orchestration So far the grammatical aberrations held up on show were part of passages with at least a strong psychological component. They may occur in other contexts as well and have divergent functions or effects. In a chapter like ‘Sirens’ they act as contrived hazards of orchestration, when simultaneous voices, instruments, motifs, themes coincide: in ‘Love’s old sweet sonnez la gold’ (U 11.682) Bloom’s thought is intruded by something outside his consciousness; it seems to happen by jaunty textual virtuosity which can easily substitute ‘sonnez’ for ‘song’ and, in a second deviation, ‘gold’ for ‘cloche’ in glides (or cross-references) that are both tonal and thematic. The sent just inspected, like many in the episode, is an associative composition. As it happens, literal glidings occur predominantly in ‘Sirens’ (and in Circean echoes), and a composition like

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His spellbound eyes went after, after her gliding head as it went down the bar by mirrors, gilded arch for ginger ale (U 11.420–2)

bundles effects of visual and acoustic gliding that is even reflected in ‘gilded’ mirroring ‘gliding’. ‘All most too new call is lost in all’ (U 11.634) would hardly make sense if we could not recognize the words of a song just heard (‘All is lost now’) as they may reverberate in Bloom’s mind. The French translator elaborates freely: ‘Tout appel rappelle un nouvel appel perdu dans tout’ (F 266); the cue is taken from ‘new call’. The Italian has moved from ‘Tutto `e sciolto’ to ‘Ogni nuovo richiamo e` sciolto in ogni’ (I 368). Both versions achieve their own echoing effects, not all is lost now in translation. The opening of the chapter, overture or tuning up or jumbled table of contents, a collocation of sents, anticipates parasyntactic devices to follow: parsing ‘Last rose Castile of summer left Bloom I feel so sad alone’ (U 11.54) tends to separate elements (or motifs) that are or will become familiar in varying constellations. ‘Sirens’ also features polytactic arrangements: ‘haughty Henry Lionel Leopold dear Henry Flower earnestly Mr Leopold Bloom envisaged battered candlesticks [. . .]’ (U 11.1261–3); this can be accounted for as various instruments playing together, ‘voices blended’ (‘Blending their voices’; U 11.158, 852), a diversification of Bloomian roles or a stage direction rehearsal for ‘Circe’. syntax of daydreaming The ‘Nausicaa’ chapter exhibits devices of wish-fulfilment, evasion, escapism, both of Gerty MacDowell and Leopold Bloom and, by implication, of human beings in general. The language not only expresses diverse strategies but acts them out. The following extended note highlights a prominent instance, which is here artificially dissected into slow motion phases. Here then is Gerty MacDowell, yearning in vain, with her musings: Yes, she had known from the very first that her daydream of a marriage has been arranged [. . .] (U 13.194–5)

English syntax can move from an unexceptional ‘her daydream of a marriage’ to the mirage of a fait accompli by way of a slightly jarring slide into a budding clause: ‘her daydream of a marriage has been arranged [. . .]’. Not her daydream, logically, has been arranged but the dream concerns the arrangement, and yet we are also treated to the verbal arrangement of diffuse daydreaming. One way to account for the glide is to see it as a shift

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from the marriage to its anticipated newspaper account. The daydream proliferates in gerundial expansion: [. . .] a marriage has been arranged and the weddingbells ringing for Mrs Reggie Wylie T. C. D. [. . .] (U 13.195–6)

Gradually, maybe imperceptibly, we are carried away into the reverie, with the expressions of a certain type of fiction or an imagined society report. The intricacies of patriarchal designations are then glossed in a parenthesis: (because the one who married the elder brother would be Mrs Wylie) (U 13.196–7)

After this digression we return to the circumstances of the wedding itself: and in the fashionable intelligence Mrs Gertrude Wylie was wearing a sumptuous confection of grey trimmed with expensive blue fox [. . .] (U 13.197–9)

This indicates the source, the newspaper, and its parlance. As attention now centres on the bride and her appearance, it is not difficult to adjust right away that it is not in the fashionable intelligence that Mrs Wylie is wearing clothes, but in its reporting. Reading is unlikely to stop and pause at the sudden transition from report to life, or to pause at the three matrimonial variants (Mrs Reggie Wylie, Mrs Wylie, Mrs Gertrude Wylie: among other things this is a carryover from the Cyclopean concern with naming). We tend to be swept along, immersed in the details of a bridal dress. But then, with no warning, not even the signal of punctuation, we face an abrupt descent. All of what preceded (wedding bells, public attention, bridal splendour, glowing report) [. . .] was not to be. (U 13.199)

The tumble of disenchantment is likely to disconcert first readers who have been caught in the vision. In a syntactic awakening we are jerked back to reality and – within the sentence – to the subject of the wayward subordinate clause, a subject that we may well have lost sight of: ‘the daydream [. . .] was not to be’. Of course it was not to be, daydreams never are: we might have known. The sentence ends with a disillusionary bang, it undergoes what it is stating. Readers are caught, for a while, in a world of wish-fulfilment, in Gerty’s own fantasies. We were made partners in her experience and her fall. The wrong collocations, however, have their own validity. Mrs Gertrude Wylie was wearing her sumptuous confection only in the imagined fashionable intelligence, and it is true that ‘blue fox was not to be’. Arranging daydreams is one of our favourite pastimes. ‘Because it’s all arranged’ (U 13.990). The period can be characterized as ‘fashionable

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intelligence’ (a great phrase, taken by itself, and worth savouring). Gerty’s mind is fashionable, not only concerned with fashions but also capable of being fashioned or shaped by the influences and styles the chapter unfolds. The stream of consciousness, for one, as applied elsewhere directly, and obliquely in ‘Nausicaa’, shows how intelligences are fashionable. The deceptive period also mimics the curve of the whole chapter – ecstatic tumescence bursts like a rocket and then collapses. The dream takes us elsewhere, to a different range of the mind, it also echoes Cyclopean interpolations and looks forward towards escalations and cataclysms in ‘Circe’. Structural disruption does not travel too well. In translation the entire peripeteia tends to evaporate, partly because syntax does not allow the same effortless slippage into the world of escapism; double-takes are elided by preventive clarification and probably also because the same precipitous fall could simply not be enacted; in some cases it is softened by narrative and proleptic pedantry. The French version is much more controlled, with an anticipatory direction: Oui, d`es le premier moment elle a compris que ce beau rˆeve d’un mariage fait dans le ciel [. . .] et dans les notes mondaines Mme Gertrude Wylie portait une somptueuse toilette grise garnie d’inestimable renard bleu, ne se r´ealiserait jamais. (F 344)

The much more correct ‘un mariage fait dans le ciel’ is remote, marked as impossible, and unlikely to lure us into its illusory sky. The comma after ‘bleu’, bringing the last visible scene to a halt, lets us down much more gently; there is a statement, but no imitation, of disillusionment.8 Georg Goyert, writing in the twenties with little regard for syntactic deviousness, reveals the disenchantment before an illusion has even been created: Ja, sie hatte von Anfang an gewusst, dass alle ihre Heiratspl¨ane Luftschl¨osser waren [. . .] (Go 395)

Negative anticipation allows for no romantic climax nor the sudden rupture. Hans Wollschl¨ager, in the seventies, no longer interfered with the sequence of the daydreaming: Ja, sie hatte vom ersten Augenblick an gewusst, daß ihr Tagtraum, eine Hochzeit wird ausgerichtet [. . .] und Mrs. Gertrude Wylie trug ein pr¨achtiges graues Kleid in der Gesellschaftsspalte mit kostbarem Blaufuchsbesatz, daß dieser Tagtraum nie Wirklichkeit werden w¨urde. (Wo 489)

Pauses (like the comma after ‘Tagtraum’) take away the surprise. Before the crucial plunge the narrative pulls itself together, in pointed r´esum´e

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(‘dieser Tagtraum’), it securely guides us into the harsh world of reality without a syntactical shock. Rhetorical control has replaced reality’s wet blanket effect. Any syntactical arrangement that frustrates – or generally affects – our expectations becomes a different experience on a second, pre-informed reading. All next times (memory permitting) will be different from the first one. Time is of the essence, as is borne out by the tenses mixed in the Nausicaan sentence. The daydream takes us from the narrative past, even the pluperfect (‘had known’) into an implied future within which the marriage (perfect tense) ‘has been arranged’; ‘the weddingbells ringing’ appear to be in a timeless now, but the reported bride ‘was wearing’ clothes (past), before the fateful future (‘was not to be’) dispels it all. The dislocated period also took time to evolve as text. Joyce proceeded by steps. At first there was a mere, undramatic sigh of resignation with a nondescript general ‘it’: Yes, she had known from the very first that it was not to be. (Rosenbach, ‘Nausicaa’ 10)

In the ‘Placards’ Joyce replaced the blurry ‘it’ by a long digression: Yes, she had known from the first that her daydream of one day becoming Mrs Reggie Wylie (because the one who married the other brother would be Mrs Wylie) and in the fashionable intelligence Mrs Gertrude Wylie was wearing an exquisite grey mantle trimmed with expensive blue fox [. . .] ( JJA 19:242)

Joyce then crossed out ‘of one day becoming’ and substituted detailed immediacy: of a marriage has been arranged and the weddingbells ringing for [. . .] ( JJA 19:242)

This moves from vaguely futuristic ‘one day becoming’ to something seen as having happened, perfective illusion, instant wish-fulfilment. At the same stage, presumably, Joyce also turned ‘an exquisite grey mantle’ into ‘a sumptuous confection of grey’ in a sumptuous confection in words. The turning point is precisely in the transition from ‘of one day becoming’ to ‘of a marriage has been arranged’; once an imaginary finite verb emerges the fantasy takes on a brief life of its own and reality is suspended. The English language permits such shifts, and the mini-sample shows that, whatever else, Joyce’s works are also a glorification of the whatness of English as it evolved through the centuries and as it became subtly varied by the Irish, distorted by blunders and transformed into literary text.

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One subsidiary function of ‘Oxen of the Sun’ is to demonstrate the precarious growth of English ways of ordering thoughts; this includes many constructions that former uses once made possible (‘In ward wary the watcher hearing come that man mildhearted eft rising with swire ywimpled to him her gate wide undid’) and had subsequently abandoned, as well as some that may never have had a legitimate existence: ‘not merely in being seen but also even in being related worthy of being praised that they her by anticipation went seeing mother’ (U 14.80–1, 56–8). ‘Oxen’ is also an anthology of putting (or arranging, -tax) together (syn) events, ideas, impressions, etc. in a diachronic odyssey through the periods, resulting in periods of varying shapes. It requires acts of intralinguistic translation to reshape the phrasings into those known and accepted by the dominant norms. sintalks and the antics of semata All oddities of language are provected9 in the Wake, and we might have moved from almost any of the examples quoted into Joyce’s orchestration of chaos. The Wake’s lexical excesses may well occlude its grammatical extravagances. A study of syntactical licences (FW 269.3: ‘sintalks’ – an appropriate coinage since deviations from linguistic norms are grammatical equivalents to sinning, deviating from the straight and narrow path) could be profitable and convoluted, and it would be facilitated if we understood the Wake’s grammatical organization better than we do. Specific deviations are hard to make out when everything looks deviously non-conforming. A reminder may be called for that the overall syntax of Joyce’s prose works is highly irregular too; that is the way in which their parts (chapters, sections) relate to each other. A Portrait as a whole seemed disorderly, its language shifted out of focus, a long sermon appeared disproportionate, a lecture on pre-formulated aesthetics is planted into a chapter which shows no clear outlines and transforms itself into a diary. The Ulysses episodes had all the appearance of a jumble of different textures and moods, some of them highly unexpected and unpredictable, and we still find critics proclaiming that the novel went overboard at some never quite determinable point. Ulysses is on the one hand schematically symmetrical; it contains twice nine episodes, coincidentally there is a triptychal arrangement of three parts, the long middle one flanked by two short ones: 3 + 12 + 3, with concentric circles. But then the symmetry is also askew, lopsided, the chapters get longer and generally more intricate, with an escalation of stylistic eccentricity. In one view, Joyce’s at one moment, ‘Ithaca’ was ‘in reality the end as Penelope has

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no beginning, middle or end’ (Letters I 172). The macro-syntax, in other words, is a jumble of architectural possibilities and alternative convolutions. This of course is carried over into Finnegans Wake, whose coherences still remain to be plausibly demonstrated. That such prevalent large-scale, first-blush anarchy is reflected in the mini-structure will hardly surprise in a universe that is so consistently flawed and shown to be a playground for clashing, contradictory forces. Joyce certainly presents no orderly kosmos and tends to display (which could be spelled ‘dis-play’) minds vainly attempting to create precarious orders. As readers or even scholars we carry on the attempt – Syntacting in Progress.10 n otes 1 ‘Joyce and the 19th Century Linguistics Explosion’, 47ff. 2 There is in fact a partially similar configuration in the Odyssey: ‘ton d’ oˆka probibanta podes pheron’ (something like: ‘But his feet bore him (as one) striding forward swiftly on’; Odyssey, 15.555; trans. A. T. Murray, II, 114–15 – the wording has been slightly changed to show the construction), to which the sentence in Ulysses is emphatically not an allusion. 3 Compare ‘Insensiblement pendant qu’il lisait ses pieds le portaient vers la rivi`ere’ (French; F 147) or ‘I suoi lenti piedi lo incamminarono verso il fiume, mentre leggeva’ (Italian; I 204). The translations used are cited as follows (full bibliographical details are given in the Works Cited): F: James Joyce, Ulysse, trans. Auguste Morel et al.; Go: James Joyce, Ulysses, trans. Georg Goyert; Wo: James Joyce, Ulysses, trans. Hans Wollschl¨ager; I: James Joyce, Ulisse, trans. Giulio de Angelis. 4 ‘for one’ is potentially misleading, in view of earlier occurrences: ‘I for one certainly believe [. . .]’; ‘For instance, there was the case of O’Callaghan, for one, [. . .]’ (U 16.880, 1185–6). 5 See Kenner, Joyce’s Voices, 15–38. 6 James Joyce, Ulysses. A Facsimile of the Manuscript. 7 Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ , 20. 8 The reading just given may be called into question; it actually appears in a new edition by Danis Rose which neatly separates the daydream from the framing sentence by introducing a non-authorial comma: ‘[. . .] expensive blue fox, was not to be’ (Ulysses: A Reader’s Edition, 335). 9 Provection, to provect, are ad hoc terms for a common process in Joyce, whereby many features (lexical licence, interior monologue, parody, etc.) begin in a muted manner but then tend to become dominant later on, by augmentation and deviation. See my ‘Joycean Provections’, Inductive Scrutinies, 35–58. 10 The reader is also referred to Gottfried’s The Art of Syntax in ‘Ulysses’ , which deals extensively with related issues.

chapter 3

‘Cypherjugglers going the highroads’: Joyce and contemporary linguistic theories Benoit Tadi´e

It is difficult for a modern linguist to confine himself to his traditional subject matter. [. . .] he cannot but share in some or all of the mutual interests which tie up linguistics with anthropology and culture history, with sociology, with psychology, with philosophy, and more remotely, with physics and physiology.1

Sapir’s account of the early twentieth-century opening up of the field of linguistics to other disciplines is doubly relevant to the theme of this essay, namely the possibility of establishing links between Joyce’s fiction and contemporaneous linguistic preoccupations. First, it suggests that an important epistemological change was taking place in linguistics as much as in literature (a change bearing not only on their procedures but also on their relationship to other worlds of discourse). Second, if one substitutes the words ‘Joycean scholar’ and ‘Joyce’ for ‘modern linguist’ and ‘linguistics’ in Sapir’s proposition, the result is an equally correct summary of the fertile crossbreeding to which Joyce’s fiction has been subjected ever since the publication of Ulysses. The relevance of this fiction to its scientific and cultural environment asserts itself through the numerous links which theoreticians and writers working on Joyce have established with the main cognitive paradigms of the day. Famous early examples are Jung’s (somewhat misguided) reading of Ulysses as the embodiment of a schizophrenic mind ( JJ 628), and Wyndham Lewis’s attack on the same book as a literary equivalent to Freud’s and Einstein’s theories.2 In their wake criticism has stressed virtually every form of confluence between Joyce’s fiction and twentieth-century non-literary theoretical models.3 Contrary to what might have been expected, however, connections of this sort have hardly been established between Joyce and the more advanced linguistic theories of the early twentieth century. Critics have chosen to associate Joyce’s work rather with pre-twentieth-century developments in the field – namely, with the nineteenth-century tradition of comparative philology – than with contemporary approaches.4 This is of course not altogether unjustified. Joyce’s aptitude at condensing a whole historical 43

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development in a portmanteau word, a statement or a chapter (as is the case with the unfolding catalogue of styles contained in ‘Oxen of the Sun’), his mastery over the diachronic dimension of language, as well as his frequent association with the philosophy of Vico, bring to mind a linguistic tradition which was more preoccupied with comparing the evolutions of individual languages and addressing the question of their mono- or polygenesis than with emphasizing how language as a whole may function as a system (the object of structuralism), or what the relation between linguistic expressions and their users (the object of pragmatics) is. I would like to submit, in contradistinction to (but not in contradiction of ) the philological approaches which have so far been favoured, the idea that Joyce’s linguistic experiments and, more generally, his mise-en-sc`ene of (what are perceived as) linguistic idiosyncrasies tend to focus on categories similar to those posited by contemporary linguistic systems. This may be illustrated by looking at Joyce in the light of three problems which have represented major concerns for twentieth-century linguists: (a) The gap between langue and parole (Saussure), or between ‘rheme’ and narrative (Peirce), a gap that is embodied in Joyce’s fiction as early as Dubliners. (b) The constraints of grammar as a system that fails to account for the variety of language in use (Pound/Fenollosa, Malinowski) and thereby fallaciously overdetermines the so-called ‘universals’ of logic and philosophy (Russell, Ogden/Richards, Sapir). This is reflected in Ulysses through forms of grammatical transgression that match contemporaneous preoccupations with the categorization of language. (c) The problem of phonetic symbolism (Sapir), which entails a tension between alliterative and anagrammatic readings of the same text (Saussure’s theory of anagrams). This later part of Saussure’s research is not merely a historical ‘mistake’ or ‘monstrosity’; it is significant of the way twentieth-century linguists entertained misgivings about the arbitrariness of phonetic allocation in language, and therefore about the validity of their own working hypotheses. In Joyce, the tension between implied alliterative and anagrammatic readings of the same texts can help sketch the implications of this theoretical crux. ‘talk in g of faints and worms’: signs and discourse The rejection of the historical study of language by the two major pioneers of modern linguistics, Peirce and Saussure, meant that words should be abstracted from etymology – the ‘strandentwining cable[s]’ (U 3.37) linking

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them all to some unknown origin(s) – and defined as independent linguistic units within a system of signs (Saussure) or ‘rhemata’ (Peirce). This entails Saussure’s well-known distinction between langue and parole. In Saussure, a radical gap is posited between these two levels: one does not produce utterances simply by stringing signs together. The relation between sign and utterance becomes the main problem of structural linguistics – a problem which it must paradoxically ignore in order to validate its own premises. As Saussure wrote, the sequence of words we resort to ‘will never make any human being understand that another human being, by pronouncing it, wishes to convey something specific to him’. Only discourse does this, and Saussure provisionally defines it as the affirmation of an unknown ‘link between [at least] two concepts invested with linguistic form’.5 A dramatization of the gap between these two linguistic levels can be found in the much-discussed opening paragraph of Dubliners. Consider the words ‘paralysis’ and ‘simony’ as they are first presented in ‘The Sisters’: Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. (D 9)

These words are here ‘mentioned’, not ‘used’ (as in ‘Say prunes and prisms forty times every morning, cure for fat lips’; U 13.901–2). Taken by themselves, they ‘sound strangely’, they are the object of a faint fascination, but they are destitute of a specific meaning. The same can be said of Old Cotter’s words a little further on: When we knew him first he used to be rather interesting, talking of faints and worms; but I soon grew tired of him and his endless stories about the distillery. (D 10)

The words ‘faints’ and ‘worms’ (technical terms linked to whiskey-making) appeal to the boy-narrator, who is most probably unaware of the fact that ‘faints are the impure spirits that come through the still first and last in the process of distillation’ and that ‘worms are long spiral or coiled tubes connected with the head of a still’,6 an ignorance ironically underscored by his growing ‘tired’ of Cotter’s ‘endless stories about the distillery’. Cotter’s words are abstracted from the narrative frame which presumably assigns them their technical meaning, as opposed to all the meanings such signifiers as ‘faints’ and ‘worms’ might conjure up in the consciousness of the boynarrator, from whose angle they represent ‘Protean inglossabilities’.7 The distance separating the boy from the adult world is therefore dramatized

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as a linguistic gap – not really a gap between ‘simple’ (or ‘common’) and ‘difficult’ (or ‘technical’) words, but rather one between signs and discourse – or langue and parole. Later on, in the account of his dream, the boy’s passage from innocence to (a still rather vague and shaky) experience is represented by the permutation between these two linguistic levels: But then I remembered that it had died of paralysis and I felt that I too was smiling feebly as if to absolve the simoniac of his sin. (D 11)

The boy’s (partial) acknowledgement of the priest’s guilt and death comes out in the reintegration of discrete signs into utterances – one may note that he no longer isolates any puzzling signifiers in the remainder of the story. The textual logic of ‘The Sisters’ thus seems to imply that understanding, or interpretation, is a narrative act; unlike ‘faints and worms’, which the boy failed to connect with Old Cotter’s ‘endless stories about the distillery’, ‘paralysis’ and ‘simoniac’ (derived from ‘simony’) become expounded, however vaguely, by narrative utterances: ‘it had died of x’ and ‘I absolved the y’. The boy seems to have become aware of what ‘paralysis’ and ‘simony’ may represent (although there is no definite suggestion that the verbs ‘to die’ and ‘to absolve’ are themselves clearly understood8 ). ‘The Sisters’ thus charts the problematic access to socialized discourse while suggesting the subversive potential of discrete signifiers in the initially marginalized consciousness of the narrator. This resolution of the gap between the two levels of language finds a direct echo in Peirce’s semiotic system, in which linguistic signs (or ‘rhemata’) are framed by propositions, at the level of discourse. The rheme ‘father’, for example, is expounded by the proposition: ‘every man is the son of . . .’: it is already a sort of narrative script in need of expansion.9 Similarly, the rheme ‘corpse’ is, for the boy-narrator, represented by ‘two candles must be set at the head of [. . .]’ (D 9). Joyce’s fiction highlights the multiple potentialities and pragmatic consequences of such narrative interpretations, for it is indeed possible that you should misinterpret a sign – that is to say, that you should interpret it in a different way than the majority of people do. ‘Araby’ yields such a perverse plot: substituted, as it is, for the name of ‘Mangan’s sister’ (the family name is itself loaded with ambiguous connotations), it is framed for the boy by a romantic narrative at variance with the flatly realistic convention of the short story: The syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me. (D 32)

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‘Araby’ can be defined as a story about what ‘Araby’ means: if we consider its syllables, as this passage seems to suggest, it may split phonetically into Latin ara (altar) and English ‘be’, which connects with the boy’s self-insertion into a narrative world in which you bear your ‘chalice safely through a throng of foes’ (D 31). For the boy’s uncle, it recalls the world of classroom poetry (‘The Arab’s Farewell to his Steed’), whereas the aunt fears it might materialize as ‘some Freemason affair’ (D 34, 32). As a bazaar, it is also a place where uninteresting people sell porcelain vases and flowered tea-sets. As the title of the short story, it is an encyclopaedic sign awaiting its reduction to narrative form. And as the short story itself, it is a series of directly competitive illustrations of what the title means. ‘Araby’ is thus both sign and text, and its ‘right’ interpretation is in the story enforced not by logic but by force: ‘Araby’ has nothing oriental about it not because it is a bazaar (the boy knows that it is a bazaar) but because society refuses to validate the ‘oriental’ hypothesis. Similarly, in the ‘Calypso’ chapter of Ulysses, the words ‘Agendath Netaim’ (first in U 4.191–2) expand for Bloom into competitive narrative illustrations, ranging from the energetic evocation of colonial/commercial activity (‘Spain, Gibraltar, Mediterranean, the Levant. Crates lined up on the quayside at Jaffa, chap ticking them off in a book, navvies handling them barefoot in soiled dungarees’; U 4.211–13) to the more austere Biblical account (‘Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom’; U 4.221–2). Joyce thus builds the ambiguous potential of signifiers into Protean narratives. This device is increasingly exploited as we progress in the ‘Odyssey of styles’ of his fiction, establishing a direct continuity between the early ambivalence of micro-narratives in ‘Araby’ and the more ‘radically intrusive parodic asides’10 of ‘Cyclops’, a chapter which has been seen as marking a turning point in Joyce’s literary practice.11 In this respect, his fictional approach to language is close to Peirce’s, whose system also expounds signs as proliferating narrative structures. But Joyce goes one step further than Peirce and implies (like Humpty Dumpty) that a form of power struggle overdetermines the rationalization of ambiguities in people’s use and understanding of signs in discourse. ‘adverb becomes verb’: a protean grammar Peirce’s model of verbal interpretation is symptomatic of an important upheaval in traditional theories of language. The turn-of-the-century epistemological landslide which serves as a background for transformations in literature, philosophy and linguistics is here perceptible. Peirce’s system reveals a transformation of the traditional conception of meaning, which is

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no longer linked to substance, or essence, but becomes a question of possible variations within given worlds of discourse. This, it is to be noted, is roughly contemporaneous with the philosophical revolution initiated by Husserl, G. E. Moore and Russell. T. E. Hulme, himself a poet and philosopher (who, like Joyce, contributed to Ezra Pound’s first imagist anthology), notes that Russell criticized the metaphysical enquiry into nominal concepts (and the whole philosophical tradition associated with this type of investigation) which had been made at the expense of other linguistic forms. In ‘Humanism and the Religious Attitude’, Hulme quotes from Russell: Even amongst philosophers we may say, broadly, that only those universals which are named by adjectives or substantives have been much or often recognised, while those named by verbs and propositions have been usually overlooked. [. . .] This omission has had a very great effect upon philosophy; it is hardly too much to say, that most metaphysics, since Spinoza, has been largely determined by it.12

Universals, according to Russell, should no longer be conceived in terms of certain privileged linguistic categories (adjective or noun), whose arbitrary disconnectedness from the world of discourse (i.e. from ‘verbs and propositions’) ultimately denies their supposed ‘universality’. It is interesting to see philosophy here converge with linguistics, whose own development simultaneously foregrounded a similar change of perception. Sapir draws the same conclusions as Russell from the linguistic study of a variety of non Indo-European languages, a study which had shown by implication that the pseudo-universals of European philosophy were based on arbitrary linguistic categories: To a far greater extent than the philosopher has realized, he is likely to become the dupe of his speech-forms, which is equivalent to saying that the mould of his thought, which is typically a linguistic mould, is apt to be projected into his conception of the world. Thus innocent linguistic categories may take on the formidable appearance of cosmic absolutes.13

This awareness of the relativity and limitations of linguistic categories, which Sapir connected with other forms of relativity (Einstein’s in physics and Jung’s in psychology), is also reflected in the growing dissatisfaction which such theoreticians as Richards, Malinowski and Fenollosa seem to have felt towards traditional grammatical classifications, a dissatisfaction which in turn fits in with Joyce’s linguistic practices. ‘Proteus’ can be read as the dialectic embodiment of the struggle between the logic of grammatical classification (the Ulysses part of the dialectic) and the elusive nature of contiguous linguistic phenomena (its Protean counterpart). Such a struggle

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is the focal point of theories addressing the arbitrary nature of grammar in the face of the mobility of linguistic roots. Pound, revisiting Fenollosa, asserts for example that the categorization of language into parts of speech is the surface product of historical repression, and that language continues to tap an endless flux of transitive verbs: There is in reality no such verb as a pure copula, no such original conception; our very word exist means ‘to stand forth’, to show oneself by a definite act. ‘Is’ comes from the Aryan root as, to breathe. ‘Be’ is from bhu, to grow. [. . .] Fancy picking up a man and telling him that he is a noun, a dead thing rather than a bundle of functions!14

We are here faced with a type of analysis (or fantasy) that also possessed the founders of modern linguistics: Peirce, for instance, thought that all rhemata were originally verbs (Collected Papers, III.440, VIII.337; ‘rheme’ is the Greek for ‘verb’), which had through historical accident become reified into nouns, adjectives, etc. Conversely, Malinowski’s theory of language (based on his anthropological study of Melanesian peoples) shows that grammatical categories are rooted in ‘primitive man’s’ perception of nature: Out of an undifferentiated background, the practical Weltanschauung of primitive man isolates a category of persons and personified things. It is clear at once that this category roughly corresponds to that of substance – especially to the Aristotelian ousia. [. . .] The category of crude substance so prominent in the early mental outlook requires and receives articulate sounds to signify its various items. The class of words used for naming persons and personified things forms a primitive grammatical category of noun-substantives.15

Verbs for him are a corruption (or rather an elaboration) of the ‘primitive grammatical category of noun-substantives’, and the resulting mobility of signs is seen as the work of civilization: [. . .] as language and thought develop, the constant action of metaphor, of generalisation, analogy and abstraction, and of similar linguistic uses build up links between the categories and obliterate the boundary lines, thus allowing words and roots to move freely over the whole field of Language. In analytic languages, like Chinese and English, this ubiquitous nature of roots is most conspicuous [. . .]16

Pound/Fenollosa and Malinowski have an opposite reading of history (‘syphilisation’ versus ‘civilisation’; U 12.1196–7), but the problem they tackle (the puzzling categories of grammar) is the same. Joyce, too, reaches beyond these categories to assert freely the permutative possibilities of parts of speech. ‘Proteus’, the chapter of changes, offers a wide variety of such

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transformations, showing that ‘names, for all their accepted substantiality, soon dissolve into doings, into the verbs from which grammar distinguishes them’.17 In a famous account, an amazed Frank Budgen (playing Watson/ Ulysses to Joyce’s Holmes/Proteus) registered the audacity inherent in Joyce’s transgression of grammar: ‘After he woke me up last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway. Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That man led me, spoke . . .’ ‘Almosting!’ I said. ‘Yes,’ said Joyce. ‘That’s all in the Protean character of the thing. Everything changes: land, water, dog, time of day. Parts of speech change, too. Adverb becomes verb.’18

Symbolic patterns in Ulysses combine with what Malinowski calls ‘the ubiquitous nature of roots’. For example, the dog’s transformation into ‘a pard, a panther’ (U 3.363) is later picked up by a lapsus in Leopold Bloom’s Protean speech (‘Leopardstown’ for ‘Fairyhouse races’; U 15.544), which in turn ushers in both Bloom’s transformation into ‘Leo ferox [. . .], the Libyan maneater’ (U 15.712) and that of the noun ‘leopard’ into a verb: ‘A yoke of buckets leopards all over him [i.e. Garrett Deasy] [. . .]’ (U 15.3990). At the literary level, such symbolic clusters emphasize the ‘complementary dispositions’ and ‘Janus-faced awareness’19 of Stephen and Bloom. At the purely linguistic level, however, they dramatize Pound/Fenollosa’s recognition that ‘[a] “part of speech” is only what it does. Frequently our lines of cleavage fail, one part of speech acts for another’ (The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, 20–1). In this respect, Joyce again echoes the linguistic preoccupations of the age, denying the omnipotence of grammatical categories, asserting the free movement of roots across the field of language, and emphasizing the relation between signs and their users (the distorted self-projections of Stephen and Bloom are themselves based on grammatical distortions). His work is of a time when linguistics had been partially reappropriated by anthropologists (Bloomfield, Sapir, Malinowski) working at deconstructing the categories set up by grammarians and inventing new pragmatic ways of looking at language – Malinowski, it may be remembered, ‘invented’ the ‘phatic function’ of language, which was later integrated into Jakobson’s theory of the six functions of linguistic communication.20 But although the ‘lines of cleavage’ focused on are the same, here again Joyce may be seen as one step ahead of his contemporaries. Pound/ Fenollosa’s problem (how did grammar happen to be imposed on primitive

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language) and Malinowski’s problem (how did language happen to free itself from primitive grammar) are echoed and exploded in Ulysses. Whereas the former need to resort to some fictional origin (Chinese, or the ‘language of the savages’) to justify their theories and transcend traditional systems of classification, Joyce’s fiction dramatizes the struggle between the alienating structure of linguistic categories and their liberating displacement in literature. Fifty years later, Roland Barthes would redefine (in the face of what he saw, hyperbolically, as the ‘fascist’ nature of linguistic classification) literature on similar grounds: For us, who are neither crusaders of the faith nor supermen, all that remains to be done is to cheat with langue, to cheat langue. This salutary form of cheating [. . .], which enables us to hear language outside the realm of power, in the splendor of a permanent revolution of language, I call: literature.21

‘mu t e secret word s’: phonetic symboli sm and anagrams We may legitimately ask if there are, in the speech of a considerable percentage of normal individuals, certain preferential tendencies to express symbolism not only in the field of speech dynamics (stress, pitch, and varying quantities), but also in the field of phonetic material as ordinarily understood. Can it be shown, in other words, that symbolisms tend to work themselves out in vocalic and consonantal contrasts and scales in spite of the arbitrary allocation of these same vowels in the strictly socialized field of reference?22

Sapir’s tentative admission that phonetic material may be symbolic in itself, and that this may some day be shown by a systematic scrutiny of everyday speech, can be understood as the twentieth-century reformulation of an age-old temptation that goes back to Plato’s Cratylus. The idea that sounds are naturally expressive may be traced from Plato through Whitman’s ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ and Rimbaud’s ‘Voyelles’, and, among countless other examples, to the ‘wavespeech’ of ‘Proteus’: ‘Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases’ (U 3.456–9). The temptation itself is not new. The logical framework, however, is. For Sapir states his hypothesis at the same time as he re-emphasizes the ‘arbitrary allocation’ of phonemes in language. Such a seemingly illogical argument reflects the problem which structural linguistics has had with the expressive power of sounds while denying the poetic fiction of a language derived from nature. Sapir’s suggestion, seeking to recombine the principle of arbitrariness with the Platonic view that phonemes are in themselves

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symbolic, is very much a product of post-philological theories somewhat dissatisfied with their own axioms and conscious of the variety of linguistic phenomena that must be discarded in order to categorize language. The whole of Saussure’s quest for anagrams can be read in the same light. Like Sapir, he acknowledged the symbolic potential of phonetic patterns; unlike him, he rejected the idea that transcendental (or psychological) values could be embodied in phonemes. Since the latter were arbitrary, the only way one could ‘make sense’ of them was by seeing them as dislocated parts of other, hidden words. Saussure’s attention seems to have been stirred at first by the repetition of certain sounds in Greek and Latin poetry. This led him to consider that the poets of antiquity worked into the composition of poetic lines the phonetic material contained in a key or theme word, which Saussure calls a hypogramme. Interestingly enough, Saussure had first called this hypogramme a ‘text’, which points to his thinking in terms of text and sub-text, or ‘pre-text’, in the full sense of the word: a text always originates in another text. Hence the fact that both the phonemes and the text are in turn matrix and sign of each other. However, since phonemes are in a restricted number, it follows that, within the space of a few lines, virtually any anagram may be combined out of the phonemes of the text. Despairing about this, Saussure looked for a confirmation of his theory in the artes poeticae of antiquity or the practice of contemporary poets (Pascoli), and, failing to find one, finally gave up his research. Joyce’s evolution runs parallel to the development of the thought of linguists like Sapir and Saussure. Historically, the phonetic density of Joyce’s prose seems to have increased with time: discreet in Dubliners and A Portrait, it becomes remarkable in Ulysses and overwhelming in Finnegans Wake. Although there is no boundary line between (or within) any of these works to suggest a formal and definitive passage from a ‘realistic’ stage to a ‘modernist’ one (nor from a ‘visual’ stage to an ‘auditory’ one), the global tendency, spanning thirty-five years of writing, is of an overall continuous heightening of the micrological importance of phonemes. Like Saussure’s theory, Joyce’s linguistic practices increasingly enforce an awareness, on the part of the implied reader, of the permutative possibilities of phonetic sequences. Also like Saussure’s hidden ‘texts’, Joyce’s fiction seems to suggest simultaneously opposite considerations of phonetic sequences – that is, as alliterations or as anagrams. More specifically, I would like to show that the tension between alliterative and anagrammatic readings of the same text (the crux of Saussure’s

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theory) is embodied already in Ulysses, which suggests that the limit still sometimes posited by Joycean scholarship between pre- and post-Wakean worlds is untenable, to exactly the same extent that Saussure’s own distinction between alliterations and anagrams is untenable. If, for example, we consider again the above-mentioned ‘wavespeech’ from ‘Proteus’, it becomes clear that two (mutually exclusive) phonological readings of it are possible. A ‘Whitmanesque’ reading would imply seeing it as an instance of onomatopoeic writing, translating into alliterative prose the hissing sound of the waves on the sand (or of Stephen’s ‘sibilant urine’23 ). A Saussurean reading would imply considering the words of the ‘wavespeech’ as hypogrammes for the sequence following them: ‘hrss’, for example, forms the consonantal structure of ‘[horses]’; the hypogramme ‘sea’ (not present in undetached form in this paragraph but of overwhelming symbolic importance) is the matrix of ‘it[s (s)p(ee)ch cea(s)e(s)]’; in ‘Sirens’ it comes out again when deaf Pat the waiter ‘[s(ee)hears lip(ss)p(ee)]ch’ (U 11.1002). The equally significant ‘Cock lake’ (U 3.453), in what may be a concealed auto-erotic passage,24 can be found in ‘In [cups of r(o)cks it sl(o)]ps’, and similarly the phonetic material of the verbs ‘flowing’ and ‘purling’ is entirely reconfigured in ‘[foampool, (fl)ower un(f )urling]’ (U 3.459–60). The proximity of such phonetic patterns to alliterations is obvious, yet they qualify as hypogrammes in Saussure’s sense because they can be seen as matrices and signs of other words, as opposed to purely onomatopoeic devices. Also Saussurean is the fact that these matrices are central to the subject matter of the passage itself – a necessity in Saussure’s theory, otherwise it would be an almost impossible task to localize the hypogrammes of a given text. If we adopt, like Saussure, the idea that hypogrammes always embody major concerns of the passages selected for attention, an anagrammatic reading of Ulysses becomes possible on more or less definable grounds. Anagrams may be sought in: – the proximity of significant words: ‘he [(t)asted the rumou(r)] of that storm’ (U 14.415). – the hidden parallels with the Odyssey: for example the word ‘Sirens’ may be echoed by ‘Si [. . .] in Ned Lambert’s’ (U 11.779–80). – the names of characters: the name ‘Leopold’ can, literally, be found in Zoe’s slip (through its association with the ‘lion’ theme): ‘h[er slip in whose sinuous f old ]s lurks the lion reek’ (U 15.2016–17), while the names of parents are repeated in their children’s (Mira’s son is to be christened ‘[Mo(r)timer Edwa(r)]d’; U 14.1334).

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– the main thematic paradigms of the novel: the concern for motherhood, which is central to ‘Oxen of the Sun’, may be reflected in such anagrams as ‘w[onderfully unequal faculty of m(e)t(e)(m)psych(o)]sis’ (U 14.897; cf. also 1099–1100), or ‘a [(m)y(r)iad meta(m)orph(o)se]s’ (which also contains an anagram of ‘Mira’; U 14.1108). Stephen’s association with this theme also comes out in a perfect Saussurean anagram, all the more obvious since it is repeated three times: [. . .] [Mouth (to) (h)er (mo)u(th)]’s kiss. His lips lipped and [mouthed fl(e)shl(e)ss lips (o)f air]: [mouth (to) (h)er (m)oo(m)]b. (U 3.400–2; cf. 398–9)

Stephen’s dead mother had already appeared as early as ‘Telemachus’, bending over him ‘wi[th mute secret wor]ds’ (U 1.272), an anagram that fits Saussure’s conditions: not only does it represent the dominant theme of the passage, but the word ‘mother’ is itself missing from a text that suggests the presence of ‘secret words’ beneath the apparent ones. In such examples Joyce seems to reconfigure phonetic excess into meaning: signs may now be interpreted at several levels, disclosing multiple layers in the narrative and suggesting possibilities of cross-reading based on phonetic correspondences. Joyce can thereby help us link the two sides of Saussure’s practice: the separation of signs from discourse on the one hand, and the attempt to conceive them on the same plane on the other hand. For Saussure’s principle of arbitrariness implies that phonetic patterns in excess of meaning cannot be linked back to nature but to other words only. By his use of meaningful excess, Joyce provides us with such a link: parasitical sounds can be seen as elements of a pre- or sub-text, and signs therefore find their origin in previous discourse, rather than in langue’s abstract catalogue of words.25 The irony, however, lies in the fact that this can appear as fully legitimate only as a literary technique, and not as an analytical principle. Indeed, even in the above-mentioned examples, all doubt as to the validity of our interpretation is far from being dispelled, and there remains the possibility of a contradictory, purely alliterative, reading of the phonetic sequences. In other words, one can feel the presence of an ‘arranger’ shifting phonetic sequences behind the scenes, but there is no paradigmatic authority to guarantee the validity of our anagrammatic hypothesis. This unsettles the theory and leaves the Saussurean question unsolved: is it possible, in Ulysses, to draw a line between alliterative and anagrammatic writing? An answer to that question is given by Stephen himself: ‘Sounds are impostures, Stephen said after a pause of some little time, like names. Cicero, Podmore. Napoleon, Mr Goodbody. Jesus, Mr Doyle. Shakespeares

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were as common as Murphies. What’s in a name?’ (U 16.362–4). Fascination for sounds is a precondition for poetry to exist, but is also a trap for the listener. The problem lies in the type of discourse selected: sounds are ‘impostures’ in cabmen’s shelters and linguistic investigation, but they are legitimate poetic units when it comes to literary composition of the kind Joyce was engaged in. Therefore, it may be argued that the categories (text and hypogramme) devised by Saussure are both highlighted and undermined in Joyce. Saussure’s theory of anagrams as ‘words beneath words’ chimes in with Joyce’s verbal constructs, with the difference that what for the former is a way of ‘squaring the circle’ of language can in the latter be seen as a means of exposing the impossibility of such a totalization. ‘met him pik e hoses’: the irrationali t y of l anguage Saussure’s theory, like Sapir’s, belongs to a series of (generally unsuccessful) conceptions that have developed in the margins of more orthodox linguistics, and through which theoreticians have sought to accommodate the ‘otherness’ of language as produced by their own paradigms. The idea that linguists take an active part in selecting and occulting linguistic phenomena is now common and has been rechannelled into poststructuralist (Lacanian) critique.26 The resulting urge on the part of linguists to reintegrate what they have been obliged to discard is less frequently noted, however. From this point of view, the tensions at play in Joyce’s treatment of language can help us put into focus the implications of totalizing theories of language. Indeed, Joyce’s linguistic strategies tend to oppose in a radical way the closure of language as a homogeneous field of study, suggesting that the reduction of linguistic material to a scientific object creates forms of irrationality which in turn must be rationalized, and so on ad infinitum. A dramatization of this opposition between rationality and irrationality can be found in ‘Ithaca’, with the emphasis on Molly Bloom’s misunderstandings of certain words: Unusual polysyllables of foreign origin she interpreted phonetically or by false analogy or by both: metempsychosis (met him pike hoses), alias (a mendacious person mentioned in sacred scripture). (U 17.685–7)

Such misunderstandings are presented, in the ironically reductive scientific terminology associated with the questions in the catechism, as ‘instances of [Molly’s] deficient mental development’ (U 17.674). On the other hand they are also a creative form of linguistic association, standing somewhere in between the pun, the lapsus and the anagram, echoing the creative process

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of word-derivation that had been so prominent a feature of Joyce’s work ever since he first introduced slips into Eliza’s discourse in ‘The Sisters’ (‘rheumatic wheels’ for ‘pneumatic wheels’; D 17). Whole books have been written using forms of phonetic interpretation ‘by false analogy’: it was the very method used at the turn of the century by the French novelist Raymond Roussel in writing his fiction, and by his disciple Michel Leiris in his surrealistic glossaries.27 What can only be conceived by linguistics (or psychoanalysis, for that matter) as the symptom of a deficiency which it must rationalize from the vantage point of its own axiomatic procedures is here transformed into a creative paradigm in its own right and given its own logic and rationality. Joyce’s tendency to emphasize what Roland Barthes calls ‘the rustle of language’, which linguistic systems can only view as peripheral deficiencies, suggests by implication the repressive nature of linguists’ attempts at the theoretical modelling of the range of contiguous linguistic phenomena into isolatable systems. The crudely reductive voice labelling Molly’s linguistic derivations as ‘instances of [. . .] deficient mental development’ – the voice of linguistic positivism – stresses by contrast the fact that scientific ‘lines of cleavage’ between what is ‘felicitous’ and what is ‘deficient’ are arbitrary fictions in the face of language’s uncategorizable complexity. In the end the truth is on Molly’s side: Joyce’s experiments with the language of fiction lay bare the fictions underlying contemporary representations of truth. In this Molly connects yet again with Penelope, unravelling at night the rational representations conceived in the daylight of scientific reasoning. n otes 1 Sapir, Selected Writings of Edward Sapir, 161 (‘The Status of Linguistics as a Science’ (1929)). 2 Wyndham Lewis, ‘An Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce’ (1927), Time and Western Man, 73–111. For instances of Joyce’s counterattack in Finnegans Wake, see Milesi, ‘Killing Lewis with Einstein’, and Slote, ‘The Prolific and the Devouring in “The Ondt and the Gracehoper”’. 3 See e.g. Herring, Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle; Rice, Joyce, Chaos, and Complexity. 4 See e.g. Kenner, ‘Joyce and the 19th Century Linguistics Explosion’. Kenner emphasizes in particular the importance of Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary (1879–82) and of the New English Dictionary (whose publication began in 1884), arguing that Ulysses ‘is the first imaginative work to proceed on the assumption that the development of historical linguistics had been accomplished’ (45), a statement which in turn has been ‘proceeded on’ by the majority of Joyce scholars. 5 Quoted by Starobinski, Words upon Words, 4.

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6 Gifford, Joyce Annotated, 30. 7 This is the title of one of Senn’s essays in Inductive Scrutinies, 133–55. 8 This is suggested by the boy’s ambiguous behaviour when being told of Father Flynn’s death (D 10), reading the card pinned on the door (D 12), and imagining that the dead priest may be smiling in his coffin (D 14). 9 Peirce, Collected Papers, IV, 438. Peirce’s definition of a rheme is the following: ‘By a rheme, or predicate, will here be meant a blank form of proposition which might have resulted by striking out certain parts of a proposition, and leaving a blank in the place of each, the parts stricken out being such that if each blank were filled with a proper name, a proposition (however nonsensical) would thereby be recomposed’ (IV.560). 10 Hayman, ‘Ulysses’: The Mechanics of Meaning, 125. 11 See Groden, ‘Ulysses’ in Progress, 114–65. 12 Hulme, Speculations, 43–4. 13 Selected Writings of Edward Sapir, 157 (‘The Grammarian and His Language’ (1924)). 14 Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, 19, 20. 15 Malinowski, ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages’, 332. 16 Ibid., 335–6. 17 Senn, ‘Joyce the Verb’, 9. 18 Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ , 55. 19 Hayman, ‘Ulysses’: The Mechanics of Meaning, 76. 20 Incidentally, the ‘phatic function’ is isolated as a linguistic dimension and problem of its own in Ulysses, especially in passages where communication fails to operate. Such is the case, for example, with Bloom’s fantasy that the voice of the dead should be recorded for posthumous communion with the living (U 6.962–6). See also ‘Circe’, where the reappearance of the gramophone is equally disastrous (U 15.2210ff.). 21 Barthes, Lec¸on, 16 (my translation). 22 Selected Writings of Edward Sapir, 62 (‘A Study in Phonetic Symbolism’ (1929)). 23 See Morse’s essay on ‘Proteus’, 34. 24 See Hayman, ‘Stephen on the Rocks’. 25 This is consonant with the novel’s overall mnemonic self-awareness of its previous discursive occurrences, whereby earlier information becomes repeated as clich´e and ‘mention’, as in the well-known meta-commentary in ‘Sirens’: ‘Blazes Boylan’s smart tan shoes creaked on the barfloor, said before’ (U 11.761; cf. 337). 26 See e.g. Milner, L’Amour de la langue. 27 A line by Victor Hugo, for example, is distorted phonetically by Roussel into unconnected words which are then used to outline a narrative: ‘Eut rec¸u pour hochet la couronne de Rome’ becomes ‘Ursule, brochet, lac, Huronne, drome’ (Foucault, Raymond Roussel, 57ff.). See also Leiris, La R`egle du jeu.

chapter 4

Madonnas of Modernism Beryl Schlossman

Madonna 1. a former Italian style of address equivalent to madam. 2. (M-) the Virgin Mary; ‘Our Lady’; also, a picture or statue of the Virgin; as, Raphael painted many Madonnas. (Webster’s Dictionary)

‘O rosa mistica, ora pro me!’ (SL 238; letter to Martha Fleischmann)

Yes! Yes! Blessed Virgin Mary, I believe! (Luis Bu˜nuel, waking up after an erotic dream of the Virgin Mary)

Love is at the centre of modern literature, and its role in a number of important modernist texts locates its cultural contexts all over the map: on the street, in the movie theatre, in religious devotion, in social history, in theology, and in a mix of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture where the sublime faces the obscene and passion confronts violence. The phenomena of love inform culture and haunt its subjects with temptations and taboos. The figures that I am naming ‘Madonnas of Modernism’ are female characters who are featured in secular modernist works as subjects and objects of desire. The path of love that these characters take includes resonances of mariolatry (the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary), mystical spirituality, and the cult of virginity (an investment of sacred powers, taboos, and social values across cultures). The Madonnas of Modernism are particularly important in the works of Baudelaire, Flaubert and Joyce. In addition to their devotional or aesthetic investment in the image of the Virgin, all three were fascinated by the dramatic and operatic character of the libertine Don Juan (Don Giovanni), who professes atheism but believes in virginity as an erotic value. In the Mozart-Da Ponte opera, Leporello’s aria of the Catalogue reveals Don Giovanni’s dominant passion for virginal young women: ‘Ma sua passion predominante e` la giovan principiante!’ At the allusion to virginity, 58

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Mozart lowers the valet’s voice to an intimate stage whisper appropriate for church or alcove. Joyce’s most compelling Madonnas of Modernism are presented as daughters or as ripening women who are virginal in soul and in memory. These feminine figures repeatedly recall their surrender of body and soul in a moment of experience that Joyce models on the Annunciation. Unlike most women, the Virgin says yes and remains a virgin. Her theologians go to great lengths to prevent suspicious natures from hypothesizing the rupture of the hymen, carnal intercourse, or the experience of pleasure, and remind us that the incomparable and endlessly imagined ‘second Eve’ is alone of all her sex.1 The mystics and the mariolaters endow the soul itself with femininity, modelled on the images of the Virgin’s beauty magnified in courtly love discourse and in centuries of religious art. When the soul says ‘yes’, it embraces passion and love. But unlike the Virgin, the modern subject who says ‘yes’ in flesh and in spirit may be surrendering to the pleasures of concupiscence, adultery or perversion. A Christian text like St Augustine’s Confessions already illustrates the divided or split voice of modern subjectivity: (1) the soul abandons itself to desire, wallows in shame, and wonders why it cannot rise above the flesh; and (2) the soul condemns desire as sin, washed clean only by the waters of grace, and rejoices at the love of God that absolves it. Modernism brings the two voices together for the greater ambivalence of literature concerning the status of femininity, virginity, sin and the image of the Madonna. The powerful resonance of modernist suggestion sufficed to bring literature’s ambivalence before the Law, as Baudelaire, Flaubert, Joyce and others discovered. Baudelaire’s vivid juxtapositions of the high and the low forms of feminine images are a leitmotif of his journals and published writings. In Les Fleurs du Mal, even the revered Andromaque does a turn as a vile animal, and the Muse appears as a penniless prostitute who sells her charms for a few coins. One of the most lurid moments in modernist literature occurs in Flaubert’s second masterpiece, Salammbˆo, when the monstrous Giscon accuses the mystical and virginal Salammbˆo of uttering raucous love-moans like a prostitute. As early as Dubliners, Joyce combines the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary with perversion, the sinful unnaturalness of human sexuality. A concise example is a description of the nubile Polly, the daughter in ‘The Boarding House’: ‘Her eyes, which were grey with a shade of green through them, had a habit of glancing upwards when she spoke with anyone, which made her look like a little perverse madonna’ (D 62–3). The image fits into the naturalist patterns of degradation exposed in Dubliners, but the

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emphasis on the Madonna’s image is an enduring aspect of Joyce’s aesthetics. Although the Irish Catholic naturalist frame of the early narrative writing is substantially transformed with each new work, the Madonna takes on increasing importance throughout Joyce’s later writings. The poetic use of the word ‘Madonna’ is particularly resonant in literary contexts of love. When Dante addresses Beatrice and Petrarch addresses Laura as ‘Madonna’, they are following a tradition derived from devotional poetry, including the writings of St Francis of Assisi and the Franciscan Jacopone da Todi, author of an Umbrian lauda called ‘Donna de Paradiso’. Derived from courtly love, the role of the Lady and the poet’s figuration of desire through her has been central to European literatures through the modernist period. The literature of courtly love is shaped in part by the impact of Platonism: the results are visible in Baroque and Romantic literature and beyond, in the trans-Romantic aesthetic of early Modernism. Because of the rhetorical power of this tradition, as well as its lingering effects on the post-Romantic conception of love that Freud explores, modernists writing about love turned to these materials within a secular framework. In his immensely popular book, Love in the Western World , Denis de Rougemont blurs the identities of most of the literary, historical and philosophical texts relevant to his subject, but he records the most symptomatic major elements of modern love in literature.2 Rougemont quotes Ortega y Gasset’s On Love to point out that everyone, past and present, uses Platonic concepts to think and talk about love. Although he does not mention any specific texts, and is apparently happy to remain in the dark with his readers as he navigates through history, religion and literature in search of the myths of love, the comment is interesting for several reasons: first, because Plato’s quasi-universal importance is assumed as a given in a book that focuses exclusively on love in a Christian context; second, because the importance of the figure of the Madonna in devotional and secular literature is presented as a given in Rougemont’s argument for the role played by religious heresy and mysticism in the literary tradition that develops through the troubadours and courtly love; and third, because of the devotional resonances of the Tristan material, with its courtly love motif of Isolde as a Madonna figure. Rougemont’s emphasis on the Tristan myth reflects the influence of B´edier’s popularized and scholarly versions of the Tristan material as well as the widespread taste for Wagner’s opera in early Modernism. Like Joyce, who also had a taste for the European popular culture of love and a familiarity with Wagner’s opera, Rougemont privileges the story of Tristan and Isolde as the central love myth of Christian (‘Western’) culture, and contrasts it with Don Juan.

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In a recent book that claims to portray the modernist Madonna, Jane Silverman van Buren emphasizes the ‘semiotics of the maternal metaphor’ and misses the feminine roles of subject and object in the historically anchored concept of the ‘Madonna’.3 The specificity of the Madonna is lost when it is conflated with a general portrait of motherhood. What is at stake is the madonna figures’ virginal status, their relation to sin, and the roles they play and play out. The accent is on desire rather than on the evidence of motherhood; Webster’s definition, quoted in the epigraph, is low-key but specific about the Madonna’s connections with courtly love literature and with Catholic images of her. Through the cult of the Madonna, virginity and adultery converge for the desiring, worshipping subject. The literary vehicles that anticipate and produce the Madonnas of Modernism consistently locate a major source of textual authority in Plato’s Symposium.4 This cornerstone of philosophy and literature may be the most enigmatic, elusive and misquoted of Plato’s works to have survived the vicissitudes of time. The literary path of love that moves through modernity seems to originate in Plato, since a Platonic discourse of love is articulated and transmitted in the inheritance of the troubadours, courtly love, and the writings of the mystics. In this sense, the frame of Modernism that reaches from the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth century starts with Plato and pursues an elaboration and working through of the art of love in its encounters with Dante, Tristan and Isolde, Shakespeare, Don Giovanni, Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Baudelaire (Les Fleurs du Mal), Wagner and Yeats. The art of love is named in the Symposium (177d8, 207c), where the revelation of love’s mystery (211c) locates it in relation to poetic art. Erotics and poetics are explicitly connected throughout the dialogue, and especially in the interventions of Socrates and Diotima. v ico’s c ycles, or the trellis of desire Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be. (FW 215.23–4)

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Baudelaire observes that true civilization is not in gaslight, in steam, or in occultism, but in the diminution of the traces of original sin. In other words, there has been progress in repression, as Freud states in his reading of Hamlet in relation to Oedipus. Modernism is grounded in the consequences of trans-Romanticism: Baudelaire’s focus on the traces of original sin in modernity in Les Fleurs du Mal is parallel to Flaubert’s focus on the excesses and banalities of love. Modernism works through the terrain of Love and Art, the two areas that literature has linked

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together since Plato’s Symposium: on the one hand, the terms and constructions of affect, memory and subjectivity are haunted by ‘beauty’; on the other hand, the concerns of style and representation are haunted by ‘truth’. These terms are implicated in the modernist focus on love. Joyce locates love at the centre of his writing and, like Baudelaire, he seeks the traces of sin and explicitly features them in the contexts of modernity that characterize his fiction. These contexts appear in repeated scenarios of seduction and the fall. Joyce emphasizes sin, the object of adulterous longing and the presence of beauty; the scene of Eve’s original sin in Genesis 3 is overturned by the felix culpa from the liturgy for Holy Saturday. Original sin is countered by the Annunciation, the aesthetic shaping and sexualizing of the Blessed Virgin that receives a special emphasis in Western art. In Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the New Testament and liturgical stagings of the Virgin in the scene of the Annunciation lead Stephen Dedalus through an early religious vocation based on mariolatry. The religious vocation ends but the mariolatry remains intact, along with an admiration for beautiful writing. Dedalus plays the scene of the Virgin in his writing of the poetry of sin; outside the Church, the paradox bothers him less. The flowing ‘enchantment of the heart’ (P 213, 217) is parodied in Ulysses through Gerty’s thoughts on poetry, menstruation and marriage, and later, in the dark of night, Molly’s monologue provides another comic version.5 The monologue moves towards the final pages of the novel, when the primal scene is replayed as a profane but mystically ecstatic Annunciation. Molly’s Joycean thoughts about femininity in the context of Bloom, Stephen Dedalus and her daughter lead imperceptibly to ALP’s intertwining of Issy and Shem in similar contexts of feminine beauty and the ecstasy of desire. The Blessed Virgin distributes her gifts of femininity to the daughters that multiply around the central daughter figure of Issy: ‘She gave them ilcka madre’s daughter a moonflower and a bloodvein: but the grapes that ripe before reason to them that devide the vinedress. So on Izzy, her shamemaid, love shone befond her tears [. . .]’ (FW 212.15–18). The mother’s gift of menstruation alludes to sexual flowering and the premature fruits of obscenity, ecstasy and the fall, in the terms of Dionysian revelry and shame/Shem, the beloved son, and the tears of passion. Dionysus is contextualized through classical discourse on love, in Plato and in other writers; in the Symposium, Agathon says that Dionysus will judge the speeches (175e). Prodicus defined Eros as ‘desire doubled’ and madness as ‘Eros doubled’, and Plato inscribes the Symposium with Dionysian madness in the passionate speech of Alcibiades.6 Ambiguously virginal, Izzy the ‘shamemaid’ anticipates the

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ripe fruits of enjoyment and the repeat version of Eve’s tears, after the Fall. High and low, mystical and carnal, the Madonna says yes: the ravisher enters her, soul and body. This scene welds erotics and poetics together. I would suggest that Giacomo Joyce remained an unpublished manuscript precisely because the Madonna figure says no, whereas Bertha’s speech at the end of Exiles provides a blueprint for the Madonna’s ecstatic affirmations at the end of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s erotics articulates desire in the context of the ascent of love, on the ladder of the beautiful and the obscene. In Lacan’s interpretation of Joyce, the ladder returns as the ‘escabeau’ of the obscene, spelled ‘eaubsc`ene’. Lacan’s pointed confession of his own desire for beauty reinforces his interpretive scenario of Joyce, jouissance, and the symbolic. Both of Lacan’s ladders echo the ascent of love in Diotima’s initiation of Socrates.7 From the male encounters of ‘Greek love’ to worship of virginity, from sacred to profane, from Greek to Jew and Celt to Catholic, from the lonely young man to the construct of the family, Joyce’s Viconian circles of desire and the excessive qualities of love become progressively more explicit as they become stylistically more challenging. The obscene takes the stage of art: the obscene is encoded, ultimately, in a new language that undermines the silences of taboo and never stops talking. Sex and talk make history: Finnegans Wake takes up from Molly’s monologue and spreads it over the landscape of history and memory by a ‘commodius vicus of recirculation’ (FW 3.2). The Wake goes around in the circles of waking and dreaming; seduction and fall are arranged according to Vico’s synthetic structuring of history as repetition with a difference. The Wake presents a history of desire, circling through language, or ascending and descending the ladder of love. The staging of obscenity knows no boundaries of space and time or of linguistic geography; in Wake language, the account of the obscene invades the structure of the word. Slips of the tongue take over, in spite of Joyce’s limited appreciation of Freud. Joyce’s Eros works on the principle revealed in a letter to Nora: the dirtiest words are the most beautiful (SL 186; letter dated 9 December 1909). Lacan’s ‘eaubsc`ene’ – obscenity as the stage for desire and beauty – combines Joyce’s dirty words with the aesthetic object to raise the curve of an emotion into art. The letter is litter and ladder (Lacan’s ‘escabeau’), obscene and beautiful writing (FW 278). More explicit than ever before, the letter at the Wake comes through the mail, through the dream, through divination: delivered by the post office or by magic, in an enchantment or an Annunciation. Art unfolds in ‘the womb of the imagination’ as Joyce wrote to Nora, his almost but not quite virginal bride in exile. Not quite or

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‘Pas encore’ was Nora’s mistake turned into a symptom in Joyce’s French or a slip of the tongue: he wants her to be untouched for his jealousy’s sake and for the sake of Don Giovanni’s quiet cult of the Virgin.8 He also wants to create her in the image of the Blessed Virgin. In Dante’s dark night and as Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, she will recreate him in a virgin birth. Or perhaps a resurrection of the flesh: why is it that Joyce’s portraits and self-portraits of the lover almost constantly invoke weariness and the desire to sleep? Joyce recreates Nora’s virginity body and soul so that her image may shelter him and give birth to the writer of his race: ‘Everything that is noble and exalted and deep and true and moving in what I write comes, I believe, from you. [. . .] O that I could nestle in your womb like a child born of your flesh and blood, be fed by your blood, sleep in the warm secret gloom of your body!’ (SL 169; letter dated 5 September 1909). He invokes the Madonna: ‘You have been to my young manhood what the idea of the Blessed Virgin was to my boyhood’. And, ‘If you leave me I shall live for ever with your memory, holier than God to me. I shall pray to your name’ (SL 165, 178; letters dated 31 August and 18 November 1909 respectively).9 The Virgin Mary, Dante’s Beatrice, and Bertha, whose name is a partial anagram of Beatrice, array Joyce’s idea of the Madonna for the bridal celebration of purity and loss, virginity and sacrifice, from Dubliners through Finnegans Wake. The bridal preparation anticipates the Annunciation, followed by a virgin birth. Aunt Julia in ‘The Dead’ sings ‘Arrayed for the Bridal’, a song that ironically figures the proper bourgeois lives of Irish spinsters and the aging singer’s approaching end. Love in Joyce underscores the bridal and virginal ambivalence of Annunciation and fatality, birth and death. Jaun delivers an obscene reprise in the Wake: ‘You’ve surpassed yourself! Be introduced to yes! This is me aunt Julia Bride, your honour, dying to have you languish to scandal in her bosky old delltangle. [. . .] Come on, spinister, do your stuff! Don’t be shoy, husbandmanvir!” (FW 465.1–7). Most of the obscene accusations and the sarcastic comments are directed at the Shem-Dave figure, just back from France, a sensitive artist figure in the autobiographical mould. ‘You rejoice me!’ (FW 464.36), says Jaun, before the lines quoted above. Joyce underscores the autobiographical reference by including a pun on his name. In ‘The Dead’, Julia’s nephew Gabriel recalls his wife’s girlhood and the boy who died for love of her. Joyce inscribes love’s bitter mystery with the paradox of virginity through his writing about couples: Gabriel and Gretta in ‘The Dead’, Richard and Bertha, his ‘bride in exile’, in Exiles, Molly returning to Bloom at the end of her monologue in Ulysses, and ALP’s return to HCE in Finnegans Wake. Love’s bitter mystery inscribes

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the explicit combination of erotics and poetics in the Wake, from ‘Eve and Adam’s’ in the beginning until the writer’s small, weak English article ‘the’ marks ALP’s last breath at the end of the line. Her monologue takes up where Molly left off. The Ulysses monologue expands from the closing speech of Bertha in Exiles: BERTHA [. . .] Not a day passes that I do not see ourselves, you and me, as we were when we met first. Every day of my life I see that. Was I not true to you all that time? [. . .] BERTHA Forget me, Dick. Forget me and love me again as you did the first time. I want my lover. To meet him, to go to him, to give myself to him. You, Dick. O, my strange wild lover, come back to me again! [She closes her eyes.] (Exiles, 111–12)

Among tears, memories, jealousy and infidelity, Joycean couples play out a Platonic encounter between love and death. Unlike the Virgin, the Madonna of Modernism is frequently in the wrong place at the wrong time: desire is affirmed but its announcement misfires. Desire oscillates between two types of feminine objects, virginal and ‘womanly’ (maternal): the two types are combined in the idealized figure of the Blessed Virgin. Joyce observed that the Italian Church placed her at the centre of Catholicism: ‘But it is a fact that for nearly two thousand years the women of Christendom have prayed to and kissed the naked image of one who had neither wife nor mistress nor sister and would scarcely have been associated with his mother had it not been that the Italian church discovered, with its infallible practical instinct, the rich possibilities of the figure of the Madonna’ (Note to Exiles, 120). In the Italian context but beyond it as well, throughout the tradition of Western European religious painting, her feminine (virginal and maternal) impact on the Church is inseparable from her beauty, transferred through liturgy and art in the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Implicitly and explicitly, she is Santa Maria Formosa, St Mary the Beautiful. In retrospect, her beauty may originate in Plato as well as in the Bible, followed by the literature of the troubadours and the tradition of courtly love. The writing of sin and desire frequently returns to the encounter between Eve and the serpent and to its enigmatic resolution by the Virgin. Through sacred and profane love, Joyce’s circuitous Viconian route of repetition winds around the paths of early modernists, several of their precursors, and Joyce’s immediate precursor, Yeats. This route retraces the written account of Eros in Plato’s Symposium; Joyce contextualizes his treatment of love

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within a modernist framework that includes Platonic Eros, mysticism and courtly love, anchored in the idealization of the Virgin. virginwhite Par the Vulnerable Virgin’s Mary del Dame! (FW 206.5–6)

Virginity is charged with a taboo. Freud’s essays on the psychology of love explore the emphasis on purity in the split between desire and love, and the dangers of feminine virginity more than its value. The Virgin is possessed by God in a virtual form of the primal scene: the long-term effect of this possession is to subtract her from the debasement of the object and attribute virginity to her (reconfirmed in extremis by the dogma of the immaculate conception in the nineteenth century). The washerwomen in the Wake find the debasement of the object even in the Ave Maria: ‘Lord help you, Maria, full of grease, the load is with me! Your prayers’ (FW 214.18–19). Jaun counsels Issy with a new version of the Mosaic commandments: ‘Twice thou shalt not love’ (FW 433.22–3). In a structure dominated by original sin and the obscenity of sex, divine love must be preserved from the threat of debasement: the notion that ‘Platonic love’ is intensely romantic love without sexual intercourse owes more to the impact of the dogma of original sin in Western culture than it does to Socrates’ refusal to submit to Alcibiades’ desire, especially since the Symposium, and other dialogues, including the Phaedrus, cite abundant evidence of Socrates’ passionate interest in beautiful young men. Virginity appeals to the jealous lover, to the courtly lover at a distance, and to the mariolater: for centuries, the virginity of the Blessed Virgin was defended in the contexts of Catholic dogma, mystical heresy and the literature of courtly love. For Freud and Lacan, however, love is predicated on the debasement of the object as such. The emphasis on the virginity of the feminine object reinforces debasement, and guarantees that the lover alone possesses his beloved in soul and body. He intimately possesses her as the object of his desire. Linked to passionate desire, debasement remains when desire has disappeared into indifference or succumbed to the repression that Freud observed in Victorian marriages, including his own. Shakespeare’s Othello paints a portrait of desire combined with debasement that results in abuse, jealousy and the murder of the beloved. The blackness of jealousy frames love in a dimension of tragedy that is closer to libertine blackness than it is to the ideals of courtly love. The libertine Don Juan, who negates the ideal

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of courtly love in the way that Sade negates it, succumbs to jealousy if he sees a woman happy in love with someone else before he has possessed her. Once he has possessed her, however, jealousy is no longer possible for him, and the woman becomes a name in a ledger, and a number in a series that will become finite only at his death. Jealous lovers portrayed in Modernism have a somewhat different fate: Flaubert’s Charles Bovary becomes a jealous husband after Emma’s death; Joyce’s Richard Rowan exalts doubt; Proust’s Swann in love with the faithless Odette suffers without end until he ceases loving her. Bovary dies; Swann falls out of love and marries the former object of passion, the mother of his daughter; Joyce’s husband-heroes live on. Like Don Juan’s objects, the Madonnas of Modernism are of particular interest to their would-be seducers if they are virgins. Although the Blessed Virgin is their model in desire, their display of maternal qualities is secondary except insofar as it connects them to the subject who desires them. In A Portrait Davin’s story of a woman who offered him milk when he asked for water and asked him to stay the night is a succinct example: ‘I thought by her figure and by something in the look of her eyes that she must be carrying a child’ (P 182–3). Half undressed, she makes her desire clear to the naive young Irishman, who is afraid to stay the night but who broods over his own refusal. Like Charles Bovary’s early encounters with Emma, including the erotically charged episode when Emma serves him a glass of curac¸ao liqueur, Davin’s story emphasizes a context of voluptuous desire, solitude and idealization that is central to the Madonna focus or ‘complex’. Gerty MacDowell in ‘Nausicaa’ is a major example of a Madonna-like figure of a young woman who is not particularly maternal; although Gerty broods about sexual difference, she is indifferent to the children and even irritated by them. She fits the Madonna category because of her obsessions, her exhibitionism, and her tenderly solicitous thoughts about Bloom as a gentleman, potential widower, and a voyeur whose attentions are meant for her alone. At the end of the line, shortly before Vico’s borrowed cycles pause for a breath (‘the’) and Joyce stops for a final signature and a last set of dates on the last page of the Wake, ALP as Eve and Mary, mother and daughter, remembers the beginning and clamours one last time for the first time: ‘It’s something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall’ (FW 627.11). Original sin combines the mother and daughter into a blurry figure, fading into the past, and imploring the art of memory: ‘Bussoftlhee, mememormee!’ (FW 628.14). As beauty fades towards death, another figure will take her place. The cycles are integrated in a temporal structure based on original sin and on the elaboration of memory along the Vichian trellis. Narratives, songs,

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historic sentences, catchphrases and ordinary English words succumb to the Nightworld of memory and desire, where repetition takes place, within a set of differences. Early devotional poetry, the literature of courtly love, and the writings of the mystics provide the imagination of modernity with a figure of femininity to be idolized, portrayed and preserved in images of virginal beauty: the Blessed Virgin is prefigured by Eve, who lost her innocence in the garden of Eden. After the expulsion from Paradise, with its frontiers guarded by armed angels, all women are the daughters of Eve. All men are her sons, but Christian liturgy tends to protect them from the dangerous proximity of their mother and her desire. Women take the heat for the Fall, in Modernism as in the Book of Genesis. Mary is the second Eve: through the adoration of her image, she neutralizes the dangers of Eve and all her daughters. Mary’s femininity becomes the site of the Christian Eros: in a landscape of sexual repression and denial, she is granted exceptional status.

pl ato in mod ernit y Here she’s, is a bell, that’s wares in heaven, virginwhite, Undetrigesima, vikissy manonna. (FW 433.3–4; Jaun’s words)

Baudelaire and Flaubert use elements of Renaissance and Baroque allegory as an antidote to the literary excesses of Romantic sensibility.10 This process of working through, or trans-Romanticism, leads Baudelaire and Flaubert to the invention of Modernism.11 Within the new literary framework, Romantic heroines take the stage as the Madonnas of Modernism. Virginal purity is fetishized, revered or disdained, but in any case, it locates them in a discourse of desire and brings them into the context of the Fall. The higher the object in the realm of the ideal, the harder it falls, according to the paradoxical nature of love. In addition, secularization may be partly responsible for the simultaneous celebration of virginity and its funeral rites. Freud’s mastery of Eros leads him to hypothesize the correspondences of high and low in the articulation of love: the general debasement of the object corresponds to the reverence accorded to sexual purity. Virginity is taboo: sacred and dangerous, fetishized and fatal to men. Modernist figures of virginity take their place in an ambivalent discourse of love that arranges for a confrontation between a discourse of truth and beauty on the one hand and a discourse of negation, destruction and death on the other. For this reason, Baudelaire adds Lady Macbeth, Michelangelo’s Night, and Moli`ere’s Donna Elvira to the Romantic list of tragic heroines, while

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Flaubert focuses on the extremes of mystical virginity (Donna Anna and Salammbˆo) and bourgeois banality (Emma Bovary). Joyce’s Madonna figures borrow additional resonances from the Book of Genesis, Dante’s Beatrice, Isolde and figures in Yeats. The early account of the mysteries of love in Plato’s Symposium hovers behind all of these representations and makes them possible. Beauty and the perspective of death enter the picture of desire beginning with Plato; what Joyce refers to as the ‘Italian Church’ had some help from Diotima and Socrates. Socrates’ account of Diotima’s discourse unfolds between his questioning of Agathon (the only moment in the Symposium when Socrates, who claims to know nothing except the mysteries of love, speaks in his own name) and the declaration of excessive and Dionysian love for Socrates by Alcibiades. Agathon is characterized by the plenitude of beauty, narcissism and the innocent ignorance appropriate to the beloved, in spite of the pointed ironies of his discourse; Socrates is described by Alcibiades as filled with agalmata, figures of virtue and the gods, that compensate for ugliness with their desirable beauty. In between these scenes, Socrates stages a virtual dialogue that draws attention away from his own knowledge and understanding of the mysteries of love by emphasizing Diotima’s initiation of her moderately gifted pupil into the Form of Beauty. Socrates occupies the literal and rhetorical space between Agathon and Alcibiades. From his initial self-identification as the empty one who lies next to Agathon, Socrates’ emptiness has become the agalma-filled plenitude of Silenus. He is transformed from Alcibiades’ lover into the beloved, the object of Alcibiades’ love. Tragedy and comedy meet several times in the erotics of the Symposium: in the discourses of Aristophanes, Agathon and Alcibiades, and in Diotima’s mythic account of the conception of Eros. Representation itself takes on the daimonic aspect of Socrates, who occupies an intermediary status between god and man, emptiness and plenitude, ignorance and knowledge, and ugliness and beauty. In the end, Socrates connects Eros and writing with his conclusive insistence that authors should write both tragedy and comedy. It is the discreet and invisible Other, Diotima, who bears the mysteries of Eros. Mantinean Stranger, sophist ‘midwife’, Priestess, and possibly an exile, Socrates’ expert teacher in the mysteries of love is adept at sacrifice and other daimonic interventions in the occult. The Greek scale of erotic values as explained by Prodicus leads from desire to Eros (‘desire doubled’), and from Eros to madness (‘Eros doubled’): like the madness of the Maenads, the plague that menaced Athens spreads through contagion and leads to indifferentiation, chaos and violent death. This gradation

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of intensity connects Socrates’ initiation into the mysteries of love with Diotima’s intervention in the occult, when her sacrifices delayed for ten years the outbreak of deadly plague in Athens. The scale of eroticism leading in a spiral descent from desire to madness to death is implicitly contrasted with Diotima’s ascending path of Eros. Although Diotima’s discourse has been claimed as Plato’s preferred account of Eros or ‘Platonic love’, recent scholarship points out that Diotima’s discourse as presented by Socrates does not justify the claim.12 The two paths of desire, Diotima’s ascending scale toward the Form of Beauty and the implicit descending scale, based on the Dionysian effects of desire (with reference to the distinctions of Prodicus and the occult intervention of Diotima), originate in the same elements: the effect of beautiful bodies and the physical law of generation and corruption or life and death. These elements and the connection between the art of Eros and the verbal art of poetry are evoked in four of the discourses of the Symposium. In his book on the Symposium, Stanley Rosen comments on the implications of this connection in Plato: The illumination of beauty which Eros generates, as derived from the body, is not false but it is incomplete. The incompleteness of beauty, which depends for its visibility upon the corporeal, both illuminates and obscures. This very incompleteness characterizes the Symposium and any other dialogue; they all partake by virtue of their form in poetry or mythos, and so are a mixture of noble lies and truth.13

The discourse of Alcibiades most explicitly combines the two progressions, ascent and descent. Alcibiades exposes the fatal effects of Dionysian passion by comparing Socrates to the Sirens who sing a man to death and to a poisonous snake who has bitten him. He concludes his speech with a warning to Agathon about Socrates’ horrible treatment and tormenting behaviour. His discourse is coloured with the tragic blackness of passion: ‘I can’t live with him and I can’t live without him!’ (216c). This illustration of descent remains suggestive even in late Modernism. Translated as ‘ni avec toi ni sans toi’, these words became the motto for one of Franc¸ois Truffaut’s late films, The Woman Next Door, in which the descent of love leads to adultery, nervous breakdown, homicide and suicide. The motto is coined by a middle-aged character named Odile Jouve, a veteran of love who attempted suicide as a young woman because, she says, the man she loved was marrying someone else. The Symposium pairs this form of descent with an ascent that takes Eros beyond the visible and into the realm of the agalmata, Alcibiades’ repeated term for the marvellous shining and golden beauty of Socrates. His interiority is described by Alcibiades as the radiant beauty of kalos,

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the term that evokes physical beauty for the Greeks. Socrates hides his unique qualities beneath the surface of appearances, words and skin, and Alciabiades emphasizes his comparison of Socrates with hollow statues of Silenus. Socrates is incomparable, unlike any other man. In conversation with Agathon, Socrates uses the image of ‘a shadow in a dream’ to describe his own wisdom (175e); the image comes from Pindar’s Pythian Ode 8, line 96, where it evokes man. Socrates’ discourse dissolves even the invisible radiance of interiority praised by Alcibiades. Like a shadow in a dream: Socrates’ emphasis on the flimsiness of appearances anticipates Freud’s understanding of the opacity of desire, a shadow that falls over the object. Socrates remains unique in his refusal of the debasement inherent in love. Words take him toward being; he eludes the strategists of having, and turns his desire elsewhere.

cl aritas Plutonic loveliaks twinnt Platonic yearlings – you must, how, in undivided reawlity draw the line somewhawre (FW 292.30–2)

Via Romanticism, Eros emerges in modernity to confront the Christian account of love. The characters who are responsible for the initial tragedy of love in the West are Eve and the serpent. Before them, the first woman to produce a discourse on love, Diotima, incarnates the Other in the male world of the Symposium. In the dark night of antiquity, drunken revelry is suspended briefly in favour of the praise of love: Socrates invokes Diotima’s initiation into the path of ascent, the mysteries of desire, and its relation to spiritual midwifery . . . and love will never again be the same. Alcibiades’ interruption confirms Diotima’s sudden stark shift from ‘having’ to ‘being’ in the vision of love’s mysteries. According to Alcibiades, Socrates refuses to enter into the labyrinth of desire and its dire consequences, but he ends his remarks with the complaint that no one else can get close to a beautiful man when Socrates is around. With this remark, the lamenting impassioned Alcibiades literally disappears. A sudden interruption of drunken disorderly guests moves in like a wave, and covers for his absence. Socrates’ contradictions remain intact. In the end, both Aristophanes, the subversive writer of comedy, and Agathon, the beautiful writer of tragedy, fall asleep, and he takes with him the correspondence between tragedy and comedy in Eros. Perhaps it was this Socratic mastery of different tones that led Friedrich H¨olderlin to restage the Night of antiquity in the eighteenth

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century: his writing emphasizes the importance of sobriety in the midst of a sublime revelry that threatens to annihilate the subject with its erotic power. The poet is like Semele, destroyed by Zeus: she conceived Dionysus and died. Not even his reading of Plato could suspend this threat for the great Swabian poet, who appears to have been tragically ill-equipped for the love to which he aspired. Unlike many of the great mystical poets of the Christian tradition, H¨olderlin, a consummate classicist, reads the Symposium as a Platonic model of the experience of passion. It is a poignant irony in the history of Plato reception that H¨olderlin calls his beloved, Suzette Gonthard, by the unlikely name of Diotima. Modernism lays claim to the Platonic Eros through the mediations of popular culture as well as through classical texts. The poetry of W. B. Yeats frequently alludes to classical Greece in Platonic contexts of love. Although the autobiographical narrator of ‘The Tower’ claims to rebel against Platonism, Yeats writes the following lines on the same page: I have prepared my peace With learned Italian things And the proud stones of Greece, Poet’s imaginings And memories of love, Memories of the words of women, All those things whereof Man makes a superhuman Mirror-resembling dream.14

Here, Pindar’s image, evoked by Socrates, enters Modernism. ‘Among School Children’, also published in The Tower (1928), first raises the topic of love in the context of an allusion to Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium: I dream of a Ledaean body, bent Above a sinking fire, a tale that she Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event That changed some childish day to tragedy – Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent Into a sphere from youthful sympathy, Or else, to alter Plato’s parable, Into the yolk and white of the one shell. (Collected Poems, 213)

The dream-image borrowed from Plato also refers to the spherical humans that Zeus later cut in half as punishment for their hybris; Yeats also evokes the eggs of the god’s offspring with Leda. As the swan-poet in love with

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feminine beauty, Yeats reshapes Aristophanes’ tragicomic parable into the love that produced Helen. The poem filters the feminine body that resembles Leda through the writer’s parable in Plato to articulate the enduring image of Yeatsian Eros. At the closing of ‘Words For Music Perhaps’, Yeats invokes the Delphic Oracle, the gods of the underworld, and the philosophers, to end with the allegorization of love: Scattered on the level grass Or winding through the grove Plato there and Minos pass, There stately Pythagoras And all the choir of Love. (Collected Poems, 265)

Joyce’s writings locate love in close proximity to the aesthetic, starting from the Platonic premise that identifies beauty as the splendour of truth (P 208; see below). The historical development of love in Joyce moves rapidly from Plato, overshadowed by Aquinas, to original sin, the art of repetition on Vico’s trellis, and the portrayals of love in Ibsen, Flaubert, Yeats and other influential modernist writers. Original sin highlights a mother–daughter iconography of two women along the road to the Madonnas of Modernism: Eve in Genesis 3, and the logic of the felix culpa (in the liturgy for Holy Saturday), based on the beautiful image of the Blessed Virgin, reinvented as the Madonna by the Italian Church. Once the Madonna is on the scene, troubadours and courtly love, crowned for Joyce by Dante’s creation of Beatrice, are not far away. Courtly love combines with enigmatic Celtic sources to shape the Tristan story that is central in the structuring of the Wake.15 In the logic of modern love, Tristan’s polar opposite would be Don Giovanni: each of the two is important in the contexts of the troubadour resonances of musical performance, the magic of love and its darkness. Tristan is faithful to Isolde within a framework of courtly love and fin’amors; a magic philtre seals their fate in adulterous love. His faith endures in spite of all the risks, and beyond the point when the philtre wears off; he is persuaded to marry a pale echo of his beloved, but his bond to the wife of King Mark is infinitely stronger than marriage. His faith goes beyond life itself. Don Giovanni is a figure born of a Baroque sensibility who represents the ultimate challenge to courtly love and to ethics. He is the irresistible faithless lover, the voice of desire who asks the question of desire in the intimate form of address: ‘che vuoi?’ Don Giovanni is a libertine who believes only in material reality and in visible beauty. He consumes his love

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objects one after another until heaven intervenes: he seeks beauty in the objects of his seduction, and his version of ‘love’ functions in accordance with the pleasure principle: he takes his women one by one. Twentieth-century popular culture has allowed the glamour of Don Juan to fade. In general, the hero of Spanish machismo has aged badly and has been degraded to farce or psychopathology. There are some exceptions, in part because of the enduring impact of Moli`ere’s play, Don Juan ou le festin de pierre, and especially Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni. Don Giovanni’s fate in Joyce’s portraits is sealed in the decisive failure in seduction that we know as Giacomo Joyce. Richard Ellmann points out the parallel between Joyce’s character of Giacomo and Stephen’s remark on Shakespeare in the Library scene of Ulysses: ‘Assumed dongiovannism will not save him’ (U 9.458–9; Giacomo Joyce, xxi). Stephen’s expression is a minimally anglicized form of the Italian dongiovannismo, derived from the libertine character of Mozart’s opera. For the evocation of erotics, the libertine seducer is in strict opposition to the attitudes of courtly love, associated with the Madonna and with Tristan. In Giacomo Joyce, the lightness of earlier failed attempts at seduction (in Stephen Hero and even in A Portrait) has disappeared. Eros appears increasingly bitter, since love creates primarily suffering and solitude. The narrator of Giacomo Joyce casts the failure of seduction as the end of youth. His lamentations are ironic, sarcastic, disdainful and filled with accusations. Only in dreams (or at a considerable distance from his beloved) can love soothe his melancholy and angry disposition. In the context of his attraction, he rhetorically alludes to Christ’s betrayal, to the Passion, and to divine violence. His fragmentary portrayal of the beloved shows her as rich, spoiled and wilful: the narrator presents himself as an unrequited lover, keenly aware of his own poverty, emptiness and desire. ‘Love’s bitter mystery’ from ‘Fergus’ Song’ will haunt the Stephen of Ulysses. To Don Giovanni, all women (except for Do˜na Anna) say yes: to Don Giacomo, his Shakespearean brother in desire, the Jewish Virgin says no. Joyce’s portraits of fraternal rivals and male friendships return to this division of success in love. Did Joyce the seducer discover the limited effects of his tragic tone, or did his reading remind him that love is irresistibly associated with comedy? The limits of Stephen Dedalus are rooted in the end of youth that Joyce celebrated in the beautiful and funereal style of Giacomo Joyce: his pain, Joyce reminds us in the first pages of Ulysses, is linked to ‘love’s bitter mystery’ and the veiled, virginal figure of the dead mother, but it is not yet the pain of love. With Don Juan in the background as the vulgar Blazes

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Boylan, and the seduction duet from Mozart’s Don Giovanni haunting the thoughts of both Bloom and Molly – the figure of a profane Virgin – Joyce turns again to the triangles of adultery, but this time in the form of comedy. The family configuration begins again with Bloom. Through Nighttown and Molly’s monologue, it leads to the young troubadour-like figure of Tristan. Molly’s monologue about the mystery of love speaks from a perspective of Night and interiority: the boundaries of punctuation have vanished, the outside world of characters and of Dublin represented earlier in the book has receded into darkness, and Molly speaks ‘inside’ herself, or rather, as Joyce reception has indicated, ‘inside’ her author. Because of the monologue, Joyce was considered an expert in matters of love, at least by Jung. Like ‘her ladyship’ in Giacomo Joyce and the serpent of his lost conquest, Molly appears in the author’s dreams, where she makes a scene. Through a strange coincidence, Molly resembles Diotima. She is somewhat exotic as a foreigner in Dublin, and she enjoys a form of magical and aesthetic power. Molly’s most remarkable connection with Diotima is her knowledge of the mystery of love, revealed to her at a certain specific point in the past. In spite of her ignorance and comic superstition, Joyce’s twentieth-century virtual woman plays the central role in the revelation of love that Diotima played for Socrates at a point in the past as defined by the framework of the Symposium. Love is the word that Stephen seeks; the mystery of love leads him into the darkness of Nighttown and the confrontation of fantasy. Socrates too was young when Diotima initiated him in the mystery of love. Bloom and Molly fantasize about a potential initiation, following Stephen’s disappearance into the night. Beginning with Giacomo Joyce as a blueprint for the triangles of Exiles, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Joyce shows the inevitable triangular configuration of desire. In the Symposium Socrates denounces Alcibiades’ speech as an attempt to separate him from Agathon (222d). Freud, who invokes ‘the Eros of the divine Plato’, elaborates the triangle as the structuring form of desire that allows him to invent psychoanalysis.16 Inside Joyce’s fiction of night, Molly silently talks herself into an ecstatic state that unveils the scene of Eros and the Fall in her affirmation. Following the unsuccessful attempt at the magic of ‘assumed dongiovannism’, Joyce confirms the shape of love as a triangle and shifts his writing strategy away from the forms of Don Juan and the black tragedy of desire. He turns to Tristan and to comedy: in the Wake, Don Giovanni makes a farcical appearance in the guise of Jaun or Shaun the Post, jealous brother of Shem, the Stephen Dedalus/Sunny Jim figure of ALP’s favourite son.

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Despite the emphasis on Aquinas in Stephen’s theory of aesthetics in the Portrait, the impact of the Symposium on Western literary culture prompts Joyce to allude to Plato: ‘“Plato, I believe, said that beauty is the splendour of truth. I don’t think that it has a meaning but the true and the beautiful are akin”’ (P 208). The dialogue that includes this remark refers to Aquinas’ three requirements for beauty, his poetic aspect, and his aesthetic terms of pleasure and desire. Love in Aquinas begins with the desiring appetite. Stephen’s dialogue with his crude and sexually obsessive friend Lynch keeps love between the lines; love becomes explicit in the later dialogue with Cranly. The dialogue with Lynch focuses on beauty in women and in art; Lynch’s interest in female beauty keeps him listening, while Stephen explores the difficulties of understanding beauty as Platonic ‘splendour of truth’, as claritas or radiance borrowed from Aquinas, and as the image in the imagination according to Shelley (who translated the Symposium into English). The consequences of Stephen’s exposition of beauty in his aesthetic philosophy and of the Platonic connection between truth and beauty occupy the last character-oriented narrative pages of the book, before the closing sequence of journal entries rendered in the first person. The narrative pages include the final dialogue between Cranly and Stephen. Stephen’s friend confronts him with the love of his mother, the love of the Blessed Virgin, and the deflowering of a virgin (P 237–49). Emma makes some appearances as well, within a mother–daughter context that is underscored in Giacomo Joyce. The focus on unsuccessful love and on the desire for beauty connects the last chapter of the Portrait with Giacomo Joyce and Exiles, and with the later works. Following an early appearance in ‘The Dead’, Joyce’s Madonna figure begins to take its definitive shape in the last chapter of the Portrait. The suspension of meaning that Stephen pronounces on the identity of beauty and truth leads directly to the aesthetics of the Wake. Throughout the novel, the emphasis on radiance or claritas in the aesthetic terms borrowed from Aquinas is overdetermined by the association of a flash of light, epiphany, and a vision or an apprehension of beauty. These terms associate radiance with the image of the Virgin, the image of art, and the image of mystical revelation. In the Symposium, Plato uses the epithet kalos to evoke shining beauty in Eros. In Diotima’s discourse and in the words of Alcibiades, visible beauty leads the desiring subject towards interior and invisible beauty; daylight fades and the night of the mysteries is evoked. But the path towards the Form of Beauty is revised and rearticulated in the speech of Alcibiades: the figures that he glimpses inside

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Socrates and the music of his speech drive Alcibiades wild with passion. These figures and words shine with the magical glow of love. Medical, spiritual and romantic, the ‘enchantment of the heart’ at the instant of imagination in the fifth chapter of A Portrait underscores the common ground between love and art. The winds are still: He lay still, as if his soul lay amid cool waters, conscious of faint sweet music. [. . .] A spirit filled him, pure as the purest water [. . .]. But how faintly it was inbreathed, how passionlessly, as if the seraphim themselves were breathing upon him! [. . .] It was that windless hour of dawn when madness wakes. (P 217)

The artist is suspended in the image, and the lover is caught in the fatal suspension of the winds that Agathon evokes ironically as the stillness of the sea, caused by Eros. In bed, Stephen is fantasizing about women and preciously playing the role of the Madonna: ‘O! In the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh. Gabriel the seraph had come to the virgin’s chamber’ (P 217). The ‘virgin womb of the imagination’ – the feminized, sexualized space of creation – is the scene for the incenseperfumed vows of desire that shape Stephen’s villanelle. Emma, the girl who says no in Stephen’s waking life, becomes a poetic figure of sexual power. She reigns over the dusk and twilight that characterize Joycean darkness; epiphany comes from the realm of shadows and dreams. In fantasy as in Diotima’s mysteries, the visible emerges from the invisible, the sublime from the obscene. Through the shining of desire, magical as an ex-voto, the Madonna of Modernism connects Eros and writing, love and art. n otes Some of my work on this motif appears in Objects of Desire: The Madonnas of Modernism. 1 See Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion; Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries; and the richly documented book by Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. Warner quotes the ‘Paschalis Carminis’ by Caelius Sedulius in her title and notes that ‘[s]he [. . .] had no peer either in our first mother or in all women who were to come. But alone of all her sex she pleased the Lord’ (17). 2 The development of Rougemont’s hypothesis that religious heresy and courtly love go hand in hand remains fairly vague and lacks historical and literary development beyond the level of polemic. The author moves through the expanse of European (and primarily Romance) literary culture in order to indicate that the mystical tradition reformulates the vocabulary of courtly love. 3 The Modernist Madonna: Semiotics of the Maternal Metaphor. The author treats a corpus of American artists who are women and who portray motherhood. But

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beryl schlossman the term ‘madonna’ as defined in Webster and as it is used in courtly love and in Catholic dogma and liturgy does not seem appropriate here. Plato, Symposium, ed. Sir Kenneth Dover. I have used the English translation of the Symposium by Nehamas and Woodruff, and Sir Kenneth Dover’s annotations and fragmentary translations in his edition. I have also consulted the following essays and commentaries: Rosen, Plato’s Symposium; Sir Kenneth Dover, Greek Homosexuality, and Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle; Vlastos, Platonic Studies; Markus, ‘The Dialectic of Eros in Plato’s Symposium’; Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness; Santas, Plato and Freud: Two Theories of Love; and Neumann, ‘Diotima’s Concept of Love’. I have discussed the ‘enchantment of the heart’ in the context of the writing of the villanelle in ‘Tristan and Isolde or the Triangles of Desire’, 155–62. Symposium, ed. Sir Kenneth Dover, 2. Prodicus is mentioned at 177b. See Lacan, Le S´eminaire. Livre VIII. Le Transfert, 20, and ‘Joyce le symptˆome II’. Discussed in Rabat´e, Joyce upon the Void , 40–4. See also my ‘Retrospective Beginnings’. I have discussed the impact of the figure of the Virgin on Joyce’s writing in Joyce’s Catholic Comedy of Language and that of Don Giovanni in ‘“Che vuoi?”: Don Giovanni and the Seductions of Art’. The split between high and low is addressed in another letter from this period, dated 2 September 1909: ‘I wonder is there some madness in me. Or is love madness? One moment I see you like a virgin or madonna the next moment I see you shameless, insolent, half naked and obscene!’ (SL 166–7). On the road to Modernism, the heroines of Shakespearean tragedy enter the early nineteenth century. Borrowed from their Renaissance context and transformed into modern shapes, Ophelia, Juliet and Desdemona are followed by the figures of desire and loss that Romanticism shapes in the writings of Keats, Shelley, Balzac, Nerval, Gautier, Sand, Musset and others. See my The Orient of Style: Modernist Allegories of Conversion. See Neumann, ‘Diotima’s Concept of Love’, and the Introduction to the translation by Nehamas and Woodruff. The issue is complex and scholarly opinion varies widely: see Vlastos, Platonic Studies; Markus, ‘The Dialectic of Eros in Plato’s Symposium’; and Solmsen, ‘Parmenides and the Description of Perfect Beauty in Plato’s Symposium’. Markus and Solmsen emphasize the Eleatic elements of Diotima’s discourse. Rosen, Plato’s Symposium, 225. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 196–7. Further page references to this edition are given in the text in brackets. See Hayman, The ‘Wake’ in Transit, 56–92; Rabat´e, ‘Back to Beria! Genetic Joyce and Eco’s “Ideal Readers”’. My essay on ‘Tristan and Isolde or the Triangles of Desire’ includes additional bibliography. See the end of Freud’s Preface to the fourth edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 43.

chapter 5

Theoretical modelling: Joyce’s women on display Diane Elam

It could be said that Joyce set himself the project of bringing about the death of the novel by writing a series of novels so exemplary that there would be nothing more left to do. Joyce’s linguistic experiments seem to push the very limits of literary language as far as they can go. In Joyce’s hands, literature appears to be exhausting itself through its own example, insofar as his exemplary oeuvre reads like a mini-history of the novel: from realist birth (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), through modernist middle age (Ulysses), to postmodern death (Finnegans Wake). And yet, however exemplary these texts may be, they obviously have not brought about an end to the novel, the report of whose death has always been greatly exaggerated. More examples of it are being written than ever before, and literary language may yet prove inexhaustible or at least infinitely recyclable. What remains strikingly exemplary about Joyce’s work, though, is that it continues to lend itself surprisingly well to being an example of just about every literary theory. Critics never cease hailing Joyce as the prime example of their theory put into practice, as if his novels permitted us to look at them through whatever theoretical lens we like. Structuralism, semiotics, New Criticism, New Historicism, feminism, postcolonial studies, pretty much all of narratology, and anything roughly considered poststructuralism – including Lacanian psychoanalysis and deconstruction – have all turned to Joyce as an example. It is probably for this reason that Jacques Derrida has suggested that ‘[e]verything we can say about Ulysses, for example, has already been anticipated’.1 Always already Joyce, and always already as example. ‘Ulysses, for example.’ It is, however, rather difficult to explain why it is that Joyce’s work functions so well as an example, for all arguments risk falling into the trap of simply making Joyce an example of a theoretical point about examples, becoming merely one more example of the problem. But the risk must still be taken, and in what follows I will raise the question of Joyce’s exemplarity by looking at feminism. This is not because I want to claim that feminism 79

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is itself an example of a larger issue or that Joyce’s work simply anticipates everything that feminism has to say. Rather, I want to explore in some detail feminism’s particular investment in exemplarity in relation to Joyce’s use of language. In this context, it is first worth remembering that a major object of feminism’s critique is the stereotyped exemplarity of women in patriarchal discourse: their classification as virgin, mother or whore. Feminism has made us question precisely how women are represented, how the very exemplarity of women has depended on a narrow range of prescribed roles that they are supposed to fill. One of the things that feminism tried to accomplish was to expose this representational charade for what it was and see what could be offered by way of alternatives. In the case of literature, this meant not only pointing to the prevalence of such stereotypes within literary works themselves but also revealing how literary criticism has all too often ignored the real complexity of literary representations of women in favour of a critical analysis that reduced women to the same old patriarchal examples. As feminist criticism set about rereading the literary canon in these terms, Joyce’s texts proved to be active sites for feminist speculation, much of which tended to consist of character analysis. While the approach itself was hardly new, the focus on Joyce’s female characters was. This seems to have proved to be a good choice, insofar as it gave feminism a chance to illustrate how the answers to its questions were far from obvious. Much feminist ink has been spilt arguing over whether Joyce’s characters are examples of archetypal symbols or representations of ‘real women’. Is Gerty MacDowell a ‘sentimental heroine’, Bella Cohen a devouring mother, Bertha Rowan a ‘bovine earth mother’?2 Are the female characters of Dubliners accurate representations of the middle-class, Issy a character modelled on Joyce’s daughter, Martha a proto-feminist who speaks for the other female characters?3 There is some consensus on these issues to be sure, but critical scores are far from settled. If decades of character analysis are any judge, then the jury is still out as to whether Joyce is merely another example of a male author who is complicitous with the patriarchy or an exemplary feminist in his critical examination of the way women are reduced to mere types. Again, Joyce would seem to have anticipated it all: patriarchy, feminism and even post-feminism. Such is the richness, the variation, or maybe even the sheer linguistic ambiguity of Joyce’s prose. And yet, given such diversity, readings of Joyce’s female characters do all have one thing in common: a tendency to moralize, to focus on the character of the characters, on exactly what examples are being set. When

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critics look at Molly, Gerty, Issy or any of Joyce’s female characters for that matter, they tend to ask whether they are good women (including good feminists). This is especially true of Molly, who initially took the stage as either good earth mother or bad thirty-shilling whore, depending on the critical fashion, and then went on to play an increasing range of feminine, sometimes feminist, roles to mixed moralizing reviews. Whereas Molly was once faulted for her inability to have a vaginal orgasm, she may now be judged as insufficiently feminist on the basis of her heterosexual proclivities and male identification.4 The point does not need to be belaboured in order to see that what counts as ‘bad’ (or ‘good’) has changed over the years, while the theoretical interest in a kind of moral gynaecology has not. It is at this point of critical convergence in the face of potential interpretative diversity that the limitations of character analysis start to show through, however. Part of the problem emerges from the desire to assume that proper names in Joyce’s novels are always realistic characters about whom one can draw moral conclusions. Whereas this impulse works rather well with Dubliners and remains plausible with A Portrait, serious problems start to arise with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Is Anna Livia Plurabelle really a character? To what extent are we making a mistake by treating Molly Bloom as if she were Clarissa Harlow? Joyce’s ill-fitting examples call attention to the mimetic stakes of literary representation: when character analysis sets to work, for the most part it assumes that realistic characters are examples of real women.5 And what counts as ‘real’ is usually based on an Enlightenment notion of the subject: real women are real Enlightenment subjects who are, in turn, represented as realistic literary characters. The very notion of literary character is bound up with the philosophical and political rise of the modern subject, and when literary criticism takes its turn at character analysis this is really the unspoken ground.6 Such a state of affairs may not be a bad thing, since some versions of feminism underline the necessity of positioning women as subjects. A consideration of women as characters and therefore as subjects would seem like an advance, and perhaps that was one of the reasons feminist criticism was so attracted to character analysis as a methodology. There is something to be said for this, yet, as I have argued elsewhere, ‘the subject’ is not without its own attendant problems, both philosophical and political.7 It is necessary to wonder what women have to gain from always being understood as Enlightenment subjects and represented consistently through the example of literary characters. Part of the stereotypic exemplarity of women – about which feminism has been so outspoken – is the reduction of women to characters. This might seem less of a problem here, insofar as

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Joyce certainly pushes the limits of what might be considered a character by exploiting the tropes of literary realism.8 Joyce was keenly aware of the representational status of women, and his novels situate character as one figure amongst others, as one example of a way to think about the representation of women. In Joyce’s hands, character loses the special status it is accorded in the realist novel, and the figure of woman takes many representational forms. To say that Joyce reflects more generally on the status of woman as figure is not to suggest, however, that he necessarily liberates woman from her stereotypic exemplarity. Rather, Joyce’s novels offer moments in which we can consider more generally how that stereotypic exemplarity gains its purchase. Just as the ‘Circe’ episode in Ulysses undermines the conventions of patriarchal realism with which it begins, the figure of woman starts to turn against the very same patriarchal conventions that ground her construction.9 Joyce thus uses the figure of woman as an example that is particularly self-reflexive about its own exemplarity. As far as feminism is concerned, this is important because Joyce’s examples can both illustrate the problem that the stereotypic exemplarity of woman is, at the same time that they can go some distance – although just how great a distance remains to be seen – in offering alternative possibilities for representation. Since it would be impossible in the space of this essay to look at all of Joyce’s representations of the figure of woman, I will have to risk using examples, examples that for some will not seem exemplary enough (too minor) and for others will seem altogether too exemplary (too general). My examples are not definitive insofar as they do not pretend to exhaust even all the possible representations within Joyce’s own texts; rather, they call attention to the impossibility of coming up with definitive examples in the first place. Given these qualifications, I will consider two passages in Ulysses, both from ‘Lestrygonians’. The first will be somewhat problematic from the beginning, insofar as the way I use it will raise questions about what constitutes a proper example, and more specifically what constitutes a proper example of the figure of woman. While allegiances to narrative continuity and appeals to character integrity normally determine such matters in advance, I would like to argue that the often experimental nature of Joyce’s own prose encourages alternative readings that open up rather than foreclose the problem of exemplarity. In this spirit, I would like to begin my first example in a place that might seem to some to produce a ‘misreading’, insofar as it might be seen as not showing a proper regard for the context in which it appears. This is not, however, some hermeneutical perversity on my part. Rather, I want

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to look at the extent to which it is possible to take the figure of woman as the starting place for reading and look at what her example might say about the use of woman as example. To begin, then, with woman as the example: And with a woman, for instance. More shameless not seeing. That girl passing the Stewart institution, head in the air. Look at me. I have them all on. Must be strange not to see her. Kind of a form in his mind’s eye. The voice, temperatures: when he touches her with his fingers must almost see the lines, the curves. His hands on her hair, for instance. Say it was black, for instance. Good. We call it black. Then passing over her white skin. Different feel perhaps. Feeling of white. (U 8.1125–31; emphases added)

A woman, for instance. An example, for instance. But of what is she an instance? Is she just herself, just a woman? Or is she an example of herself, which is not quite the same thing as being herself? Or is she only a commodity, a representation on display, always only an instance, an example of herself as a commodity? Or is she something else, and if so what is that something else? The answers here are far from obvious, especially since no proper name accompanies the figure, which thus makes character analysis a less tempting method to use for a quick solution. Woman in general, and not a character, is the instance. The passage moves from a statement about woman as the general example to the more specific instance of the ‘girl passing the Stewart institution’. She becomes the example of the example of woman, the ‘for instance’ of the ‘for instance’. Effectively, woman is not just herself here, but herself in relation to specific examples of herself. Or to put this another way, she is only herself in specific examples of herself. This is true even to the extent that her very figure is composed of other specific examples, with the result that in this short passage, the phrase ‘for instance’ recurs no less than three times. Woman as a portrait of ‘for instances’. This could be a very feminist move insofar as it could be read as a refusal to generalize about women, as an insistence on the specificity of her particular example. We could go even further and suggest that the figure of woman could also be the example of ‘more shameless not seeing’. She shamelessly does not see things, perhaps specifically the thing that goes by the name of Bloom, who seems to be the voice who commands, ‘Look at me’. The girl has her head in the air, a posture that marks her as potential feminist and possible snob who feels no obligation to look at a man nearby. Bloom is above notice. More strongly still, we could argue that it is the girl who is saying to herself, ‘Look at me. I have them all on’. The figure

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of woman does not have to look back. She makes us look at her and toys with our attention as a result. She is in control, is still given the rhetorical power over the gaze. The figure controls her own rhetorical destiny, as it were. However, the passage is not consistently espousing a feminist line. First, the shift from ‘a woman’ as an instance to the diminutive ‘that girl’ as the specific instance (of that instance) employs the by now familiar rhetorical move that puts woman in her place. She is always a girl, never fully a woman. All boys grow up to become men; women remain at an arrested stage of development in the eyes of their male peers. The rhetorical place of woman in patriarchal discourse is established as developmentally inferior. Second, patriarchy gains the upper hand insofar as it remains ‘[h]is hands on her hair, for instance’. It is not, for instance, her hands on his; or her hands on hers; or his hands on his. These would be very different kinds of ‘for instances’ that would upset both heterosexual and patriarchal norms. Instead, Joyce’s example serves both to establish gender differentiation and to reinstate the hierarchy of active male (hand) over passive female (hair). Finally, the ‘shameless not seeing’ could be the problem of those who do not see her. It would be strange, it would be a shame, not to see her. She commands attention; she is there to be seen. It would be the person who has no shame indeed who could possibly ignore such a fine specimen, such a fine example of woman. She is a woman meant to be put on display, another commodity to be looked at. It is difficult, probably impossible, to resolve which figure is supposed to gaze where and to what purpose. On its own, the passage leaves too much linguistic room in which to manoeuvre. The effect could be either contradiction or consistency of meaning, final patriarchal leanings, feminist triumph, or even a mixture of both. What is clearer, though, is that the oblique figure of woman calls attention to the general problem of viewing: her figure questions who is in control of the gaze, raising the issue of whether the image of woman is the passive example to be viewed or the active instance that may or may not look back. Moreover, the phenomenological confusion to which this passage gives rise involves more than vision; the contemplation of the figure of woman upsets expected representations of all the senses. Voice is given expression through a sensation usually experienced through touch: ‘voice, temperatures’. Touch causes a reaction that is normally visual: ‘when he touches her with his fingers must almost see the lines, the curves’. Colour, which of course is normally considered a visual experience, is here represented as tactile: ‘Feeling of white’. In each case, the trope of synaesthesia blurs the boundaries between different

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sense experiences. And yet amidst this sensory confusion, a clear move does emerge, which could be both a patriarchal and a feminist problem: questions of racial difference are obscured. While the colour of the figure’s hair becomes an example (‘Say it was black, for instance. Good. We call it black’), the colour of her skin is not an instance; it is just white skin. Racial difference does not fully figure.10 Besides, the text provides no indications of class or even of nationality. The woman is in Dublin to be sure, but that does not mean that she is of Dublin. And even if she were of Dublin, that would not make her fully Irish, for in 1904 Ireland was still the subject of English colonial rule. It is difficult to know how properly to read the figure of woman here: what should be included, what excluded? Even the precise shape her example has taken results from a certain lack of propriety on my part, from a specific disregard for the text that precedes it. As many readers of Ulysses will already be aware, this particular figure of woman enters Joyce’s text by way of what is conventionally understood as Bloom’s thoughts about what ‘the blind stripling’ would think about a woman, for instance (U 8.1075). Strictly speaking, in this larger context, not all of the same conclusions could be drawn, simply because one would need to make allowances for the fact that, as conventional hermeneutic wisdom would have it, Bloom is speculating on what it must be like not to see anything at all, including, of course, a woman. The remarks about vision (certainly its supplantation by touch and voice) take on a different significance, to be sure, and the extent of the reading I have just offered would at times be checked by the surrounding text. Yet the conclusion to be drawn here is not merely that, taken out of context, the figure of woman is capable of producing a misreading of Ulysses, a mistake any half-aware reader could avoid in the first place. Rather, by questioning the narrative borders that frame the example, by shifting the focus away from Bloom and the blind man, it is possible not only to raise issues implicit in the passage that might otherwise go unnoticed, but also to call attention to the fact that woman is rarely taken to be her own example: a self-determining, self-framing example of herself. To stand on her own is the result of a certain impropriety on the part of woman. Or to put this another way, examples always leave something out, at the same time that they take for granted that what they cast aside is in some way unessential. In this case, deciding that the larger narrative context is an essential part of the example, that the figure of woman cannot properly be an example in her own right, reveals that the figure of woman is here twice over the speculative product of the male imagination: the example of Bloom’s example for the

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blind man’s experience of the world. She is an example within an example, supplementary, marginal, merely another instance. The point I am trying to illustrate here is not so much that one reading, one method, of defining this example is more correct or more complete than the other, although the second could certainly be said to be the more conventional. At the very least, Joyce’s elusive use of language makes us challenge the sacrosanct terms of the debate in the first place. By calling into question the very exemplarity of examples, we are asked to think about the extent to which we as readers are also blind striplings, incapable of actually seeing a woman, relying instead on stereotypes, on forms in the mind’s eye, on examples taken from novels, for instance. One of the lessons to be learned from Joyce’s examples and former method of composition has to do with the dangers inherent in generalizing, in taking a particular to represent the universal (cf. JJ 505), even when it might involve something as seemingly small as the frame of reading in which the example is placed and through which it is constructed. I would suggest, then, that we need to look more carefully at what happens when an instance is made to be more than just an instance, when the example is put on display to be copied, imitated, repeated, idealized. These issues lead back to the long-standing problem I discussed earlier, where specific representations of women characters become universal moral models of good or bad women – women to be copied because of their good example, or women to be shunned through their bad example. What I have not mentioned, however, is the way in which the figure of woman can become an aesthetic model with political agendas that are not necessarily explicit. Feminism has long known that aesthetics has its politics, and woman has been at the centre of those politics. One thing that feminism has stressed over the years is how aesthetic models serve to narrow down the possibilities for what women should look like, what they should be, what they should do. We do not have to search through the history of aesthetics to find examples of this, merely open a newspaper, turn a magazine page, look at the television to see a world of super-thin, super-tall supermodels who serve to promote the current trend for an unvaried body image that is unattainable for many women and hardly healthy for most. Fat has always been a feminist issue. But the politics of aesthetics were not born on the catwalk, even if that is the location which so baldly displays what feminism has long sought to expose. The stakes of such aesthetic modelling are clear in a second passage that occurs a bit earlier in ‘Lestrygonians’. Bloom is looking at the curves of an oaken table, and thinks of the statues in the library museum:

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His downcast eyes followed the silent veining of the oaken slab. Beauty: it curves: curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires. Can see them library museum standing in the round hall, naked goddesses. Aids to digestion. They don’t care what man looks. All to see. Never speaking, I mean to say to fellows like Flynn. Suppose she did Pygmalion and Galatea what would she say first? Mortal! Put you in your proper place. Quaffing nectar at mess with gods golden dishes, all ambrosial. Not like a tanner lunch we have, boiled mutton, carrots and turnips, bottle of Allsop. Nectar imagine it drinking electricity: gods’ food. Lovely forms of women sculped Junonian. Immortal lovely. And we stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine. They have no. Never looked. I’ll look today. Keeper won’t see. Bend down let something drop. See if she. (U 8.919–32)

To be sure, Joyce’s curvaceous goddesses are not the anorexic models of today; the ‘lovely forms of woman sculped Junonian’ would not fit into most current fashion. Yet even if Joyce’s world in Ulysses allows for robust female forms, they are forms nonetheless. The statues are the materialization of the idealized form of beauty that should be in the mind’s eye.11 They are classical models on display as ideals that set an impossible standard for what mortal women should be: what they should look like, but never will; what they should do, but never can.12 Such aesthetic modelling can only function, however, by relying on a curiously circular logic. Classical statues are particulars, but particulars that are manifestations of the universal ideal of beauty. In a sense, then, they are both particulars and universals, insofar as they are particular examples that are supposed to be universal (ideal) models of beauty.13 The example may be made to stand on its own as a particular instance, yet the particular instance itself is supposed to represent the universal ideal (of female beauty). The very universality of the figure allows it to become a particular in the first place, and thus a space does not exist for the example that is a model only of itself. These examples, these models, are no more than stereotypes, a fact disguised all the better because it is in plain view: curves are beauty. Yet not all of each figure is in plain view. While the ‘for instances’, the particular details of the figure of woman, are relevant, in the library museum passage Joyce asks us to consider whether we have all of the figure on which to speculate. Here Bloom concentrates on a forbidden area, a forbidden ‘for instance’, of woman’s anatomy: the anus. He is interested in whether goddesses have digestive tracts like ‘real’ women, and he assumes that sculpture, with its commitment to realist representation even of mythical figures, will provide the answer. Chances are, though, that Bloom would not have had much of an eyeful, regardless of which direction he

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cast his eyes. For as Luce Irigaray points out, in Greek statuary ‘woman’s genitals are simply absent, masked, sewn back up inside their “crack”’.14 The goddess’s eyes look down upon her own nothingness, the nothingness that represents the horror of nothing to see: the lack of ‘for instances’. But we can only speculate here, deprived as we are of specific examples. Bloom never finds out whether the goddesses sport anuses; he never even gets a chance to bend down and look. What, then, are we to make of the doubly absent ‘for instances’? Character analysis might assume that the focus on these missing narrative details means that Bloom is a victim of his own scopophilic interests, voyeuristic fantasies, fetishistic impulses or obsessive behaviour. I have already mentioned the limitations of pursuing this line of enquiry and the ease with which competing analyses of Joyce’s characters can lie side by side. What interests me more is how this passage comments on frequently held attitudes about representations of woman: if there is pleasure in her beauty, is there also beauty in her pleasure? And if there is, which of her parts, which ‘for instances’, represent this pleasure and this beauty? By way of risking part of an answer, I would like to draw attention to the common concern for statues of women that Joyce’s text shares with a certain psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. As many will recall, Bernini’s statue of Saint Theresa plays a central role in Lacan’s theory of feminine sexuality: [Y]ou only have to go and look at Bernini’s statue [of Saint Theresa] in Rome to understand immediately that she’s coming, there is no doubt about it. And what is her jouissance, her coming from? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics is that they are experiencing it but know nothing about it.15

In both the passage from Ulysses and Lacan’s remarks, woman is represented as mystical or mythical; the only question that remains is just how much men can see of her. Joyce has Bloom puzzle over what precisely constitutes the particular figure of woman in the museum: woman as a question of representation remains a question. But as far as Lacan is concerned, woman is all answers; she conceals nothing. Or to put it differently, for Lacan, woman’s beauty lies in her transparency, in her open display of unbounded pleasure. So in one glance, Lacan thinks he knows all about women’s pleasure – a jouissance that the mystics themselves could not know. In Lacan’s defence, much of what he has to say about feminine sexuality, especially in the Encore Seminar, has been enormously influential for feminist analysts and literary critics alike (including, of course, readers of Joyce).16 But we should not take this to mean that Lacanian psychoanalysis

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is necessarily feminist, nor Ulysses necessarily a model for feminist theory. In this context, Irigaray’s remarks about Lacan are a timely reminder: The question whether, in [Lacan’s] logic, [women] can articulate anything at all, whether they can be heard, is not even raised. For raising it would mean granting that there may be some other logic, and one that upsets his own. That is, a logic that challenges mastery. And to make sure this does not come up, the right to experience pleasure is awarded to a statue [. . .]. In Rome? So far away? To look? At a statue? Of a saint? Sculpted by a man? What pleasure are we talking about? Whose pleasure?17

The same questions could be addressed to Ulysses, although I would suggest that the answers have more to do with what Joyce’s text might teach Lacan: something about the status of women as example that defies mastery. All too often women’s pleasure is accorded to statues and to characters that might as well be statues. Regardless of which anatomical particulars feature in a given instance, the figure of woman as statue is always conveniently blind and speechless – except in myth, when she gets a chance to tell men off, to be released from her fixed passivity in a move which is itself not altogether innocent of patriarchal conceit. By raising the question of the statue’s anus and by calling attention to a certain material flow through the body of woman, Ulysses exposes the impulse (which Lacan will share) to turn women into statues. It is this impulse that Irigaray also reveals when she exposes Lacan’s entire vision of feminine jouissance to be based on the analysis of a statue. As Irigaray so rightly points out, the example of feminine pleasure is nothing more than a solace for men, guaranteeing to them that there is something foreign, fantasmatic, other than what is intolerable in their world.18 The rather recent statue of Anna Livia Plurabelle, which now graces Dublin, might just be one more example. Otherworldly ‘curves the world admires [. . .] Lovely forms of women sculped Junonian’. Statues, examples, characters. Understanding woman as always and only a fixed model (even a model such as Saint Theresa, fixed in an attitude of mobility and self-abandon) necessarily reduces woman to the condition of the patriarchy: to be for herself a representation, lost in the act of modelling herself. The problem here cannot be corrected, however, by merely pointing out that Bernini’s statue or the figures of woman in Ulysses misrepresent real women. Upon which grounds exactly would misrepresentation be distinguished from representation? Who would do the distinguishing, and who

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would establish the grounds? Were feminism to claim that it could do any of these things, it would share Lacan’s certainty (and perhaps arrogance) that it always knows what women are. Nor would things be made much better if feminism were to argue that the figure of woman never represents real women, that woman is never herself in representation. This would mean that the figure of woman would always only be allegorical, always an instance of something else: hence, the figure of woman as allegorical representation of truth, justice, beauty, the state, the universal Other. This constitutes an effacement of woman altogether, for she would not exist except as rhetorical device, as discursive example of something else. The problem with which we are left, then, is not that the judgements of female beauty are simply inaccurate or incomplete, the figure of woman never an allegorical one, the criteria of realism merely faulty. There is no easy correction to be made in the name of feminism. Rather, feminism must confront a difficult issue that Joyce’s work also raises: how would it be possible to negotiate the limitation that models or examples impose through the very necessity of their use? Communication demands the particular; it is not possible to refer to everything at once. At the same time, judgements that arise from the use of those particulars are always to some extent faulty – inaccurate or incomplete, overly particular or overly general. This applies as much to aesthetics (models of beauty) as it does to politics (another matter of representation). What is at issue here is the entire problematic of inclusion and exclusion, no matter whether the arena is politics or aesthetics. While some standards of beauty are narrower than others, they remain standards nonetheless. While some versions of realism admit a wider understanding of what constitutes the real, the narrow mimetic tie between real life and representation continues. While some politics represent a wider constituency than others, they are still representative and necessarily selective. I do not believe that these are conditions from which we can escape completely, and to think that we can is itself to fall prey to committing an injustice insofar as it is to claim to have found a position from which to represent, to speak, for everyone – an all-inclusive aesthetics, a fully representative politics.19 I would suggest that rather than striving for the perfect representation of woman or trying to overcome altogether the use of examples, we focus instead on whether a representation – a model, an example – brings about justice or injustice. This is not a static judgement, made once and for all, but an ongoing process of evaluation and re-evaluation: judgements that themselves must be judged in future. Put another way, each judgement will have the status of a judgement that will

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have been judged. This would be an ethical response to the matter of examples, not an epistemological claim. It would not, however, be a response that returns through the back door a moral criticism about which I expressed my reservations in the case of character analysis. More precisely, I am arguing that we need to pay attention to the ethical effects of examples – effects that are not always stable – without at the same time making an epistemological claim that we know what women are. So neither a claim to know a universal ground upon which moral judgements are based, nor a claim for a universal moral a priori that grounds knowledge. This would be a way to think the particularity of the example without losing sight of the fact that particulars have effects, make things happen. To make such a case is also to argue for the particularity rather than the universality of literature: literature not as exemplary but as example. Literature, that is, does not speak to a common experience; it is itself a set of particulars, a collection of ‘for instances’, not a universal. This flies in the face of those who imagine literature to be the expression of universal truths. Such claims about the nature of literature have always sat uncomfortably alongside categories like ‘women’s literature’, because the very determination ‘women’ argues against the universality of literature. ‘Women’s literature’ is no mere illegitimate offspring of its more universal parent. More properly, it is the daughter who was born as a reminder of the particular nature of literature. Whether ‘women’s literature’ is defined though the gender of authors, thematic contents, intended audiences, or some combination, ‘women’s literature’ underlines the fact that literature is not a universal experience of universal truths but instead a matter of particulars. That ‘women’s literature’ as a category emphasizes such things is not just part of the historical record, one chapter in the annals of the history of literary criticism. The biases that the seemingly general reference to ‘literature’ creates, the privileges it may or may not extend, are certainly still at issue. Considering Joyce’s work as ‘women’s literature’ would be an interesting debate for which I do not have the space here. What can be said, though, is that Joyce’s novels share with ‘women’s literature’ the potential to expose the status of the particular – its necessity and its limitations. It is this condition that moves us as readers closer to ethical responses than to epistemological discoveries. Joyce’s work spells neither the death of the novel nor even the end of exemplarity. Debates rage on about the health and function of literature; general theories continue to connect particulars to argue their cases. But Joyce does add something important to the conversation about women’s stereotypic exemplarity. Ulysses has checked our

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blind impulses to turn the example of the figure of woman into a model – a model of the past or a model for the future. And feminism thus still stands a chance of holding open the possibilities for what women might yet become, what they might yet have been, what they might yet have done. For instance. n otes 1 Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Here Say Yes in Joyce’, 48. Derrida’s own reflections on exemplarity can be found throughout the ‘Parergon’ essay in The Truth in Painting, 15–147, and, more recently, in Archive Fever. It is also worth noting that McGee has earlier asked the question ‘Why Joyce?’ in the specific context of feminism. McGee likewise is struck by the ability of Joyce’s work to anticipate a feminist reading (‘Reading Authority: Feminism and Joyce’). 2 See Henke, ‘Gerty MacDowell: Joyce’s Sentimental Heroine’; Beja, ‘The Joyce of Sex: Sexual Relationships in Ulysses’, 257, also cited in the Introduction to Henke and Unkeless, eds., Women in Joyce, xii. 3 See Walzl, ‘Dubliners: Women in Irish Society’, 40; Scott, Joyce and Feminism, 185; Lawrence, ‘Joyce and Feminism’, 238. All feminists have not, however, been so keen on Joyce. Notably, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar contend, in ‘Sexual Linguistics: Gender, Language, Sexuality’, that Joyce is openly misogynist and that, as a result, his work is of use to the feminist critic only as an example of patriarchal discourse. 4 For extreme examples of these positions which are not altogether feminist, see Shechner, Joyce in Nighttown, 197; Morse, ‘Molly Bloom Revisited’. With more nuance, Bonnie Kime Scott concludes that ‘Molly should be seen as more than a principle of fertility, or desire. She is desired, but not just as mother; she is sought as an alternate to structures that have been granted undue sovereignty’ ( Joyce and Feminism, 183). Of course, other questions about Molly’s character remain open as well. For instance, does she reinforce conventional female stereotypes, or does she radically deconstruct logocentric meaning? (Unkeless, ‘The Conventional Molly Bloom’; van Boheemen, ‘Joyce, Derrida and the Discourse of “the Other”’.) Is Molly a feminist who ‘refuse[s] to conform to the wishes of men’, or is she merely a ‘comic example of a self-loving woman’? (MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word , 132; O’Brien, The Conscience of James Joyce, 204.) Reviewing the criticism available on Molly’s character would in itself be an encyclopaedic project and bring us no closer to reaching a critical consensus (feminist or otherwise) as to what precisely Molly is an example of. We would do best to remember Jeri Johnson’s words instead in her Introduction to Ulysses for the World’s Classics edition: ‘we will go astray if we read Molly as either a positive or a negative representation of woman’ (xxxvii). 5 The publication of Women in Joyce (1982), edited by Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless, marked a significant turning point in Joyce studies insofar as it directed

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attention to sustained, contextual evaluations. At the same time, however, the editors expressed their own reservations about the volume’s acknowledged emphasis on ‘realistic characters’. Their point that ‘Joyce’s portraits in his later works reach far beyond traditional notions of character’ (xiv) is one that has perhaps not been emphasized enough in subsequent criticism. I would argue that it is no coincidence that the rise of the very idea of literature coincides with the birth of the Enlightenment subject. For a compelling account of the ‘birth’ of literature and the significance of ‘character’, see LacoueLabarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute. This is not to say, however, that there have been no critical developments in approaches to character since the eighteenth century. Psychoanalysis, for one, offers an approach to subjectivity that suggests a depth and complexity previously unacknowledged in character analysis. Psychoanalytic criticism could even be said to have invigorated and sustained character analysis over the years; it has certainly been of use to feminist character analysis that sought to reveal the complexity of female subjectivity. See my Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en Abyme. Although MacCabe argues, in James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word , that Joyce’s texts mark the end of meta-language and of the realist story, there is ample evidence to suggest that there is still a great investment in reading Joyce’s work as realist novels. This is true even when, as is often the case, the whole recuperative effort is preceded by an acknowledgement of Joyce’s stylistic innovations, poetic language and critiques of realism. For an extended discussion of the way in which ‘Circe’ operates as an assault on the ‘masculinist realist narrative’, see Duffy’s considered analysis in The Subaltern ‘Ulysses’ , especially chapter 4. Duffy also persuasively makes the case that ‘“Circe” first shows the inadequacy of realist representations of [terrorist] violence’ (140). I should also point out that I am using the term ‘realism’ in the same way MacCabe does: to refer to ‘the conviction that the real can be displayed and examined through a perfectly transparent language’, which we have come to understand as including recognizable characters, vivid descriptions, and temporally coherent narratives (James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, 18). It is worth noting that this illusion of transparency does not come about by itself; it is made possible, as MacCabe points out, by the text’s own metalanguage, which creates for the reader (and critic) a position of dominance from which to read. Put another way, the textual meta-language of realism is what provides an open seat in front of a ‘window onto the world’. His strong example is Middlemarch, which I would argue is a more troubled case than his argument admits. I am not suggesting, however, that Joyce consistently turns his back on racial differences and always upholds gender hierarchies. Much important work has been done that convincingly argues otherwise. Ewa Ziarek contends that ‘since the figures of women reappear precisely at the crucial points in the text where the artist’s relation to language is reappraised, they reveal a constant appropriation and erasure of gender categories in theories of artistic production’

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(‘“Circe”: Joyce’s Argumentum ad Feminam’, 53). In The Novel as Family Romance: Language, Gender, and Authority from Fielding to Joyce, van Boheemen calls attention to the neglected ‘other’ in Ulysses. Valente discusses ‘Joyce’s own narrative method for communicating the generalized patriarchal exclusion of feminine subjectivity’ (‘Who Made the Tune: Becoming-Woman in “Sirens”’). Christy Burns suggests that ‘the three models of female sexuality offered in the Wake [. . .] partially flow into one another’ (‘An Erotics of the Word: Female “Assaucyetiams” in Finnegans Wake’, 324). Shari Benstock also considers ‘the textual ordering of sexual difference’ in Finnegans Wake (Textualizing the Feminine: On the Limits of Genre, xv). Finally, Milesi examines in revealing detail the ‘underlying theme of female grammar and sexuality’ in Finnegans Wake (‘Toward a Female Grammar of Sexuality: The De/Recomposition of “Storiella as she is syung”’). 11 In Ulysses, Joyce is not entirely playing along with classical judgements on beauty. While I would argue that it is rather evident in the passage I have cited here, it is even more obvious in the ironic replay of the Trial of Paris in ‘Nausicaa’. Margot Norris’s brilliant explication of this scene is extremely relevant in this context. In ‘Modernism, Myth, and Desire in “Nausicaa”’, she argues that ‘by subordinating beauty to the mediations and manipulations of desire, the Trial of Paris dramatizes the irony of modernism’s adulation of the classical myth for exemplary parables of truth and beauty’ (41–2). Norris goes on to conclude that ‘the point is not that modern culture has corrupted the ancient judgment of divine beauty or that modern culture has lost its aesthetic compass. The invocation of the repressed Trial of Paris rather dramatizes that the internalization of the myth’s desires by modern women and the men who install themselves as judges of their desirability is tragically ironic because it is served by a primordially corrupt model of the judgment of beauty. Joyce indicts the psychological power of myth rather more than he indicts its absence in the modern consciousness’ (48–9). 12 It is worth remarking on the fact that these are naked goddesses, after all. In itself, this is nothing really shocking, but the role of female nudity in classical sculpture has not, of course, been without its controversies and has often been an occasion for drawing surprising commentary from unexpected sources. One of the sources that is relevant in this context is Hegel. In ‘The Unpresentable’, Lacoue-Labarthe calls attention to a curious twist in Hegel’s Aesthetics. Were we to follow Hegel’s remarks carefully, Lacoue-Labarthe points out, we would see how he argues that ‘femininity is only beautiful, ideally, when veiled’; ‘female nudity simply falls within the province of sensuous beauty’ (The Subject of Philosophy, 139), which is the poorest mode of apprehension. A sense of shame calls for the figure of woman to be covered up. Male nudity, by contrast, can be shown because ‘masculinity is the unveiling of the spiritual’ (142). Hegel’s gendered aesthetic is another instance of ‘shameless not seeing’: we shamelessly see her clothed figure; her shameful parts are not seen. 13 It is the same circularity with which Kant could have been said to struggle in his attempt to distinguish between determinate and reflective judgement in

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the Critique of Judgement. Whereas with determinate judgement the universal is given and the particular is derived from the universal, with reflective judgement the particular is given and the universal follows from the particular. Determinate judgement ‘subsumes [particulars] under universal transcendental [a priori] laws given by the understanding’ (Introduction, IV); these are empirical judgements. Reflective judgement requires a principle it cannot get from experience; something must precede the particular if the universal is to be derived from it. Reflective judgement must therefore be a judgement also based on the universal a priori, but in a different sense insofar as it is neither empirically derived nor grounded. While the distinction between empirical (determinate) and non-empirical (reflective) judgement is clear enough, there is a curious overlap here. Both types of judgement seem to proceed from the universal. Determinate judgement = universal law → particular judged under that law. Reflective judgement = particular → judged by a universal a priori that actually precedes the particular; therefore, the sequence can be seen to be: reflective judgement = universal a priori → particular judged under universal a priori → universal law. If there is a difference here, it is that for reflective judgement the a priori is an enabling condition, a non-empirical necessity, for the very possibility of knowing anything. Reflective judgement, unlike determinate judgement, ‘gives a law only to itself and not to nature’ (Introduction, IV). As far as Kant is concerned, judgements of beauty are always singular judgements with universal validity, based on the a priori (§ 8); they are always reflective judgements. Moreover, according to Kant, judgements of the human form are never pure judgements of taste (they are both reflective and determinate judgements) because they are always also informed by a purpose – by moral feeling and perfection – and hence rest on a concept (§ 17). Significantly, it is the figure of woman that Kant takes as one of the central examples with which to illustrate this point: ‘In such a case, e.g. if it is said “that is a beautiful woman,” we think nothing else than this: nature represents in her figure the purposes in view in the shape of a woman’s figure. For we must look beyond the mere form to a concept, if the object is to be thought in such a way by means of a logically conditioned aesthetical judgement’ (§ 48). Pure judgements of taste, for Kant, can only proceed from nature: beautiful tulips, not beautiful women, are the perfect examples. That Kant specifically chooses the figure of woman to make this point calls further attention to the way in which she is situated as being more than she might appear, a potentially disruptive, but still aesthetically flawed, figure of whom ‘we think nothing else than this’. Before simply putting Kant to one side, however, we should remember that, although the radicality of his move is checked by an appeal to the a priori and the universal subjectivity of aesthetic judgements, Kant also argues that aesthetic judgements of particular examples do not themselves function as models (for beauty). His is an aesthetics of examples rather than models. 14 Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 26 (in the title essay). Irigaray also argues that woman’s ‘sexual organ represents the horror of nothing to see. A defect in

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diane el am this systematics of representation and desire. A “hole” in its scopophilic lens’ (26). Lacan, ‘God and the Jouissance of The Woman’, 147. The James Joyce Quarterly has devoted an entire issue to this topic; see Works Cited, s.v., and Brivic’s introduction, ‘Joyce Between Genders: Lacanian Views’. Brivic also provides a timely reminder about Lacan’s own interest in Joyce, noting that, on the last page of ‘Joyce le symptˆome II’, Lacan emphasizes ‘the importance in Joyce’s work of “jouissance opaque d’exclure le sens”’ (18). Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 90–1 (in ‘Cos`ı Fan Tutti’). See ibid. 96–7. For a more extensive discussion of this issue, see my essay ‘Speak for Yourself’.

chapter 6

The lapse and the lap: Joyce with Deleuze Marie-Dominique Garnier

There are pass-words beneath order-words. Words that pass, words that are components of passage, whereas order-words mark stoppages or organized, stratified compositions. A single thing or word undoubtedly has this twofold nature: it is necessary to extract the one from the other – to transform the compositions of order into components of passage.1 I’ve lapped so long (FW 625.27)

I is a femaline person (FW 251.31)

l ap one: d ef initions There are pass-words beneath order-words, laps beneath lapses, ‘cat-licks’ beneath Catholics – Joy(ce) beneath shame, or James. The free energy of linguistic production can be seen to emerge, with the help of a Deleuzian2 logic, beneath the pattern of solidified representation. Gilles Deleuze and F´elix Guattari’s ‘schizoanalytic’ assemblages in A Thousand Plateaus provide novel, erring rather than deferring, inroads into James Joyce’s linguistic fissions – nomadic wanderings across the plateaus, whether hills or boglands, of writing and reading. The concept of ‘plateau’, borrowed from Gregory Bateson by Deleuze and Guattari, is defined (though again the word should ideally be submitted to criticism and replacement) as being ‘always in the middle’, and, in connection with the way Bateson originally used it, as ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’. The explicit philosophy of their book, they claim, resists the ‘order-word’ of a chapter-based structure, to which it prefers a collection of ‘plateaus’: 97

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For example, a book composed of chapters has culmination and termination points. What takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus that communicate with one another across microfissures, as in a brain? We call a ‘plateau’ any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome. We are writing this book as a rhizome. (TP 22)

Ulysses seems to qualify best as the Joycean book of plateaus – though admittedly the novel hovers between two logics, two maps, being keyed to the logic of the order-word (the chapter) as well as that of the pass-word (the plateau). The final locus of Ulysses is a geographical as well as a climaxfree, sexual ‘plateau’: the hill of Howth, where Bloom and Molly exchange mouthfuls of seedcake, a scene which echoes Bateson as quoted by Deleuze and Guattari: ‘Some sort of continuous plateau of intensity is substituted for [sexual] climax’ (TP 22). Paradoxically, however, the plateau formation overlaps with a process of culmination, since the scene appears at the end of the ‘concluding’ chapter, which can, however, easily receive further logical twists: the end also qualifies as a beginning; and of all Ulyssean ‘chapters’, ‘Penelope’ is the one that least resembles a chapter, and most resembles a large area of level fictional land, a plateau. Again Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy seeks to evade dual oppositions: The important point is that the root-tree and the canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a transcendent model [. . .]; the second as an immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a map [. . .]. We employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all models. (TP 20)

In the early pages of A Thousand Plateaus (a title which in its English version resonates, both ironically and felicitously, with ‘Plato-es’ in plenty) Deleuze and Guattari take exception to Joyce’s words, which they compare to Nietzsche’s aphorisms: The abortionists of unity are indeed angel makers, doctores angelici, because they affirm a properly angelic and superior unity. Joyce’s words, accurately described as having ‘multiple roots’, shatter the linear unity of the work, even of language, only to posit a cyclic unity of the sentence, text, or knowledge. Nietzsche’s aphorisms shatter the linear unity of knowledge, only to invoke the cyclic unity of the eternal return, present as the nonknown in thought. (TP 6)

This, in turn, is reverberated in the structure of A Thousand Plateaus, which the authors acknowledge is also circular: ‘We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs’ (TP 22). Deleuze and Guattari’s misconception of Joyce (and their misreading of Finnegans Wake in particular, which they misspell as Finnegan’s Wake),

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has been detrimental to both fields, the critical and the philosophical. Joyce’s words can easily be shown to be neither roots, nor entirely geared to a circular form. Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual machines need to be connected to micro-readings of the Joycean corpus, so far almost entirely subjugated to the dominant voices of post-Romantic, ‘Oedipean’ criticism (i.e. one based on the concepts of loss, lack and lapsus). What follows is a Deleuze-oriented reading model based on what I call ‘lapping’, reading in laps, for which a prototype can be found in the opening pages of ‘Calypso’. her licking l ap ( u 4.4 3) The Bloom breakfast scene at the beginning of ‘Calypso’ offers a linguistic exercise on a plateau, or at least on a tray. Language, lingo, is treated in close connection with matters pertaining to the tongue, the inner organs, the gloss of the cat’s hide and the porous holes of its (her) licking lapping tongue. Palate, fine tang, dry mouth, rough tongue: the Joycean text relishes the ‘inner organs’ of words, the gutturals, labials or fricatives of a dawning day’s cryptic ‘Calypso’ code. Yet those g-ridden (giblet/gizzards/gelid ) and plosive organs resist organization and organisms – or, in Deleuzian terms, the striated, the guttural, the deep-throated is ironed out into the smooth, the labial. Nomos challenges logos, the liquid gelid underwrites and undermines the previous, guttural g-strings. Deleuze and Guattari provide the following definition of nomos: The nomos is the consistency of a fuzzy aggregate: it is in this sense that it stands in opposition to the law or the polis, as the backcountry, a mountainside, or the vague expanse around a city [. . .]: sedentary space is striated, by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures, while nomad space is smooth, marked only by ‘traits’ that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory. Even the lamellae of the desert slide over each other, producing an inimitable sound. [. . .] It is a tactile space, or rather ‘haptic’, a sonorous much more than a visual space. (TP 380–2)

Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘lamellae of the desert’ call for a fuzzy logic of the lap and the overlap, which the opening pages of ‘Calypso’ produce or experiment with, in the overlapping laps of Molly and the cat. Other Deleuzian/Guattarian postulates are at work in Joyce’s texts – bodieswithout-organs as opposed to organisms, rhizomes as opposed to arborescences, minor versus major modes of language, lines of flight as opposed to strata and roots.3 What Joyce’s writing does is subvert the logic of ontological dualism that Deleuze and Guattari intend to avoid. What follows experiments with two texts, connecting or hooking the one onto the other,

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the literary and the philosophical. The experimental model or cat(ch)word that operates at the beginning of ‘Calypso’ is – in a logic of the overlap – nomadic, herborescent, off-minor and rhizomatic. Bloom’s cat and the cat’s tongue function as a rhizome, an errant shoot that obliquely resurfaces in other places in the book, as in the distant ‘packs’ of porous monosyllables ‘ba/bat/ba’ (U 13.1117ff.) – as a subterranean, minor pulse that syncopates the book. The Bloom-cat ‘machine’ produces a network or plateau of meanings that resonates with a number of ‘lines of flight’4 or loosely connecting threads – from the ‘cat filled with sweets’ that inaugurates Joyce’s letter to his grandson Stephen about the cat of Beaugency story (SL 382), to the apparently unconnected household cat. The ‘porous holes’ (U 4.48) of the cat’s tongue call for a logic of porosity, where sense connects with nonsense, and hermeneutic enquiry with mere pussyfooting or ‘pussibilities’ – the need to make disconnections and displacements along rhizomes, surface shoots. Such holes connect or disconnect, for example, in a cross-linguistic fashion, with the ‘brick holes’ or bricoles of Levi-Straussian bricolage, where bricole translates, with the aid of linguistic serendipity, as cathouse (cf. below). The Bloom cat will be seen to function as a catachresis, in connection, though not in agreement, with what Lorraine Weir has described as ‘[c]atachresis, catafalque, cataglottism: tropes of the Fall in Derrida’s Glas’.5 The linguistics at work in ‘Calypso’ and in Joyce’s letter to his grandson rewrite lapse into lap, the story of the fall into a fiction of felix culpa where felix is a Deleuzian – and Guattarian – pass-word for any generic, common or garden, cat. the ‘cat f illed with sweets’ In the letter to Stephen Joyce dated 10 August 1936 already referred to (SL 382–4), Joyce tells his grandson the story of the cat of Beaugency, in distant relation to a present he sent him a few days before – a cat filled with sweets. A number of linguistic twists and threads in the letter connects its nonsensical overtones to the mainstream of Joycean fiction, as well as to remotely Deleuzian features. A river runs through the story, mostly about building bridges and about waking. Its three main characters, the mayor of Beaugency, the devil and the cat, somehow make up a mock-Oedipus (or Oedi-puss) triangle complete with m`ere (mayor), father (Joyce) and (grand)son. Both the mayor and the devil are shown as compulsive dressers, as bearers of Joycean fetishes, wearing scarlet robe, golden chain, and long spyglass. The bridge connects two opposite ends of a linguistic spectrum, ranging from proverbs, or order-words which the letter aptly deconstructs into pass-words, to the opposite end, here called ‘Bellsybabble’ – the word

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appears in a post-script appended to the body of the letter, the reading of the letter itself amounting to a crossing process.6 A literal reading of proverbs is at work in Joyce’s story – a lateral procedure in which the proverb, the ‘order-word’, is levelled out into a pass-word, a horizontal, paronomastic device, a linguistic bridge – chou-chat. Joyce’s devil speaks a minor language, a prototypical Wakean tongue or ‘belzey babble’ (FW 64.11), one ‘he makes up as he goes along’ (cf. FW 268.F2), a bellsybabble which sounds like the end product of a disassembly-line distorting Beaugency into belles gens (‘Balgentiens’) and ‘bellsy’ – where Beelzebub overlaps with balls, bells and belles.7 The letter provides a tight network of associations and passages where the cat-and-devil nexus uncannily brings up a father/son or grandfather/grandson pattern of proximity (‘mon petit chou-chat’). Polarities that would normally organize and construct meaning are here shown to enter modes of interaction and connection: several ‘lines of flight’ or fluid elements generate lateral readings, such as the water which circulates both above and beneath bridge level. the literal, the l ateral, the l acanian The logic of the lap and the overlap rewrites in a radically new fashion the lapsarian model to which most Joycean texts have been submitted, from Dubliners, where Dublin seems to stand for the city of ontological lack, to Ulysses (for which a laconic summary could be: losing a son, losing a wife) and Finnegans Wake (or the great fall). Lapping and lapsing, though the words have branched off into divergent areas, actually do overlap and connect rhizomatically. The word lapsus originates from labi: to glide, as well as to fall (labi being also the etymology of ‘to sleep’). When read carefully, even Jacques Lacan’s statement in ‘The Function of Writing’ (S´eminaire. Livre XX. Encore), which precisely designates Joyce’s texts as examples of lapsus-ridden writing, begins to trip over the signifier and commits a lapsus calami – as though Lacan himself turned out to be manipulated by the Joyce corpus, which at once resorts to and strongly resists the logic of the lapsus. Lacan, like many others (including, we recall, Deleuze and Guattari), trips on Finnegan’s, lapses from the proper, authorized spelling of Finnegans Wake, and writes: Qu’est-ce qui se passe dans Joyce? Le signifiant vient truffer le signifi´e. C’est du fait que les signifiants s’emboˆıtent, se composent, se t´elescopent – lisez Finnegan’s [sic] Wake – que se produit quelque chose qui, comme signifi´e, peut paraˆıtre e´nigmatique, mais qui est bien ce qu’il y a de plus proche de ce que nous autres analystes, grˆace au discours analytique, nous avons a` lire – le lapsus. C’est au titre

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de lapsus que c¸a signifie quelque chose, c’est-`a-dire que c¸a peut se lire d’une infinit´e de fac¸ons diff´erentes. Mais c’est pr´ecisement pour c¸a que c¸a se lit mal, ou que c¸a se lit de travers, ou que c¸a ne se lit pas.8

What Lacan formulates as ‘lire de travers’, misreading, reading aslant or askew, is very close to what the lapsus-as-lapping is about. Lacan’s metaphoric ‘truff´e de’ – peppered with, packed full of – also translates as ‘bristling, or mushrooming with’ (though the French contains an added reference to the truffe, not only a mushroom but the nose of a small mammal), which calls for a rhizome-oriented reading, a lateral, proliferating displacement. A similar concept of laterality is developed by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty – whom Lacan often quotes and refers to9 – who mentions the need for a language of philosophy quite akin to the language fashioned by Joyce in the Wake, and somehow already at work, or at play, in the early pages of ‘Calypso’. Merleau-Ponty writes: [. . .] there is or could be a language of coincidence, a manner of making the things themselves speak – and this is what [the philosopher] seeks. It would be a language of which he would not be the organizer, words he would not assemble, that would combine through him by virtue of a natural intertwining of their meaning, through the occult trading of the metaphor – where what counts is no longer the manifest meaning of each word and of each image, but the lateral relations, the kinships that are implicated in their transfers and their exchanges. It is indeed a language of this sort that Bergson himself required for the philosopher.10

The concept of rapports lat´eraux (lateral relations) is what here becomes reformulated as lapping – or, in Deleuzian terms, as pass-words. One of Merleau-Ponty’s most poetic and philosophical statements comes very close to Joycean ‘lapping’, for which a model is provided by Bloom’s cat’s tongue: As the secret blackness of milk, of which Val´ery spoke, is accessible only through its whiteness, the idea of light or the musical idea doubles up the lights and sounds from beneath, is their other side or their depth. Their carnal texture presents to us what is absent from all flesh; it is a furrow that traces itself out magically under our eyes without a tracer, a certain hollow, a certain interior, a certain absence, a negativity that is not nothing [. . .]11

Merleau-Ponty’s investigation into the intertwining, chiasmic relations between the visible and the invisible, whiteness and blackness, led him to a paradoxical logic of the lap, or the overlap – one might say, of the entrechat, the lateral leap; in other words to a type of thought which moves away from the philosophy of lapse and loss. Gloss replaces and overlaps loss – as in the fleshly g-spots of Bloom’s gizzards and giblet soup. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘certain hollow’ or ‘negativity that is not nothing’ casts a sidelight on Bloom’s

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apparent malapropism – the ‘porous holes’ of the cat’s tongue. Beneath the visible ‘holes’, beneath the obvious signs of lack or loss – terms which in a Freudian analysis can be seen at once to displace and gesture towards Molly Bloom’s illegitimate love-making in the afternoon – porosity establishes a different horizon, a felix culpa, a ‘carnal texture’. Merleau-Ponty never severs the visionary from the flesh. The visible becomes a ‘quality pregnant with a texture’. By ‘flesh of the visible’ Merleau-Ponty implies what he later develops as a ‘carnal being [. . .] a being “in latency”’ (my emphasis). The word ‘lap’ also appears – hardly a concept, in this instance, much closer to what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘line’: The body unites us directly with the things through its own ontogenesis, by welding to one another the two outlines of which it is made, its two laps: the sensible mass it is and the mass of the sensible wherein it is born [. . .] upon which, as seer, it remains open. (TP 136)

to l ap bet ter Lapping connects the cat to a network of other signifiers: the lap, the overlapping, ALP (Molly and the cat also largely overlap in ‘Calypso’, as do Milly and the cat in ‘Ithaca’ (U 17.896ff.)). Much ink has been spilt about the lapsing and the lapping in connection with ALP,12 about utterance and butterance, milk, butter and cheese in Joyce’s texts. JeanMichel Rabat´e has written extensively on one of the ruling proverbs buried in Finnegans Wake: ‘there’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip’, and about woman as ‘the place of the lapsus (its inverted signifier ALP as lap) and man its provoker, producing it by his serious and serial fall’.13 The present essay seeks to rewrite alp as the locus of the lap, which it does invert, rather than that of the lapsus, which it does not, and to investigate the cat/catechism/catachresis/catafalque/catalick (cf. FW 158.4 for the latter) series or rhizome in a different light, where felix (a name that belongs to more than one cat) subverts the fall. Bloom’s cat in ‘Calypso’ is at the centre of a rather dense oral as well as aural and visual sequence. Its ‘lithe black form’ (U 4.21) stalking over ‘my writingtable’ (U 4.19) turns it into a hermetic metaphor of writing, into a smooth textual, Mercurial operator – the mrk(r) consonantal code in the cat’s meow (U 4.25, 32) having been read as suggestive of M ercury, patron of thieves and writing. One could add, in the same hermeneutic vein, that the a/o vowel cluster prewrites the Wakean pairing in FW 94.21–2, which JohnPaul Riquelme reads as ‘the letter in its barest possible form’,14 provided one sees the sheet of paper doubled over on itself to create a M¨obius strip

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(this doubling over being another way of formulating the ‘lapping’ process). Another instance of this appears in the Wake’s rewriting of ‘yes’ as ‘jas jos’ (FW 184.2), as James Joyce’s signature tune, already audible in ‘Calypso’ in the mewlings of the cat. The cat’s erect tail, glossy hide and lithe black form call forth the pen, the vellum, the ink and the glossary – a smooth writing space. Bloom’s absorption in ‘the white button under the butt of her tail’ (U 4.22) produces the paronomastic series of overlapping signifiers, a fascination for winking blinkpoints15 or anchoring points – the obverse or reverse of Joyce’s black dot or colophon appended at the end of ‘Ithaca’. The scene reads in two ways, either as a case of lapsing or as an instance of lapping, either as order-word or as pass-word. The first reading will interpret the cat as cryptic; the cat’s smooth hide retains a secret in hiding, as would befit a ‘Calypso’ cat with a cryptic call-name: pussens. This approach will open onto a fairly stable interpretive position, i.e. as a prolepsis, a premonition of Molly’s lapse; the transitive syntax in Bloom’s remark, ‘she can jump me’, will be seen to gesture towards a rhetoric of betrayal. Even Bloom’s ‘chookchooks’ (U 4.31) is bound to confirm the previous decipherings, since chickens or roosters are traditionally associated with Hermes/Mercury, whether the god or the alchemical substance.16 On the other hand the text disavows its own hermeneutic signposting. Sense verges on nonsense, guilt or shame is avoided, and the reading process is not geared to moralistic, narrowly exegetical investigations. Sense roams or ‘rhizomes’ freely, at large, across the field of nonsense or ‘joysense’. In the vicinity of the cat, Bloom’s syntax takes on the characteristics of early Wakese. A sentence like, for example, ‘Curious mice never squeal’ reads in two ways, either as sense or nonsense, either as ‘it is curious mice never squeal in the claws of a cat’, which may point to Bloom’s unsquealing self in the claws of Molly, or as radical nonsense, as a mock-nonsensical proverb: curious mice never squeal, like Chomsky’s famous ‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’. The cat’s ‘shameclosing eyes’ (U 4.33) import into the text a logic of the word as pass-word, and of the signifier as equally black, lithe, smooth and proliferating. ‘James’ surfaces up, while the phrase is structured as a one-dimensional M¨obius tube, tugging chiasmically into two opposite directions. The adjective could mean either closing out of shame, or putting an end to shame, thus signalling either a beginning (a wornout, guilt-ridden love triangle story) or an end (no jealousy, but ‘jalousies’, shame being simply shut or shuttered out of existence). This could be reformulated as an alpha/omega opposition – back to the a/o pattern, the shame/closing model that recurs throughout the Wake. The cat, the lithe glossy symptom of letters and glossolalia, brings in an element of porosity

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in the text, creating an overlap between authority and ‘otherity’, and creeps and curls right in the midst of the a/o opposition. Merleau-Ponty formulates a similar type of exchange or porosity between object and subject: [. . .] the body sensed and the body sentient are as the obverse and the reverse, or again, as two segments of one sole circular course which goes above from left to right and below from right to left, but which is but one sole movement in its two phases. [. . .] We have to reject the age-old assumptions that put the body in the world and the seer in the body, or, conversely, the world and the body in the seer as in a box. Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?17

Bloom’s mock-serious close examination of the ‘flesh’ of the world, the grain of the cat’s tongue, rewrites phenomenology into a more fleshly (s)catology, where, beneath the puss and the plate of milk, other signifiers bloom. The cat, in more than one way, ‘tips’: ‘she tipped three times and licked lightly’ (U 4.39–40). What could be seen as a Trinitarian, Vichian ritual – thrice tipping – is here metamorphosed, overlapped, ironed out into a lithe, smooth and labial lightly-licking, through which the text tips from logos to nomos, from a narrative of the fall (tipping as falling) to a sensuous tale of tongues. The verb ‘to lick’ recurs in the paragraph: ‘He listened to her licking lap. [. . .] She lapped slower, then licking the saucer clean. [. . .] To lap better, all porous holes’ (U 4.43–8), the last phrase reading also in two ways, either as a gross malapropism, or as a dense cluster of puns, where a rhizomatic connection between holes, pores and poring is being made. The phrase, after much poring, resonates like a slightly uncouth pun telescoping ‘porous holes’ into ‘parasols’, at which point the umbrella series seeps into the text, thus suggesting one thing and its opposite – porosity as well as its obverse side, waterproofness and protection – and reverberates in its microfissures the overlapping procedures of the entire textual unconscious. The holes of the cat’s tongue signal the porous holes of Joyce’s lithe letter in the Wake. The cat’s tongue reads as a catachresis for Joycean writing. catachresis, cataglot tism, catapult : room to swing a c at Catachresis appears in Jacques Derrida’s Glas in two different lights, either as a trope of the fall, or, like catafalque, as rather curiously and obliquely related to the cat, in, yet once more, two of its possible etymologies. Derrida quotes two sources, Diez and Du Cange:

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According to Du Cange, cata derives from the Low Latin catus, a war machine called cat [cathouse] after the animal; and, according to Diez, from catare, to see, to regard; after all, finally, these two etymologies merge, since catus, cat, and catare, to regard, share the same root.18

These few words weave together a number of loose threads which to a large extent Jacques Derrida leaves aside and slurs over by dismissing as overlap, or confusion of etymologies, what seems to be, rather, a fundamental lexical clinamen or passage to the limit across two radically different ways of thinking – catus versus catare, war machine versus state apparatus or law, nomos versus logos, to take up Deleuze and Guattari’s terms. This is how they define the ‘war machine’ – the cat or cathouse of Deleuzian metamorphosis being different from the Derridean cathouse of deconstruction: [T]he war machine [. . .] seems to be irreducible to the State apparatus, to be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law [. . .], a celerity against gravity, secrecy against the public, a power against sovereignty, a machine against the apparatus. (TP 352)

Catus has become ‘cathouse’ or cat in English, in the sense of a war device (catapult), a ‘movable penthouse used in early times by besiegers to protect themselves in approaching fortifications’19 – what, in French, is also called a bricole, a word on which Jean-Michel Rabat´e puns by transforming it into ‘a brick-hole, a hole in the brick-wall’, but which also connects with LeviStraussian bricolage and with Bloom’s holey metaphors.20 Beneath the ‘cat’ order-word lurks the ‘cathouse’ pass-word, a war machine aiming against the ‘state’ apparatus of meaning, a catachresis diverting proper meanings into figurative ones. The cat’s ‘porous’ tongue functions as a catachresis, as ‘something which serves to clear an opening in language’, to quote Lorraine Weir in ‘From Catechism to Catachresis’ (228). She adds, however, that it also serves to ‘enact the absence of name’ (228), and situates her analysis within a more general enquiry into what she sees as ‘tropes of the Fall in Derrida’s Glas’ (220), namely catachresis, catafalque, cataglottism. What this Deleuzian reading takes issue with is Weir’s focus on lack, loss, rather than gloss, and on glas as death-knell rather than, equally importantly, glace. Her approach misreads Derrida’s title by linking it to ‘the glassy medium of the medieval speculum’ rather than to the one-dimensional, icy substance that smoothes out logos into nomos – and gloss. Derrida’s book is also a joyous or ‘joycy’ text about felix culpa rather than on culpa seen as lack and loss. It rewrites the ‘Phall’ (FW 4.15), rather than the Fall, and functions, like the Joycean text, as a cathouse or war/whore machine – which is yet another alternative,

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but quite pregnant, meaning of cathouse.21 Weir rephrases the Derridean definition as follows: Cataglottism, the ‘use of abstruse words’, becomes catafalque, bearer of the corpse of language and authorial imprimatur, becomes catachresis, the transformation of language through the trope of cataglottism enshrined through the agency of death upon a catafalque (author, book, reader, arche-text, writing) which is the Fall, tomb (tombe) and tome of the catachretic text. (220)

The overwriting of the shrine over the script, the grave over the engraving, the tomb over the tome, erroneously leaves behind the first meaning of ‘fall’ as tomber, where the initial consonant triggers off a series of fortunate/felix or phall-ic dissonances in the corpse-related postmortem credo of postmodernism. When quoted and analysed in its entirety, Derrida’s definition of catachresis as quoted in Glas combines two unrelated, somehow dissonant, meanings: Trope wherein a word is diverted from its proper sense and is taken up in common language to designate another thing with some analogy to the object initially expressed; for example, a tongue [langue], since the tongue is the chief organ of spoken language [. . .] Musical term. Harsh and unfamiliar dissonance. (220)

The ‘porous holes’ of the cat’s tongue operate catachrestically, in the two meanings of the term – as trope as well as a dissonance, as metaphor for Joyce’s porous Wakean tongue, as well as harsh and unfamiliar pun collapsing porous holes into parasols. The first reading will point to the lapsus-oriented interpretation of the Joycean corpus/corpse, and will fall, yet once more, into the traps and tropes of deconstruction perceived as a state apparatus rather than as bricole, cathouse, war machine – Derrida’s catachrestic and porous glas being then misread, reformed into a heavy-duty, representation-bound concept, enmeshed in speculative, death-knell interpretations. The second reading will shift from the lapsing to the lapping, from the cat to the cathouse and the catapult, from logos to nomos. bricoles and brick-holes Joyce’s cat, like a cat’s cradle, a game very much like Lacan’s Borromean knots, weaves together the two ends of the Joycean thread, the culpa and the felix. The phrase ‘porous hole’ reads, in its full extension, as ‘all porous holes’ (emphases added) – the word ‘hall’ appearing more than once in the ‘Calypso’ text, as if in catachrestic accordance with the programmatic sentence uttered in a rather inconspicuous story in Dubliners, ‘A Mother’,

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where ‘the noise of the hall became more audible’ (D 143). On the echochamber effects of the syllable ‘all’ Rabat´e has already cleared much ground, in relation to the following Wake passage: ‘turn wheel again to the whole of the wall. [. . .] There was once upon a wall and a hooghoogwall a was and such a wallhole did exist’ (FW 69.5–8). He writes: By condensing the two English terms for ‘whole’: All and Whole in Wallhole, Joyce makes the hole arise from the whole. The reader is always between the hole of reading, between two references which disperse meanings and times [. . .], and the whole of the whole book taken as a closed system [. . .]22

The a/o opposition surfaces up again in the wall/hole coupling, except that two more words join the first couple in a lexical square dance: wall, whole, hole, all. The series is disrupted, however, by the odd word out: ‘hall’, which brings up some measure of catachrestic dissonance within the clearcut opposition between le tout/le trou: all, hole, the two ends of a logocentric approach. The book’s textual and sexual economy reads differently once some attention is paid to the hall, the entrance hole, neither a hole nor a whole, but a lateral or clitoral space (puss, after all), the lap as well as locus of the lapping. The odd ‘man’ out in the series, the hall, interrupts the fall-ocentric logic by functioning as a lap, the place of the lapping rather than that of the lapsing; or the place of ALP. Much caterwauling is at work in the ‘Calypso’ text. There is, literally, noise in the hall. The Wake hovers between sets of overlapping pairs – wall/hole, wall/hall – with the difference that the a/o opposition or, in Deleuzian terms, stratum is refined out of existence into a paronomastic, repetitive series based on a/a echoes – in the second pair – to create a smooth, unstriated space, where the linear becomes a ligne de fuite, leakage point as well as line of flight. One of the ‘leakage points’ of the cat plateau is the cat’s plate, the milk, and its lactic, latent, and para-lactic contents. milk, or joyce’s pharmacy The milk series or milky way through Joyce’s texts opens onto nomadic avenues, paths related to Deleuzian nomos, for which a possible adaptation could be uncharted cow-country. Sandycove milk is called for in the early breakfast scene of Ulysses and returns in the last pages, where Molly Bloom mentions ‘Albion milk and sulphur soap’ (U 18.1194), as well as ‘that white thing’. The latent or para(l)lactic references to the lacteal cast some light on the lapping process. In L’Officine des sens, Piero Camporesi enquires into the anthropology of, among other substances, milk, and stresses its doubleness, its twofold nature, according to the lactatio mystica of St Bernard:

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Saint Bernard avait repr´esent´e la lactatio mystica: dans le lait coexistent deux principes, deux substances de signe diff´erent, l’une positive, l’autre n´egative. L’une donnera vie au beurre, l’autre au fromage.23

In another piece of milk- but also Joyce-related anthropology, Camporesi writes: Les barbares trouvaient leur identit´e dans le lait, peu importait qu’il fˆut de jument, d’ˆanesse, de chamelle, de brebis ou de ch`evre. Carburant alimentaire des peuplades d´eracin´es, des tribus sauvages se consacrant a` l’´elevage des moutons, s’adonnant aux incursions violentes, aux irruptions soudaines, avides de latitudes nouvelles, assoiff´es d’horizons chim´eriques, sanguinaires comme ces hordes scythes qui, apr`es avoir aveugl´e leurs ennemis captur´es et r´eduits a` l’esclavage [. . .], les contraignaient a` traire et a` cailler le lait des troupeaux extermin´es – peuple, selon H´erodote et Hippocrate, imbu de mollities ac frigiditas. Ils boivent des rations d´emesur´ees de lait de jument [. . .] Cette surabondance d’humeurs rend les femmes des steppes grasses et st´eriles [. . .]. Elles ont des menstruations sporadiques et incertaines, le col de la matrice dilat´e par l’ob´esit´e, le ventre frigide et mou, elles sont oisives et adipeuses – pingues, ventresque earum frigidi et molles. Eff´emin´es, les hommes se font souvent eunuques, e´prouvant un penchant irr´esistible pour les travaux f´eminins.24

The above description provides an oblique commentary on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomos – closely connected to tribal, nomadic space – seen from within the over-striated, mental space of logos inhabited by Herodotus and Hippocrates. It also reads as a polytropic commentary on Joyce’s own texts, which bear the marks of uprootedness and European nomadism, as well as of Molly’s singular ‘mollities’ and fitful menses. Milk is a trope: it literally turns, from Sandycove to Albion milk, from Irishness to Britishness, while retaining, beneath its white, order-word-like surface, the secret blackness of the pass-word (see above). Molly Bloom’s lappings and overlappings produce what Deleuze and Guattari have termed a minor language, one in which meaning ‘passes’ into new territory, whether uncharted bogland or the nomadic plateaus of Howth Hill and environs.25 Dublin, as a fictional city, resists the territory of logos, law and arborescent space; it smooths itself out into a nomadic space, where Bloom’s wanderings and zigzaggings redistribute space into lines of variation, lines of flight. ‘Even the most striated city gives rise to smooth spaces: to live in a city as a nomad, or as a cave-dweller. Movements, speed and slowness, are sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space’ (TP 500) – or, in French, ‘un espace lisse’, as in U/lisse. Dublin is literally dub-lined, lined with ‘other’ lines, dubbed and doubled with other laps, where the Other, to take up Heidegger’s formulation in Being and Time (124), duplicates the self, of which it provides what he calls in German a Dublette.

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1 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 110. Hereafter quoted as TP followed by the page number. 2 The adjective is here used for the sake of simplicity, though Deleuze actively resists categorization; a full and unwieldy adjective form could be Deleuze-andGuattarian, which is in itself an encouragement not to resort to the use of an adjective. 3 The Winter 1993 issue of the James Joyce Quarterly contains a ‘Deleuze-Guattari Cluster’, four essays which attempt to reconceptualize Joyce’s writing. None of them offers micro-readings, local or molecular approaches to the Joycean text. Relying entirely on the English translation may also result in a number of mis- or under-readings. The first essay (Reizbaum, ‘The Minor Work of James Joyce’) hovers between minor literature and minority literature, itself yet another orderword. The third essay (Miller, ‘Beyond Recognition: Reading the Unconscious in the “Ithaca” Episode of Ulysses’) analyses the ‘productive function of the textual unconscious’ (214) but does so in connection with a specific reading of ‘the meaning of fluid waste’ (Bloom and Stephen’s shared act of micturition), without enrolling the line-of-flight concept, in its proper acceptation (point or line of leakage). 4 Brian Massumi, the translator of Deleuze and Guattari, adds an important note to the translation of ligne de fuite: ‘Fuite covers not only the act of fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the distance (the vanishing point in a painting is a point de fuite). It has no relation to flying’ (TP xvi). 5 Weir, ‘From Catechism to Catachresis: Aspects of Joycean Pedagogy in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake’, 220. The essay was reworked as chapter 3 of Writing Joyce. A Semiotics of the Joyce System, 29–53. 6 Unfortunately permission was not granted to quote from Joyce’s story, now known as The Cat and the Devil (see ‘Works cited’). 7 The relevance for Finnegans Wake of Joyce’s tale to his grandson is discussed in Janet Lewis, ‘The Cat and the Devil and Finnegans Wake’. 8 Lacan, Le S´eminaire. Livre XX. Encore, 37. Trans.: ‘What happens in Joyce? The signified is loaded with the signifier. It is because the signifiers get entangled, jumbled up, and dovetail – read Finnegan’s Wake – that something takes place which, as signified, may seem enigmatic, but is the nearest thing to what we analysts, through the analytical discourse, have to read – the lapsus. It is as lapsus that it makes sense, which means that it can be read in a number of different ways. But then it is also the reason why it makes for uneasy reading, or for misreading, or for no reading at all.’ (Translation mine.) 9 As, for example, in Lacan’s Eleventh Seminar, translated as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, passim. Both texts, the psychoanalytical and the philosophical, were published in 1964 (posthumously in the case of MerleauPonty). 10 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 125. 11 Ibid., 150–1.

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12 See e.g. Mahaffey, ‘“Minxing marrage and making loof”: Anti-Oedipal Reading’ – a reading which remains mostly geared to traditional, humanistic critical paths, and owes little to Deleuze and Guattari, as in the following: ‘Joyce rehearses the hackneyed hope that marriage will bring both sex and friendship, a lap and a pal as well as ALP’ (230). The main question asked, ‘What are the implications of such a view of love for an understanding of Finnegans Wake?’, also remains far off any anti-Oedipal mark. 13 Rabat´e, Joyce upon the Void, 131. 14 Riquelme, Teller and Tale in Joyce’s Fiction, 92. 15 See Brivic, The Veil of Signs, 171ff. 16 See e.g. Chevalier and Gheerbrant, eds., Le Dictionnaire des Symboles, 785. 17 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 138. 18 Derrida, Glas, 2, second column (parenthesis mine). 19 The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘cat’, II, 6a. 20 Rabat´e, ‘Lapsus ex Machina’, 80. 21 One of its most jouissance-enhancing columns is the one devoted to Jean Genet’s works, among which The Balcony – also linked, etymologically, to cataf alque/balk – and to the boxon, i.e. brothel or cathouse. 22 Rabat´e, Joyce upon the Void, 128. 23 Camporesi, L’Officine des sens, une anthropologie baroque, 35. Trans.: ‘Saint Bernard represented lactatio mystica; two principles coexist in milk, two substances of a different sign: one positive, the other negative. One will beget butter, the other cheese.’ (This and subsequent English translations mine.) 24 Ibid., 19–20. Trans.: ‘Barbarians found their identity through milk, whether it be mare’s, ass’s, camel’s, ewe’s or goat’s. A staple food for uprooted populations, for uncouth hordes of sheep-breeders indulging in violent assaults, sudden attacks, longing for new horizons, hankering after unheard-of frontiers, as bloodthirsty as the Scythian hordes which, once they had captured, enslaved and blinded their enemies [. . .], forced them to milk and curdle the milk of their decimated herds – a people, according to Herodotus and Hippocrates, imbued with mollities ac frigiditas. They will drink measureless amounts of mare’s milk [. . .]. Such a surfeit of humours renders the women of the steppes fat and sterile [. . .]. They have uncertain, fitful menses, their cervixes bloated with fat, their bellies frigid and flabby, they are obese and idle – pingues, ventresque earum frigidi et molles. As to the men, they are womanly and often become eunuchs, irresistibly drawn to womanly chores.’ 25 Their notion of ‘minority’ becomes reterritorialized in Reizbaum’s essay, ‘The Minor Work of James Joyce’. Reizbaum rehistoricizes the (fundamentally territorial, or geographic) minor, and steers away from Deleuzian thinking in statements such as the following: ‘I want to talk about Joyce’s work as minor in the context of modernism and nationalism’ (179), which amounts to piling order-word upon order-word.

chapter 7

‘sound sense’; or ‘tralala’ / ‘moocow’: Joyce and the anathema of writing Thomas Docherty

How might a writer represent infancy? Given the fact that the infant – infans – by definition, is one who has not as yet entered language, there is a sense in which it is true to say that infancy is fundamentally inimical to writing, that infancy is writing’s anathema. By extension, it would further follow that infancy would be inimical also to representation in language or even to representation as such. One further consequence of such a claim that infancy is inimical to writing is that infancy is defined as a condition which must equally be distanced from the basic attributes of writing, including the very faculty of understanding itself. How might we understand, then, a writing about childhood? Yet more important still for present purposes, how might the writer of an autobiographical text ‘understand’ herself or himself; and how might one write oneself into a life from the starting point of infancy? In short, how might one write one’s own necessary distance from language; how might one begin A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? The proposition regarding the distance between infancy and representation has a distinguished history as a problem for philosophy; Aristotle indicated the basic link between infancy and imitation in the Poetics. But such an easy intimacy comes under scrutiny in modernity, when Cl´ement Rosset argues for an ‘idiocy’ (related to an ‘idiosyncrasy’) in the real: the real, for Rosset, is that which is conditioned precisely by its singularity, by its unavailability for representation or any other form of doubling;1 and hence we can establish a different kind of link between the real and the ‘idiocy’ of the infant – that Wordsworthian ‘Idiot Boy’ – who has an ostensibly limited relation to language. The Idiot Boy’s text (and Romanticism itself ) ends close to where Joyce’s (and Modernism) begins: The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo, And the sun did shine so cold!2 112

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Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. . . . (P 7)

Such a beginning establishes what has conventionally become known as that ironic distance between Joyce and Stephen which is considered to be constitutive of the substance, point and style of A Portrait; and this issue of a certain ‘distance’ will be central to the questions I shall pose to Joyce’s text in what follows. Joyce determinedly wrote at a distance: primarily, of course, he wrote at a distance from the geographical locatedness of his origins, infantile or other, in Dublin. Yet, writing from a distance, he nonetheless wrote parables of intimacy, one of the functions of which was to represent precisely and as accurately as possible that (his) historical origin and geographical location. Most frequently in recent times, this has resulted in a particular attitude to Joyce, which has highlighted the issue of ‘presence’ or of Being in his work; and criticism has begun fairly insistently to regard him as a proto-poststructuralist, sceptical of any trace of a metaphysics of presence.3 It is as if we have taken a pleasure in finding Derrida avant la lettre in the texts of Joyce; and, indeed, even Derrida himself has done so to some extent, especially in the essay ‘Two Words for Joyce’, in which the complexity of Finnegans Wake is, if not encapsulated, at least summed up in the rather infantile phrase, ‘he war’.4 It hardly needs stating, of course, that in such a manoeuvre Derrida reduplicates the questions of distance and intimacy again: Joyce’s distance from Derrida marked by the uncanny proximity of their thought, style, language. In this present argument, I wish to counter this tendency to some extent, by considering the relation between infancy and experience in Joyce. The Portrait ends with Stephen claiming that ‘I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’ (P 252–3). While contemporary political – especially postcolonial – criticism has tended to focus on the latter half of this sentence, the first half, like the infantile opening sentences of the text as a whole, has not been considered adequately enough.5 The result is that not sufficient attention has been paid to what is at stake in the opening of the Portrait, with its ostensibly rather banal onomatopoeia, focused on the ‘moocow’, despite Kenner’s early remarks on the ‘contrapuntal opening’.6 It is around this word, in fact – this ‘one word for Joyce’ – that I will make the argument of the present essay. Joyce’s text, I suggested above, begins where that of Romanticism ends; and in what follows here I would like to theorize this more fully. Despite

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the problems or self-contradiction involved in the seemingly oxymoronic notion of the infantile text, it is clear that infancy has at least been written about rather frequently and in various ways. Giorgio Agamben, writing of the ‘idea of language’, offers what could almost pass as a definition of Romanticism, and of the human predicament with which Romanticism seeks to deal, in terms that are centrally relevant to the present argument: Seule la parole nous met en contact avec les choses muettes. La nature et les animaux sont toujours d´ej`a prisonniers d’une langue, ils ne cessent de parler et de r´epondre a` des signes, mˆeme en se taisant; l’homme seul parvient a` interrompre, dans la parole, la langue infinie de la nature et a` se poser pour un instant face aux choses muettes. La rose informul´ee, l’id´ee de la rose n’existe que pour l’homme.7

For the Romantics, and especially for Wordsworth, infancy was an extraordinarily privileged arena of supposed insight and of understanding, precisely (and paradoxically) because of its linguistic incapacities and difficulties. The infant was the rustic in the most extreme, even parodic, form; and, like the primitive rustic, the child is seen to be conditioned by that originary spirit which has not yet suffered the traces of history or of the epistemological conditioning of ontological experience through the vagaries and ideological deformations of a language and a representation whose effect is to distance the subject from her or his experience – a distancing which, as postcolonial theory shows, informs much of the substance of Joyce. Consequently, in the Romanticism from which Joyce’s text begins at least, the child is presented as being closer to the truth than the adult, even if she or he cannot speak the truth. Indeed, it is precisely the linguistic capacity itself – the ability to say ‘I’ – which causes the major problem of alienation for Romanticism: ‘I’, at the moment of its articulation, distances itself, distances ‘I’, from the world in the very instant of claiming an identity with or proximity to the world, for ‘I’ marks a consciousness of self alongside or metonymically adjacent to a consciousness of the world, indeed a consciousness of self which is not part of the condition of infancy. By implication, the infant sitting on the cusp between Romanticism and Modernism has to be considered as the ‘I’ which is not ruptured and alienated by self-consciousness. It is, in short, another term for what Coleridge called the primary imagination (in an argument which actually seems to consider the relation between fancy and in-fancy): The imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite i am.8

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And Coleridge knows that one way to this imagination for those of us fallen to the secondary level is through the logic of the auto-reflexive writing of the Bildungsroman or of the modernist K¨unstlerroman such as A Portrait, for ‘We begin with the i know myself , in order to end with the absolute i am.’ (154) This Romantic predicament is, of course, exactly what de Man later found to be a primary condition of deconstruction: the rupture between the empirical self (which we might call infantile – or Stephen) and the linguistic self (which grows only in ever-increasing knowledge of itself as a linguistic entity, at the cost of losing contact with the empirical realm of material history – what we might call ‘Joyce’ or the loss of experience itself ). In what follows, I shall characterize this problem – in which a referential truth is compensated for by a prioritization of style in the form of a demand for linguistic coherence as a measure of truth – as a primary aspect not of deconstruction as such, but rather of the modern in and through which Joyce negotiates the relation between himself as a writer and himself as Stephen or as one who can undergo precisely the experiences of which Joyce writes.9 By the mid-nineteenth century, the peculiar intimacy between childhood and truth had been further developed. Indeed, as Ari`es and others have shown, ‘childhood’ as a concept had been invented for specific social purposes; and infancy becomes characterized by a proximity not just to truth, but to a truth conditioned by a neo-Blakean innocence. This allows for a presentation of justice in terms of an innocent truth, and a castigation of knowledge and of the intellectual as somehow corrupt and corrupting. In Dickens, for example, the infant proffers the great narratological tool of the ‘innocent’ or neutral point of view, the naivety of which functions in fiction to reveal the truth even while it itself cannot know the truth. The Dickensian infant, ‘innocent’ of both truth and knowledge, is a direct precursor of Stephen. That child is thus the privileged site for the explorations of the great Dickensian themes of social injustice or the immorality of the supposedly ‘civilized’ but really ‘barbaric’ adult world. Given such barbarity – itself a term denoting a problematic relation to language, or a ‘foreignness’ of speech such as that experienced in the relation of HibernoEnglish to Anglo-Irish in a postcolonial situation – as a condition of the adult world, it is not surprising that, for Dickens, a specific kind of infancy can persist into biological adulthood, as the concept of the ‘grown-up child’ charted by Malcolm Andrews has shown.10 Such infancy now works as a counter to barbarism, serving a political purpose every bit as much as it serves an aesthetic or narratological function. Joyce inherits this.

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In late modernity, this attitude to the infantile evolves yet further: for Kafka, the childlike point of view emerges as one consistent with the production of a paranoia, admittedly a different type of paranoia from that detectable in Stephen or in the Bloom of Ulysses. On the one hand, Kafka’s infantile characters know that they are important enough to be the potential victim of the plots in which they find themselves enmeshed and whose figure they can never quite discern; on the other hand, they simultaneously know themselves to be fundamentally insignificant – unsignifying, in their illegitimized forms of speech – and they correspondingly have an extremely problematic relation to the kinds of autonomy around which a Bildungsroman, or, indeed, any autobiographical fiction, formulates itself. It is such a problematic autonomy that is central to the issue of modernity, and especially as it emerges in Joyce, whose writings, as I will now show in more detail, sit uneasily between a certain Dickensian infantilism (most especially, paradoxically, in that most linguistically ‘infantile’ of texts, the Wake) on the one hand, and a Kafkaesque consciousness of futility and of absurdity on the other. Stephen in his ‘experiences’ (however distanced, detached and aestheticized they may be) – not entirely unlike Joyce himself in his act of writing – is caught between the purity or innocence of language and the necessity or demand for a language adequate to – indeed as empirically substantive as – historical experience in all its materiality itself. In the question of the literary infant, then, we can find a different take on the question of reference in Joyce: how does Joyce address the issue of finding a language adequate to the materiality – not the complexity – of experience; or, what is at the foundations of the link between Joyce’s writing and history itself? When Joyce began to write, he inherited from the nineteenth century the great modern literary form of the Bildungsroman; and he inherited it not just as a neo-Romantic project, but also as one marked by the Flaubertian and Mallarm´ean desire to achieve a writing sustained entirely by style, un livre sur rien. In fact, of course, this desire typically results not in the modernist production of a ‘book about nothing’, but rather in the production of the ‘book about the book’ (livre sur le livre). Modernist prose inherits almost directly from Romanticism a specific problem of ‘organic form’ that shifts fundamentally for the modernist writer the relation of truth to infancy. This can be briefly and simply explained. In a word, it is the ‘logic of Frankenstein’ that drives the modernist inheritance from Romanticism. The first-generation Romantics (satirized in fact by Mary Shelley’s novel) wanted to collapse the distinction between text and poet, in accordance with Coleridge’s great rhetorical gesture: ‘What is poetry? is so nearly the

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same question with, what is a poet? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other’ (Biographia Literaria, 173). The task was to make a poem into a living and self-sustaining thing, to make the word as substantive and as ontologically present to history as a human consciousness itself. The word was at once to cause the wound between human and nature and to heal it, by mediating the relation of human autonomy to historical or natural necessity. As the autonomous human subject is identified in Romanticism precisely by self-consciousness, or the ability to reflect upon the self by the now fractured subject – conscious in nature and yet also conscious simultaneously of that consciousness and thus divorced from nature – it follows simply that the task is to make a text which structurally involves self-reflexiveness as a condition of its very existence. Such a text might be Coleridge’s infinitely tricky and proto-postmodern (Shandean, Joycean) Biographia Literaria, or it might be The Prelude, in which Wordsworth writes a poem explaining how he came to be able to write the poem which we thought we had just read and which now we must reread in a gesture which conditions the poem as auto-reflexive: the rereading reflects upon the first reading, giving us a text grounded on itself, un livre sur un livre. The text now demonstrates or enacts precisely that self-reflexiveness which the Romantics take as the very definition of human consciousness as such: Frankenstein-like, they create the ‘monstrosity’ of their own living organism in the form of the word, the poem. To read The Prelude is to hear Wordsworth’s monstrously living voice. It is this grounding of the text not so much now in its own ‘origination’ – its originary, authorizing source as one which can be precisely located in a moment of ‘beginning’ – in the infantile mind or even in something called ‘experience’, but rather in itself, a grounding which is achieved not through the content of the poem but through its form, that changes the orientation to truth into one with which Joyce will struggle when he comes to write his own Prelude, the growth of Stephen’s aesthetic development as represented in A Portrait. Joyce thus inherits a specific attitude to infancy, but it is a complex one. In the first place, the infant is intimate with truth or proximate to it in her or his very linguistic innocence (for she or he experiences purely, in a form not shaped by the ideological figurations and disfigurings or commodities of language). Yet truth is now also distancing itself from the very question of language itself, and thus distancing itself from a position which will privilege the infant in that particular way. For Joyce, there were thus two competing attitudes to truth, and consequently a problem regarding representation. The first of these attitudes, deriving fundamentally from Descartes,

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considers truth to be a function of linguistic propositions: truth is something told or concealed in language, and amenable to an ethico-linguistic analysis (thus denying any special privilege to the infant); the second sees truth as an issue of legitimation, self-legitimation (or self-grounding – autonomy – in Romantic terms), fundamentally the legitimation of an ethos (or character), of an ethical way of life. This latter ties truth to experience – not necessarily linguistic – and thus reinstates the infant as a potentially privileged site of truth. The question thus is simple, but potentially devastating for the writer: how is one to write one’s experience truthfully, now that the condition of the truth of one’s experience is seen to be antithetical to the condition of the truth of one’s language – writing? Another way of putting this question is: how to reconcile Descartes with Marx? By founding modern philosophy not on the Cogito but rather on its utterance, Descartes is able to reduce the intractable matter of experience into the manageable abstractions of language. Marx has no time for such abstractions, especially those occasioned by the collapsing of material realities into their representations, linguistic or otherwise. He begins not from the idea of women and men, but from the material conditions in and through which they articulate themselves (perhaps most tellingly in chapter 10 of the first volume of Capital, where the working-day of children is disturbingly recounted). Joyce wants a book which is stylistically self-supporting, autoreflexive (Cartesian), while yet remaining truthful to the material and historical conditions of life and experience (Marxian). For Joyce as he starts, truth is conditioned by language and experience, yet their relations to truth make them fundamentally incommensurable with each other. Joyce starts from the imitation of a childlike language, the emergence from infancy into communicative childhood in the opening pages of A Portrait. In this imitation of an uninformed or unformed ‘inhabiting’ of language, Joyce addresses the novel complexity of the relation between truth and experience. Yet he is unavoidably in the presence of what Benjamin described as the ‘increasing decay of the mimetic faculty’. Benjamin hypothesizes an entropy of mimesis, in which an ancient time is considered to have enjoyed more fully the adequacies of the mimetic faculty than our own. Dance, he claims, has as its oldest function the production of similarities. Joyce’s illustration fully demonstrates Benjamin’s point: He danced: Tralala lala Tralala tralaladdy Tralala lala Tralala lala. (P 7)

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While, visually and semiotically, this may approximate to an imitation of a dance in language, it also is semantically rather empty (and it does not quite properly imitate the sailor’s hornpipe tune to which Stephen dances. It ought to go: tralala lala tralala lalalaladdy, tralala lala tralala lalalala). But Joyce, like Benjamin, sees the intimacy between infancy and the mimetic function in its prime condition. Benjamin writes: In dance [. . .] such imitation could be produced, such similarity manipulated. But if the mimetic genius was really a life-determining force for the ancients, it is not difficult to imagine that the newborn child was thought to be in full possession of this gift, and in particular to be perfectly moulded on the structure of cosmic being.11

Benjamin points out that such similarity as is discussed here – similarity produced at the level of empirical experience – is not the primary focus for our contemporary or modern structuring of the mimetic faculty: rather, for us moderns, such similarity is effected through language and is therefore ‘non-sensuous’, as Benjamin puts it. He argues that ‘[f ]rom time immemorial the mimetic function has been conceded some influence on language’, but says also that ‘such notions remained tied to the commonplace, sensuous area of similarity’ (161); and thus we arrive at the notion of a fundamental onomatopoeia as the constituent of language as such. This, needless to say, is problematic for anyone, including Benjamin and Joyce, with a knowledge of translation and its attendant difficulties. Benjamin’s way around this is to suggest that while, for example, the various words such as ‘tree’, arbre, Baum (say) all refer to the same object even though they sound different, nonetheless a mimetic faculty can persist at the level of the script of the written language. Script thus becomes ‘an archive of non-sensuous similarities, of non-sensuous correspondences’. The result is that, for us, ‘the mimetic element in language can, like a flame, manifest itself only through a kind of bearer. This bearer is the semiotic element. Thus the coherence of words or sentences is the bearer through which, like a flash, similarity appears’ (162). Mimesis, then, is available to the modern only in glimpses, flashes, Proust’s intermittences du coeur or Woolf’s moments ‘between the acts’. It is at this point that Benjamin then turns his logic in a manner that accommodates Joyce’s infantile writing: ‘To read what was never written.’ Such reading is the most ancient: reading before all languages, from the entrails, the stars, or dances. Later the mediating link of a new kind of reading, of runes and hieroglyphs, came into use. It seems fair to suppose that these were the stages by which the mimetic gift, which was once the foundation of occult practices, gained admittance to writing and language. In

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this way language may be seen as the highest level of mimetic behaviour and the most complete archive of non-sensuous similarity: a medium into which the earlier powers of mimetic production and comprehension have passed without residue, to the point where they have liquidated those of magic. (162–3; emphasis added)

‘To read what was never written’ is, in some ways, a description of the attitude required for engaging with Finnegans Wake; but it is also intrinsic to the representation of the non-linguistic, of the noise made by a cow, for example, or the experience of a hornpipe dance. The problem of representation can be seen to be thematized as part of Joyce’s project in his writing. To state this, of course, is hardly news; yet it is true to say that the question of representation has rarely, if at all, been considered from the theorization of infancy and experience (the issue of sensuous and non-sensuous imitation) formulated in these terms taken from Benjamin or in relation to the philosophical work of Agamben. I now add to these a further consideration: Lyotard. From its very title, A Portrait brings together two distinct modalities of representational thinking: the visual and the linguistic. Lyotard’s argumentation in Discours, figure and in ‘Figure foreclosed’ indicates that the relation between these two modalities has been the determinant of that mentality which we identify as ‘modernity’; and Joyce’s collocation of them in his writing is far from accidental. Once again, a question of aesthetic distance will be seen to be important in allowing us to consider their relation in Joyce. Lyotard’s argument implicitly invites us to return to some origins of modern aesthetics. Lessing, for instance, proposed a basic distinction between the plastic arts and the narrative arts in terms of a distinction between their relative prioritizations of the categories of space and time in their internal form. According to the argument of Laoco¨on (recalled also in the beginning of ‘Proteus’), plastic arts (such as sculpture and painting) are, in a certain sense, immediate or unmediated: presence is intrinsic to their being. The arts of music and narrative, by contrast, are dominated by their relation to time, and are constructed in a mode of continuous deferral or self-distancing: absence is a fundamental condition of their very becoming. Joyce’s text responds to the antinomy between these two possibilities not just in the banal sense that a ‘portrait’ is, in the first instance, a visual term. Much more importantly, A Portrait is conditioned uncertainly between being and becoming: it is a portrait of an artist – indeed, of the very artist who makes the portrait (and thus of something whose essential being can be described with more or less mimetic adequacy); and yet it also acknowledges

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change – becoming – as the very condition of that ‘being’, in the youth of the title and in the infantilism of the opening language. This, indeed, is axiomatic to the narrative structure of the text, moving (as has been noted before) from third-person narrative form to that of the first-person journal or diary. The move, ‘from narrative to discourse’ as MacCabe describes it, is a move that fractures the text even as it unifies it: fracturing it at the level of being, unifying it at the level of becoming.12 Joyce’s own absence from Dublin and from his earlier life – the substance of the ironic distance which he establishes between himself and Stephen – is intended as a counter to the demand for Stephen’s presence as a material entity. Joyce (as writer) wants a sculptural form, as it were: he wants the kind of mimetic adequacy of Benjaminian ‘script’. This is, of course, a prescription for Finnegans Wake, where the tension between the mediate and the immediate, the plastic and the temporal, is more fully the very condition and point of the text itself. The language of the Wake is a language which tries not to be language, but to be plastic, sculptural, gestural even: presence in the very midst of absence – Beckett’s famous dictum that ‘[Finnegans Wake] is not written at all. It is not to be read – or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. [Joyce’s] writing is not about something; it is that something itself .’13 The modern, considered as an attitude rather than just as a temporal period, is conditioned by this tension between the temporal and the spatial or, better, in Lyotardian terms, between the discursive and the figural. The ‘wrong turn’, thus, in Joyce criticism, is the turn taken in which we think of his work in relation to the scriptural Saussure, rather than in relation to Fenollosa (and thus also in relation to Pound). The Fenollosan route would be another way of opening up the problem of a sensuality in Joyce, which will eventually be not just the sensuality of Lyotardian figure but the sensuality of voice: timbre – or the stamp on the envelope bearing the meanings. Figure, for Lyotard, is sensuous and voluminous, even if anorexic with regard to meaning; discourse, on the other hand, is thin to the point of invisibility, even if packed fat with signification. What we call ‘the modern’ happens whenever there is a resolution of the tension between the discursive and the figural in favour of ‘understanding’ – that is, in favour of the discursive. The modern ignores the semiotic in and through which the semantic occurs. As Joyce asks: Has any fellow [. . .] ever looked sufficiently longly at a quite everydaylooking stamped addressed envelope? Admittedly it is an outer husk: its face, in all its featureful perfection of imperfection, is its fortune [. . .]. Yet to concentrate solely

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on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is [. . .] hurtful to sound sense [. . .] (FW 109.1–15)14

It is ‘sound sense’ or the sense of sound that is important to Joyce if we are to explain the movement of the language not only of A Portrait but also of the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ in Ulysses, that section in the later text which recapitulates at the phylogenetic level the movement of language in its development seen at the ontogenetic level in the earlier novel.15 ‘Sound sense’ is lost in ‘the modern’ precisely because the modern fails to grasp anything other than a mere mimetic function to the onomatopoeia of ‘script’. For a fuller reading of the infantile, we need to attend also to the sensuality of sound, to its plasticity or figural constitution: to its ‘stamp’ or timbre. In brief, we could call the modern the collapse of the figural into the discursive. For a writer like Joyce, this poses a problem, for much of his stated intent in writing is precisely concerned with the attempt – no matter how difficult – to reconstitute the plastic, the figural, the spatial and voluminous; but a criticism that prioritizes the linguistic above all else (a broadly postSaussurean criticism) is unable to address the way in which Joyce asks us to listen to the ‘stamp’, the sound of his text, as the way into the constitution of figure. Read, for example, the early poststructuralist intervention of MacCabe, in which the Portrait makes almost exactly the move from figure into discourse, as MacCabe charts its shift from ‘narrative’ (which is akin to the messiness of figure) to discourse as such; and Joyce becomes thus explained – or explained away – in relation to the modern as a modernist, as one complicit with the loss of reference and the autonomy of linguistic self-legitimation. Yet that prioritization of the abstractions of discourse, that power of abstracting from the real to the point where one believes that one is engaging with the real even as one flees it in linguistic description of the real, is precisely what Adorno and Horkheimer castigate in modernity’s philosophical roots in the Enlightenment. It is this negation of the real or of sensuousness – indeed the negation of empiricism – that is at stake in Joyce. The stakes are explained in some of Lyotard’s confrontations with poststructuralism. Lyotard is the heir to Adorno in that he wishes to attend more fully to the materiality of history – or to experience – without always already seeing that experience as something translated into linguistic terms and thus collapsed into a matter for epistemology or ‘critique’.16 Joyce, especially as he opens his writing in A Portrait, lives and writes through the particular confrontation of discursive and figural that constitutes modernity itself.

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This modern in Joyce, as in socio-political modernity as a whole, is characterized by what Agamben has referred to as the ‘destruction of experience’ (comparable to Lyotard’s considerations of the ‘assassination of experience’ in his book on Monory).17 It is paradoxical that the more realistic Joyce tries to be – the more mimetically adequate he tries to make his text – the more removed from the actual experience of Dublin and of his life he becomes; but this, of course, is precisely the predicament of infancy. Joyce is Romanticism’s predicament writ large in the sense that his attempts to represent the empirically real gradually but consistently shift into attempts to represent linguistic representations of the real: experience gives way to language or mediation, as is abundantly clear (as I suggested above) in ‘Oxen of the Sun’. The ‘destruction of experience’, however, is not total in Joyce, despite what ‘linguistic’ or ‘discursal’ criticism would encourage us to believe. Rather, the destruction of the empirical experience is the condition on which Joyce founds the possibility of the experience – our experience – of the text; and in that experiencing of the text, Joyce produces what we might properly call the possibility of reading for the first time. The Romantic necessities of ‘rereading’ (all those texts based on auto-reflexiveness or selfrepetition in the interests of organicism) are being advanced and modified in this Joycean shift. Joyce tries to make us read experience and to experience reading, and not to read of experience nor to have the experience of reading, both of which have been the normative post-Romantic modes. Reading here is to be described in terms of an experience of the word as such, the word in itself, without reference but with volume. Hence the moocow, the tralala, the truncated words in the flow of consciousness in Ulysses or the fractured languages of Finnegans Wake; all of them precursors to Beckett’s Krapp as he experiences the sound sense in ‘spool’ in Krapp’s Last Tape. It is my point that these extraordinarily complex ‘experiments’ (or experiences) in language all begin from a consideration of the relation between infancy and experience. The loss of experience as a condition of the modern – and, by extension here, as a condition of our entering into language and into the possibilities of representation – is not a new discovery. It lies in Benjamin’s other much-cited essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. That essay is concerned with – among other things – technology; but for our present purposes, the most important concern of the essay is a question of distance. Benjamin’s attitude to the technology of cinema and photography is ambivalent. On the one hand, it promises the possibility of a politicization of the masses and suggests a capacity for the mobilization

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of popular force. Yet, as Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the 1934 Nuremberg rally, Triumph des Willens (1935), shows, this force might not necessarily be a progressive or radical force. On the other hand, in any case, Benjamin sees also that the prevalence of the political in the work of art is established at the cost of the loss of the cultic; and, even though that is often a reactionary force, yet there is a radicalizing potential in it too which we lose at our peril. The cultic is organized in the aura of the work of art, and such aura is tied firmly to the concept of authenticity. ‘The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.’18 The aura of natural objects which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is specifically characterized by distance: it is ‘the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be’ (224). This is that authenticity which speaks directly to the peculiar collocation of truth-aslanguage and truth-as-experience addressed by Joyce in his onomatopoeia, his dancing ‘tralala’, his truncated words that seem to degenerate into pure semiosis. The age of mechanical reproduction bears witness to the withering of the aura, according to Benjamin. We might now add to this that the ‘age of language’ itself bears witness to the ‘withering of experience’, or to the decay of historical being itself. The logic of this argument is that the infant is a privileged site of experience, but of an experience that must be, by definition, anathema to the very language in which we can know or describe such experience. What Joyce is after when he deploys an infantile rhetoric has nothing to do with the great poststructuralist theoretical manoeuvres of recent criticism and theory; rather, shockingly, he is after something quite extraordinarily metaphysical: the presence of experience itself. He may be unable to give us the voluminous figurality of sculpted space; he may fail in the end to give a voluminous substantiality to Dublin, substituting instead ‘geo-graphy’: but he gives the sensuality of sound, a ‘sound sense’ whose semiotic function attempts to recapture the purity of an experience unmediated by language. In short, he does not give us modernity; rather, he gives us infancy as the condition through which we are able to mediate experience with our inescapable language. This is so not just when he writes of his own infancy: it is actually the very condition of Joycean language itself, all the way from A Portrait to Finnegans Wake. In this, his position is close to a theological one, clearly; and yet this is not simply the obvious Christian theology of a ‘word made flesh’: it is, rather, a philosophy or theology whose inflection suggests that in the corporeality of the word, understanding is lost. As Cioran has it:

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‘For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened [. . .].’ No sooner are they open than the drama begins. To look without understanding – that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much.19

Cioran’s gloss of the Biblical text here speaks to the condition of infancy at the start of A Portrait where ‘his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face’ (P 7) as the infant Stephen becomes aware of the visual world around him, opening his eyes but lacking the benefits of a linguistic abstraction that would make sense – or, as we should now say, literally disfigure sense – of that world. While Stephen does not understand, Joyce’s language does: this is Cioran’s heaven and hell, with Joyce in his purgatorial middle, negotiating the two possibilities. Another of Cioran’s aphorisms encapsulates almost entirely the point of view ascribed here to Joyce as the fundamental attitude conditioning his writing: If only we could reach back before the concept, could write on a level with the senses, record the infinitesimal variations of what we touch, do what a reptile would do if it were to set about writing! (29)

In other words, if only we could write Finnegans Wake, or, in perhaps a more limited fashion, write ‘tralala’, just as Eliot would write ‘Weialala leia / Wallala leialala’ in The Waste Land. Such writing would require a reading ‘for the first time’; and in this Joyce differs fundamentally from Proust who considers listening to Vinteuil’s sonata: It was on one of these days that she happened to play for me the passage in Vinteuil’s sonata that contained the little phrase of which Swann had been so fond. But often one hears nothing when one listens for the first time to a piece of music that is at all complicated. And yet when, later on, this sonata had been played to me two or three times I found that I knew it perfectly well. And so it is not wrong to speak of hearing a thing for the first time. If one had indeed, as one supposes, received no impression from the first hearing, the second, the third would be equally ‘first hearings’ and there would be no reason why one should understand it any better after the tenth. Probably what is wanting, the first time, is not comprehension but memory.20

Joyce wants to force the possibility of every reading being a first: hence a language in which logos is ergon, an infantile language for those who, like the infant, have a reading without memory, without ‘waking’.

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1 See Rosset, L’Objet singulier. For a fuller exploration of the stakes of this argument, see my Alterities: Criticism, History, Representation. 2 Wordsworth, ‘The Idiot Boy’, Poetical Works, 104. 3 A typical collection of such influential essays is Attridge and Ferrer, eds., Poststructuralist Joyce. 4 ‘Two words for Joyce’ is reprinted in Attridge and Ferrer, eds., Post-structuralist Joyce. Derrida’s text finds a theological imperative – that of Babel – driving Joyce. In my own piece here, finding ‘one word’ for Joyce, I propose an argument in which Joyce is seen to be driven by a theological demand, certainly; but it is a demand that runs precisely counter to that of Babel. 5 For an excellent reading of Joyce in relation to the issues of the nation that have emerged from postcolonial criticism, see especially Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism, and Seamus Deane, Strange Country, 94–6, 166–8. 6 Kenner, ‘The Portrait in Perspective’, Dublin’s Joyce, 109–33, especially 114–16. 7 Agamben, Id´ee de la prose, 102. Trans.: ‘It is speech alone that puts us in contact with the silence of things. Nature, animals, are always already prisoners of a language, speaking and replying incessantly to signs, even when silent; only man manages to interrupt, in speech, the total language of nature and to place himself, for an instant, face to face with silent things. The unarticulated rose, the idea of the rose exists only for man.’ (Translation mine.) 8 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 167. 9 See Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight. De Man makes an argument in his famous ‘Rhetoric of Temporality’ essay which demonstrates, in his terms, ‘the impossibility of our being historical’, condemned as we are, according to the logic of his theoretical position, to live in the ever-escalating realm of selfconsciousness – the very substance, many say, of the modernist aesthetic experiment itself – and thus denied access to the real, lost as we are within a privileged but circumscribed consciousness. For an attack on that argument whose scope exceeds the present Joycean context, see my After Theory. 10 See Andrews, Dickens and the Grown-up Child. About the relation of ‘barbarity’ to Joyce, see Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism, and Milesi, ‘In-Law and OutLex: Some Linguistic Aspects of “Barbarity” and Nationalism in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake’. 11 Benjamin, One-Way Street and other writings, 161. 12 MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word , 62–4. 13 Beckett, ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce’, 14. 14 I am adapting Lyotard’s terminology from Discours, figure fairly freely; I explore the implications of the argument more fully in After Theory. 15 In relation to this in Ulysses, see Iser’s ‘Doing Things in Style’ in The Implied Reader, especially 187, where he shows that ‘[t]he relation between language and object becomes a mystery’. 16 This, indeed, is what I would claim to be at the centre of Lyotard’s description of the postmodern as a mood or attitude. For the full argument, see the Introduction to my Postmodernism: A Reader.

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17 See Agamben, Infancy and History, and Lyotard, L’Assassinat de l’exp´erience par la peinture: Monory. 18 Benjamin, Illuminations, 223. 19 Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, 28. This book, of course, is a kind of negation of the Romantic conception of the infant: for Cioran, ‘being born’ is itself constructive and constitutive of the ‘inconvenience’ of life, and hence the child does not enjoy the pleasure of memoration of an ideal realm but rather looks forward despairingly – if occasionally stoically – to living away from some hypothetical paradise. 20 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, I, 570.

chapter 8

Language, sexuality and the remainder in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Derek Attridge

A few pages into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the young Stephen Dedalus – not yet seven years old, if we can extrapolate from Joyce’s own life – gives grave consideration to a word he has just heard from the mouth of one of his schoolfellows: Suck was a queer word. The fellow called Simon Moonan that name because Simon Moonan used to tie the prefect’s false sleeves behind his back and the prefect used to let on to be angry. But the sound was ugly. Once he had washed his hands in the lavatory of the Wicklow Hotel and his father pulled the stopper up by the chain after and the dirty water went down through the hole in the basin. And when it had all gone down slowly the hole in the basin had made a sound like that: suck. Only louder. (I.150)1

From the point of view of modern linguistics, Stephen’s theorizing is obviously false: ugliness does not inhere in the sounds of a language, and although a culture can imbue certain sounds with negative associations, none of the three common phonemes in ‘suck’ is so affected. (Compare the same sounds in words like ‘luck’, ‘sup’, ‘musk’, and ‘success’.) Nor would water going down a drain sound, in objective, measurable terms, like the word ‘suck’ uttered in any normal human voice or accent. Although Stephen’s vigorous response cannot be explained in terms of inherent aesthetic and onomatopoeic qualities, we can find other reasons for it, reasons not consciously available to the six-year-old boy but still operative upon him. In particular, the word, as used in this schoolyard scene, evokes a realm of taboo sexuality, a realm of which Stephen would be slowly becoming aware in the schoolboy milieu of Clongowes Wood College, with the usual mixture of excitement, ignorance, guilt and fantasy. Although its overt meaning in the sentence ‘You are McGlade’s suck’, which Stephen has just overheard, is ‘favourite, sycophant’, and Stephen can make sense of it only in terms of the special relationship indicated by the prefect’s 128

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tolerance of playful behaviour on the part of the schoolboy, it possesses for him an aura of the forbidden, the sinful, the unclean, for at least two reasons that derive from the culture to which he is becoming assimilated: it echoes the primary taboo word ‘fuck’, and it names a specific sexual activity that could have taken place between the two males in question. One can imagine – and later the reader is given an example of – the half-overheard conversations among the older boys that would have granted Stephen that partial degree of sexual knowledge whose lack of specific content can invest certain words with all the more erotic power. That these subliminal associations are not just those of the grown-up reader is confirmed by Stephen’s consequent train of thought, as he recalls the visit to the Wicklow Hotel. A hotel would have been a notably adult space, and thus already a source of some disquiet for Stephen; and a visit to the washroom with his father would have added to this the ambiance of adult male sexuality. (‘Lavatory’ in this context probably means ‘washbasin’, and the term may well have had ecclesiastical associations for Stephen; at the same time, the word was already in use for a room containing a water-closet as well as a basin, and the hotel no doubt provided both. It is not many pages before the school latrine, or ‘square’, is named as a locus for schoolboy homosexuality.) Young children regularly find in ‘bathroom’ activities and vocabulary a conduit for sexual impulses which at this age have no other outlet, and Stephen’s adjective ‘dirty’ traverses a well-established pathway between excretion and sex even while it consciously refers only to the condition of the escaping water. Stephen’s unease is projected onto the sound of the draining effluent, or rather onto the sound which emerges so disquietingly from the ‘hole’ (common schoolboy slang for the female genitals, of course), and its perceived ugliness acts as a focus or correlative for the entire experience. The association of the word ‘suck’ heard on the playground with this earlier sound is an indication, therefore, not of objective aural similarity but of the mental impression made by an earlier experience of taboo sexuality, now triggered in memory. That the sexual element is conscious in neither experience is an important connection between them: it means that for Stephen they have in common a troubling yet unfathomable quality that only hindsight (that of the implicit, but concealed, adult narrator) can account for. The paragraph that follows this one exhibits the same features: a surface from which sexuality as a subject is absent, coupled with a sexual suggestiveness that can hardly have presented itself as such to the young boy but which helps to explain the peculiar intensity of his remembered experience:

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To remember that and the white look of the lavatory made him feel cold and then hot. There were two cocks that you turned and water came out: cold and hot. He felt cold and then a little hot: and he could see the names printed on the cocks. That was a very queer thing. (I.159)

Stephen makes no comment on the word ‘cock’, but it is hard not to suspect once more a subliminal awareness of its sexual meaning that is part of its fascination for him. Like ‘suck’ and most of the other words on which he does comment explicitly in this chapter – ‘belt’, ‘rump’, ‘kiss’, ‘God’, ‘wine’ – it is a monosyllabic noun with Anglo-Saxon roots.2 ‘Cock’ echoes the word ‘suck’ in sound and is linked to it semantically through the sexual activity (or fantasized activity) that involves both. The two paragraphs are also linked, beginning to end, by the word ‘queer’ – ‘Suck was a queer word. [. . .] That was a very queer thing’ – and it may be hard for the present-day reader not to assume a homosexual reference here too. However, for Stephen this is not a new word, suffused with strange and disturbing qualities; it is a common Anglo-Irish adjective that is part of his normal speech. If there is a sexual meaning to be read into it – some commentators argue that the word was already being used to mean ‘male homosexual’ by the end of the nineteenth century – it can only be as a wink on the part of the adult author to the reader. A number of studies of A Portrait have discussed the barely submerged allusions to homosexuality in these pages, as well as in some later portions of the novel.3 The sexual associations forged in these paragraphs point backwards and forwards, functioning as links in a chain of related experiences and meditations. Thus the cold and hot streams of water in the lavatory recall the description of the effect of urine on the bedsheets in the book’s opening (I.13), and strengthen the double entendre of ‘cocks’. They point forward to the hot and cold bodily sensations that accompany Stephen’s interrogation on the subject of his mother’s kiss (I.260, 271) – another word, incidentally, that prompts a linguistically false onomatopoeic explanation from Stephen (‘a tiny little noise: kiss’ (I.279)). Similarly, the ‘white look of the lavatory’, which has such an effect on the young boy (even in recollection), anticipates his dwelling on the whiteness of three characters’ hands: those of Eileen Vance (I.1008, 1257) (who is associated from the very beginning of the novel with both sexuality and sin), Tusker Boyle (I.1255) (one of the boys caught ‘smugging’ – masturbating, presumably – in the latrine), and Mr Gleeson (I.1347), who is suspected of allowing his sexual attraction to another of the delinquents, Corrigan (himself the object of

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intense physical attention from Stephen (I.1669)),4 to abrogate his punitive responsibilities. My purpose is not to develop any of these arguments further, but to investigate the relation between implicit sexuality and overt attention to language, especially to single words. For the sexual suggestiveness in A Portrait frequently occurs, as it does in the passage we have just examined, as part of Stephen’s encounters with language. (It is notable that in the second paragraph, the ‘queerness’ of the lavatory cocks appears to reside in the actual words they bear.) How is it that language can produce physical sexual effects, as it seems to in Stephen, even though at this early age he has no sexual vocabulary by means of which to describe his reaction? And how is it that language, in the form of literary writing, can produce a similar effect upon the reader – if not an actual physical response, at least an intensity and immediacy of reaction which comes close to physical sensation? Readers of A Portrait have frequently found these paragraphs, like the rest of the opening pages of the novel, remarkably vivid, and it seems likely that this vividness stems from more than just the accurate evocation of a young boy’s attempts to understand language and its relation to the world he is also trying to come to terms with. That is to say, something rings true, in the mind, in the body, about Stephen’s false linguistic theorizing: Joyce makes it possible for the reader to share his protagonist’s experience of a word’s peculiar intensity and physicality when uttered in a certain context. The early reviews of A Portrait testify to the shock of an encounter with language that has an unwontedly direct effect, often combined with a sense of disgust that is itself perhaps testimony to the immediacy of the feelings and sensations conveyed. The following are a few snippets, which could be multiplied at great length, all from 1917 reviews: ‘an astonishingly powerful and extraordinarily dirty study [. . .] absolutely true to life – but what a life!’ (Everyman); ‘Mr. Joyce has a cloacal obsession [. . .] by far the most living and convincing picture that exists of an Irish Catholic upbringing’ (H. G. Wells, Nation); ‘like the unwilled intensity of dreams’ (A. Clutton-Brock, Times Literary Supplement); ‘brutal probing of the depths of uncleanness’ (Literary World and Reader); ‘What he sees he can reproduce in words with a precision as rare as it is subtle [. . .] Mr. Joyce plunges and drags his readers after him into the slime of foul sewers’ (Freeman’s Journal).5 We are less likely to be disgusted today, and perhaps the intensity of our reaction is to that degree dulled, but many readers continue to report that intensity and precision of physical and mental evocation are what draws them repeatedly back to A Portrait, and particularly to its opening chapter.

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I want to approach this question with the help of a series of three fascinating books by Jean-Jacques Lecercle which explore the repeated manifestation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature of what he calls the ‘remainder’ – those aspects of language to which most linguistic theories fail to do justice, but on which the working of language depends. These are: Philosophy Through the Looking-Glass (1985), The Violence of Language (1990), and Philosophy of Nonsense (1994).6 Although Lecercle focuses on texts that take greater linguistic and generic liberties than A Portrait, such as the works of Lewis Carroll, Jean-Pierre Brisset, and Raymond Roussel (the only references to Joyce are to Finnegans Wake), his interest is primarily in the contribution these works make to our understanding of language. Any language, he argues, operates in accordance with four propositions, not all of which are compatible with one another (and here I summarize brutally): (1) Language is a material product of the body. (2) Language is an abstract system, independent of the body. (3) The speaker speaks the language, saying freely what he or she means. (4) The language speaks, and meaning belongs to the community before it belongs to the speaker.7 What Lecercle calls the ‘commonsensical’ view of language (The Violence of Language, 107), which is at the heart of Saussurean and Chomskyan linguistics as well, combines propositions (2) and (3): a language is an abstract system of rules which the speaker utilizes in order to construct sentences – sentences which, as Chomsky influentially pointed out, can be different from all those that have ever been uttered in the prior history of humanity. The Saussurean dichotomy of langue and parole, and the Chomskyan dichotomy of competence and performance, map this dual character of language as at once, and interdependently, suprahuman system and human act. Both common sense and theoretical linguistics acknowledge that there is an element of truth in (1) and (4), but these propositions are kept firmly in their place: the bodily specificity of language is governed by its systematic organization, and the shared meanings of language are at the disposal of the individual speaker. It is when (1) and (4) begin to transgress their allotted frontiers that we become aware of the remainder, that aspect of language’s functioning which, in spite of its necessity, is normally suppressed from our conceptions of it. The remainder imparts to utterances powerful effects of various kinds, though they cannot be described in purely conceptual terms. This is not to say that the remainder is prelinguistic (or presymbolic); it may just as easily be manifested in an excess of meaning as in a lack of it. The fact

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that language necessarily employs physical signifiers which have their own complex interconnections (at a purely material level), and connections with the worlds of meaning, feeling and action, together with the fact that the meanings conveyed by any item of language always depend on its context, and that contexts are variable and inexhaustible – these facts result in an ever-present possibility that an utterance, written or spoken, will convey more than could be understood in terms of a model of ‘intention’ or ‘communication’. To take one relatively simple example: because of the nature of language, the pun is always waiting round the corner, and its effects can never be fully controlled; thus the reader can never know whether in the famous penultimate sentence of A Portrait the word ‘forge’ means not only ‘make’ but also ‘fake’. An obvious instance of the remainder at work is the speech or writing of many of those who are held – partly because they use language in this way – to be mentally ill: the language of delirium, schizophrenia, glossolalia. To let one’s speech be dominated by the body that articulates it, rather than subordinating diaphragm, larynx, tongue, teeth and lips to a system, is to be regarded as passing beyond the bounds of sanity; and the same judgement awaits anyone who surrenders the individual’s power over the system, and instead allows the language (and hence the culture that has produced it) to determine what is spoken or written – which might be series of clich´es, endless lists, or constantly repeated words and phrases (one thinks, in Dubliners, of Eveline’s mother’s eternal ‘Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!’). Both these proclivities may be present simultaneously, of course, and language may revert at once to its physiological and its cultural roots. There are two other, more familiar, discourses that are rendered distinctive by their openness to the remainder: the language of children and the language of literature.8 Here, of course, we find ourselves back with the young Stephen at the beginning of A Portrait. Stephen’s bodily response to the word ‘suck’ (heightened by his feverish condition, and – as we have seen – expressed in part by the recall of an earlier, and more obviously physical, experience) does not belong to the linguist’s domain of explanation and analysis. The young boy perceives the word as belonging to others, and as itself disturbingly other, and he finds himself strongly affected by the word’s physical, acoustic properties, so much so that it can be associated with a purely non-linguistic sound, one which had also crystallized for him an intense experience of alienation.9 Moreover, the word’s physical potency is, as we have seen, profoundly linked to the sexual and the erotic, even though this is not a way of thinking available to Stephen at this age – in fact, it is

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because the thought of sexuality itself is not possible that the sexual quality is felt so directly as a physical sensation. Joyce, one might go so far as to say, is proposing a view of the latency period that in some ways extends and particularizes Freud’s rather exiguous account. The rapid development of linguistic ability in this period (from five or six to puberty), Joyce seems to suggest, coincides with a stage of sexual development in which intense physical sensations are not linked to specific sexual knowledge, images or practices; words may therefore be experienced as themselves suffused with (unnamed and unnamable) sexual impulses, at once highly physical and beyond the control of the speaker. ‘Rump’, ‘suck’, ‘kiss’ and ‘smugging’ are all words that seem to be particularly charged for the young Stephen in this way. If we turn back to the opening paragraphs of A Portrait, to what is presumably the beginning of Stephen’s encounter with language, we find a response that contrasts with this somewhat later development. Language begins, certainly, as the language of the other – the language of the father, no less, telling him the story of the ‘moocow’ and ‘baby tuckoo’ – but it is immediately appropriated by the child: ‘He was baby tuckoo’ (I.7). Even if language is misappropriated, as when the phrase ‘the wild rose blossoms’ becomes in the little boy’s articulation ‘the geen wothe botheth’, there is no hint of anxiety. Rather, the sense of possession is complete (even though the reader is aware of the operation of the father’s authority): ‘He sang that song. That was his song.’ The bodily aspect of language is a source of pleasure, not unease, as the child discovers the physical gratification of rhythmic utterance. The result, of course, is nonsense, both at the level of the ‘words’ produced (especially now that Joyce’s geen has been restored to the text), and at the level of the sentence itself. As a more mature six-year-old, Stephen will correct himself by dismissing the possibility of a green rose, though his uncertainty at this later stage about the relation of language to the world emerges in an immediate retraction of this dismissal: ‘But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could’ (I.197). In infancy, however, there are no such uncertainties. Nonsense, the product of Lecercle’s propositions (1) and (4) impinging heavily on (2) and (3), so that creativity arises not from the imperious use of an abstract system but from a willingness to let both the body and the language community speak, is produced in confidence and celebration.10 Nonsense, together with repetition, also becomes the vehicle for rhythm and melody when, in the same initial sequence, Stephen dances to his mother’s playing of the sailor’s hornpipe: ‘Tralala lala / Tralala tralaladdy / Tralala lala / Tralala lala’ (I.17). But very soon rhyme, rhythm and repetition become invested with fear and guilt, and the sequence of paragraphs seems

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to suggest that these are associated with Stephen’s incipient sexual attraction to Eileen Vance (who, we later learn, was the object of Dante’s disapproval on account of her family’s Protestantism (I.999)): When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen. He hid under the table. His mother said: – O, Stephen will apologise. Dante said: – O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes. Pull out his eyes, Apologise, Apologise, Pull out his eyes. Apologise, Pull out his eyes, Pull out his eyes, Apologise.

(I.29–41)

Here the remainder of language overwhelms its rational communicative function: words are progressively emptied of their meaning through repetition, rhyming and rhythmicization and are transformed into the sounds of physical aggression and vindictiveness. Though the source of the utterance is not identified, it has all the markings of a children’s chant – another manifestation, that is, of the speech of the linguistic community rather than of a single individual exploiting the creative possibilities of language.11 The other discourse which exploits the potential of the linguistic remainder is literature. Historically, it has been poetry which has found a variety of means to release the bodily dimension of speech from its domination by language’s rational-communicative function, and it has been poets, above all, who have testified to a mode of composition in which the controlling consciousness of the language-user is relaxed in order to allow the language’s own proclivities – which is to say, those of the inherited culture, mediated by an individual and partly unconscious psyche and by the urgings of the body – to determine to some degree the words of the poem. The result, for the successful poet, is not, of course, the nonsensical or clich´e-ridden speech of the schizophrenic, but it may be quite close to the intense engagement that characterizes some childhood involvements with words. Romantic poetry is, of course, the richest body of literature to have exploited these resources. By the end of the nineteenth century, the study of Indo-European languages had invested individual words with a new historical and material

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specificity; each word (understood as essentially spoken, not written) was seen to have a concrete history, not only in terms of shifts in meaning but in terms of changes in sound, occurring in accordance with strict historical laws beyond speakers’ or language communities’ control.12 When Joyce was writing A Portrait, the only poet in English who had been able to capitalize fully on this new sense of the materiality and historicity of words was Gerard Manley Hopkins, and his work was not widely known until a collection of his poems was published by Robert Bridges in 1918, four years after the serialization of A Portrait began. In French, Mallarm´e – whose writing Joyce certainly did have some familiarity with13 – had found ways to foreground individual words as both physical and semantic entities, and had written an entire study entitled English Words (1877), in which he set out his theories of the potential meaningfulness of the sounds of the English language. But the most characteristic poetry, and poetic prose, of the turn of the century was closer to the verse that Stephen writes in A Portrait and in Ulysses, and to the style that Joyce employs later in A Portrait to convey the heightened moments of Stephen’s career. One of the great achievements of this writing was the exploitation of the rhythmic potential of English verse, and in this respect it did capitalize on one aspect of the remainder, often allowing language to be determined by a strongly rhythmic movement that derives both from bodily movement and from popular forms of poetry. As poets, Swinburne, Kipling, Dowson, Gilbert and the early Yeats were all in their different ways masters of strongly musical rhythmic form, building on the metrical innovations of Tennyson and Browning. Joyce was certainly able to learn from them, but he also needed to find a way to break down the powerful rhythms of his predecessors. A carefully unpoetic prose, a style of ‘scrupulous meanness’, as in parts of Dubliners and Stephen Hero, was one possibility, but this did not open a door to a new literary practice. A door did open, however, when (perhaps as early as 1907, and certainly by 191314 ) Joyce wrote, or extensively revised, the opening pages of A Portrait, turning his account of early childhood into an engagement with language as an assemblage of words, each with its peculiar density and singular history, each functioning as a site where both physical articulations and semantic suggestiveness work together, where to heighten one is to heighten the other. The process is the opposite of the metaphorical: as Lecercle notes, ‘The universe of d´elire may be wildly imaginative: it is also painfully literal. There are no longer any clear frontiers between words and things’ (Philosophy Through the Looking-Glass, 162). Contrary to the assumption governing the realist tradition – that to draw attention to the language as such is to divert attention away from the reality it is attempting to

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represent – Joyce showed that an even stronger sense of the physically and emotionally real can be created in language that foregrounds its own materiality. In many passages in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake he demonstrates this with unequalled brilliance;15 in A Portrait such moments are few, but they announce very clearly the break with the literary tradition and the new possibilities to be developed.16 To open his novel with a representation of childhood language, and to make Stephen’s responses to and encounters with language such a cardinal part of his experience of early schooling, therefore, is not just to introduce a highly successful new technique for beginning a biography at the beginning, with particular relevance to the biography of a writer (or would-be writer); it is also to announce a fresh understanding of the literary potential of language, distinct both from what had gone before and from the other literary experiments of the time. (We might think of Imagism and Vorticism – Pound’s collection Des Imagistes and the first issue of Lewis’s Blast both appeared in 1914 – or the writing of Gertrude Stein or T. S. Eliot – Tender Buttons came out in 1914 and ‘Prufrock’, written in 1910–11, first appeared in 1915.) Literature, Joyce demonstrates, shares with childhood language the capacity to exploit the remainder, to allow the body and the language community to speak through and to some degree against the abstraction and instrumentalism of utilitarian employments, and most theories, of language.17 ‘Suck’ is a queer word, not intrinsically but as Stephen encounters it in the schoolyard and as the reader encounters it in the pages of A Portrait. Joyce’s failure to gloss it (beyond the indirect explanation that Stephen gives to himself ), like his failure to gloss many of the other schoolboy terms in these pages, is not only the result of a strict adherence to the child’s point of view; it is also a strategy designed to put the reader in the same situation as the boy and thus enhance the physical suggestiveness of the words. Of course, any word can be made strange; it is a matter of context and presentation. The child finds it happening in his or her daily life, while the artist has to develop and perfect the means to make it happen. However, it is not a skill that, finally, can be taught: the remainder is everything about language that is not reducible to rule, and the effectiveness of these moments in A Portrait can never be fully accounted for. The explanation of the intensity and erotic suggestiveness of ‘suck’ for Stephen does not quite explain its intensity for the reader; no literary effect can be wholly explained and remain literary. There is one other encounter with a single word in the novel that is worth noting, one that marks the changes in Stephen’s relationship to language and

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to sexuality when he reaches adolescence. While Simon Dedalus searches for his initials cut into a desk in the Queen’s College anatomy theatre in Cork, Stephen finds a different inscription: On the desk before him he read the word Foetus cut several times in the dark stained wood. The sudden legend startled his blood: he seemed to feel the absent students of the college about him and to shrink from their company. A vision of their life, which his father’s words had been powerless to evoke, sprang up before him out of the word cut in the desk. (II.1049)

Stephen sees, as if present before him, a large student carving the word among his laughing peers. The image of the letters cut into the wood, and the vision it evokes, stays with him, at once exciting him by providing an external echo of his own fantasies and increasing the guilt and self-hatred that is an integral part of his adolescent sexual life. Although ‘suck’ and ‘foetus’ both affect Stephen powerfully, and both combine suggestions of forbidden sex with a male community from which he feels excluded, the differences are striking. The former is Anglo-Saxon, the latter Latin; the former is spoken, the latter is written; the former evokes a memory, the latter evokes a fantasy. Far from being barely conscious of sexuality, Stephen is now hyperconscious of it (though at this stage it seems centred on masturbation and masturbatory fantasies – it is only at the end of this chapter that he has sex with a prostitute). The result is that he reads the word not as an item of the language with its own suggestive power and physical attributes but as a trace, the record of a past event, and as a provocation to fantasy and self-abuse (in both senses of the term). What is important for the purposes of my argument is that for the reader, the word ‘foetus’, as a word, has no particularly strong resonance (though the fact of its incision in the anatomy desk may). Stephen’s reaction appears, in fact, to be excessive, an indication of the high pitch of his sexual angst. There is no remainder at work; just a train of associations. We witness the trials of adolescent sexuality, but we do not participate in the overflowing of the linguistic system and the genesis of the literary. The irony that underlies this remarkable artistic breakthrough in A Portrait is, of course, that the artist whose portrait we are being asked to contemplate does not appear capable of it himself. Although the title of the novel repeats a common formula for a self-portrait, the work itself presents a disjunction between the author of and the author in the text. Stephen’s earliest ‘literary’ productions, as we have seen, are dominated by the remainder, and while he is a young schoolboy they remain formulaic and ritualized, such as the nine-line ‘address’ in his geography

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book (I.300), the prayer he murmurs before going to bed (I.411), and the poem on Parnell he attempts after the Christmas dinner quarrel, which turns into a listing of the names and addresses of some of his classmates (II.373). Two tendencies then develop in Stephen’s use of language as a literary vehicle: a lyrical, repetitive mode, and a hard-edged, unsparing, realist mode. (Both of these are manifested in Joyce’s own early ‘epiphanies’.18 ) We become aware of the first style in Stephen’s fantasies about the romantic heroine Mercedes (II.104, 166), and of the second in what are presented as transcribed epiphanies, introduced with the words, ‘He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and tasting its mortifying flavour in secret’ (II.252). Occasionally, the older Stephen has experiences which suggest the survival of his earlier sensitivity to the physical and erotic suggestiveness of individual words. Interestingly, two of these involve a foreign language. As Fritz Senn notes, ‘What a foreign reader [. . .] tends to notice much more is that words are words, the only prime reality in literature’ (‘Foreign Readings’, 44); the same is true of foreign words in a native text. When the director uses the phrase ‘les jupes’, it has a physical effect on Stephen, causing him to blush (IV.279); and something of the sensuous immediacy of the French word may relay itself to the reader (though perhaps not to the native speaker of French). In the meditation that follows on ‘the names of articles of dress worn by women or of certain soft and delicate stuffs used in their making’, we learn that the sensual quality of some words, as Stephen experiences them, is finer than reality: women’s stockings are disappointingly coarse to the physical touch. A similar process occurs when Cranly responds to the sound of a woman singing with the words ‘Mulier cantat’ and the narrator continues: ‘The soft beauty of the Latin word touched with an enchanting touch the dark of the evening, with a touch fainter and more persuading than the touch of music or of a woman’s hand’ (V.2479). (Here the strong punctual effect of the Latin phrase is described in Joyce’s vague, repetitive, lyrical style.) In some of the diary entries, too, there is an echo of the acute lexical attention that characterizes both Stephen and the novel at its opening. ‘When he pronounces a soft o he protrudes his full carnal lips as if he kissed the vowel’ (V.2653); ‘Rather, lynxeyed Lynch saw her as we passed’ (V.2695); ‘I fear him. I fear his redrimmed horny eyes’ (V.2754): these phrasings from the diary seem closer to Joyce’s own most important stylistic achievement in this novel than the majority of Stephen’s writings, thoughts and utterances since chapter 1. When we meet Stephen again in Ulysses, Joyce’s new technique of interior monologue – a development of the opening and closing sections of

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A Portrait – gives us access to a mental world that possesses a linguistic and cultural richness (and humour) well beyond anything in the earlier novel. Although his literary productions remain relatively unpromising, Stephen’s internal ruminations and sometimes his speech suggest a pleasure in language, and a skill in its deployment, that represent a mature development of the schoolboy’s reaction to ‘suck’ and ‘kiss’, and the college student’s response to ‘les jupes’ and ‘Mulier cantat’. Throughout the later text, Joyce exploits the remainder in a number of different ways, not only in the more linguistically and stylistically extravagant chapters like ‘Sirens’, ‘Cyclops’, ‘Oxen of the Sun’ and ‘Circe’, but continually as part of the texture of the writing, always alert to the possibility that a word can resonate physically and often erotically even as it points to a referent or expresses an idea. And Finnegans Wake? The triumph of the remainder, without a doubt. Like ‘suck’. Only louder. n otes 1 References are to the section and line numbers given in the 1993 Garland edition of A Portrait, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Walter Hettche. Normally only the first line number of the quotation is given. 2 See Onions, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. The exception in this list is rump, which appears to have entered the English language in the fifteenth century from the Scandinavian languages. In modern English, however, it has the characteristic qualities of the Anglo-Saxon portion of the vocabulary. 3 See, for example, the essays collected in Valente, ed., Quare Joyce; Carens, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’; and Lamos, ‘James Joyce and the English Vice’. 4 It is possible that in Stephen’s recollection – ‘he remembered how big Corrigan looked in the bath’ (I.1669) – ‘big’ refers not merely to the older youth’s overall size. As a member of the higher line, Corrigan could have been as old as eighteen ( JJ 31n.). One can understand why Stephen regards the bath with a ‘vague fear’ (I.550). 5 These reviews are all reprinted in Deming, ed., James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, I, 85–98. 6 In the first of these studies, Lecercle uses the term d´elire for the excess which is overlooked by the dominant, instrumentalist conception of language; in the later two, he prefers the term ‘remainder’. 7 See The Violence of Language, passim, but especially 105–6. 8 A third discourse which is strongly marked by the remainder is prayer and liturgy, and A Portrait has many examples. Here too, the speaker surrenders individual command over language to the community, and invests the precise words spoken with a peculiar power in excess of their ordinary linguistic functioning.

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9 For a valuable account of Stephen’s entry into language, see Senn, ‘Foreign Readings’, Joyce’s Dislocutions, especially 41–4. Maud Ellmann provides a vivid exposition of Stephen’s language, and his sense of language, as bodily secretion in ‘Disremembering Dedalus’. 10 Later, nonsense will be a sign of Stephen’s disaffection, when words ‘band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms: The ivy whines upon the wall / And whines and twines upon the wall [. . .]’ (V.173), or when the jingle of the dean of studies’ words seems to blend with the smell of his candle butts, ‘bucket and lamp and lamp and bucket’ (V.483). Some of Joyce’s own highly repetitive passages of lyrical prose in A Portrait run the risk of the same kind of emptyingout of meaning. 11 In revising the early epiphany on which this passage is based, Joyce substituted Dante for Eileen Vance’s father (who enters the house with a stick), and deleted the source of the chant: ‘Joyce – (under the table, to himself )’ (Poems and Shorter Writings, 161). These deletions render the episode less specific, and in particular introduce an ambiguity as to whether the chant is the product of internal defiance or external malice. 12 Linda Dowling, in Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Si`ecle, discusses the effect of the new German philology on late nineteenth-century Irish and English writers. It is interesting to note that Saussure’s influential Course in General Linguistics, which was an important founding text for a new synchronic linguistics, was published in the same year as A Portrait – and that Saussure’s attempts to keep language within the bounds of the rational and the systematic in the Course failed to exorcise the remainder. See, for example, Jacques Derrida’s discussion of Saussure’s dismissal of onomatopoeia in Glas, 90–7. (The entire right-hand column of Glas is an extended discussion of the remainder.) 13 For a detailed study of the influence of Mallarm´e on Joyce – concentrating, however, on Finnegans Wake – see Hayman, Joyce et Mallarm´e. 14 See Gabler’s Introduction to the Garland edition of A Portrait, and his ‘The Seven Lost Years of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’. 15 I have discussed some examples in Peculiar Language, chapters 5 and 7. 16 The other major innovation that paved the way for his later works was the use of a paratactic narrative sequencing, allowing Stephen’s life to be represented by very few scenes, each related in some detail but separated from those before and after by unexplained gaps. David Hayman has given a valuable account of this feature of the novel in ‘The Fractured Portrait’. 17 One theory of language which does not occlude the remainder is Freud’s, and Joyce may well have been influenced by the important part played by the material specificity of words in such works as The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1901), and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1905). 18 For a discussion of these two tendencies in Joyce’s earlier style, see Riquelme, ‘Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Styles of Realism and Fantasy’.

chapter 9

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bord erlines James Joyce’s Ulysses demonstrates how culture is produced in the act of social survival and as an act of social and political survival. Stephen Dedalus, that ‘embryo philosopher’, argues in the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode for the power of the artist’s word to invoke forgotten history and the ‘nations of the dead’, as Odysseus calls forth the unnumbered dead to learn their histories and, from Tiresias’ shade, to foretell his future: ‘You have spoken of the past and its phantoms [. . .]. Why think of them?’ Stephen asks. ‘If I call them into life across the waters of Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to my call? Who supposes it? I, Bous Stephanoumenos, bullockbefriending bard, am lord and giver of their life’ (U 14.1295, 14.1112–16; cf. Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald, XI.36). His claim echoes the Welsh Glendower’s boast in Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part One: ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep’, and Hotspur’s ironic cut: ‘Why, so can I, or so can any man, / But will they come when you do call for them?’ (III.i.50–2). Can the artist’s word prove any more efficacious than a rebel’s boast against an imperium that will ‘rebuke’ rebellion, that will not leave the field ‘till all our own be won’ (I Henry IV , V.v.1, 44)? How is the struggle for the historical and ethical right to signify played out in the colonial Ireland of Joyce’s Ulysses? The nationalism of a colonized people, David Lloyd points out, requires that its history be seen as a series of unnatural ruptures and discontinuities imposed by an alien power while its reconstruction must necessarily pass by way of deliberate artifice. Almost by definition, this anti-colonial nationalism lacks the basis for its representative claims and is forced to invent them. In this respect, nationalism can be said to require an aesthetic politics quite as much as a political aesthetics.1

However, as Joyce recognized, an opposition necessarily constructed within the very system it opposes is ambivalent: the system of power prevents the 142

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constitution of oppositional identity, yet is at the same time the very condition of its existence. The representational politics and aesthetics of nationalism, the identification of self with nation, are as false as the representations imposed by imperialism, and thus he, as have other anti-colonial artists, conceived of ‘a cultural politics which must work outside the terms of representation’ (Lloyd, Anomalous States, 89). ‘We can’t change the country. Let us change the subject,’ a ‘crosstempered’ Stephen suggests (U 16.1171, 1169); and it is precisely in changing the subject of discourse, in challenging the strictures of representation, that Joyce attempts to change the country. Discourses not only constitute what is speakable but are themselves bordered, bounded by a constitutive outside, by the unspeakable, the unsignifiable.2 In such a cultural politics, translation – of language, of bodies –, the metaphor for the historical necessity of the colonized to bear witness, itself bears witness to what cannot be signified, to silence, to the incommensurable. Joyce replaces Stephen’s dream of mastery, his postcreation, with negotiation, a retroactive negotiation of the past which, through that negotiation, imagines a future liberated from historical determinism. His writing, as ‘a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror’ (U 14.1044), relocates the past, reactivates it, reinscribes it, resignifies it. Homi Bhabha argues that negotiation ‘commits our understanding of the past, and our reinterpretation of the future, to an ethics of “survival” that allows us to work through the present. And such a working through, or working out, frees us from the determinism of historical inevitability – repetition without a difference.’3 Repeating English cultural history with a difference, recapitulating ontology with political economy, Joyce displaces the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions of that history. History, particularly the history of modernity, is comprehended by Joyce’s text as language, representation, discourse, knowledge, power – the violence of the will to power. Writing in Ulysses is performative, interrogative, transformative: an uncanny repetition that projects a past, that initiates a differential history that will not return to the power of the same: ‘history repeating itself with a difference’ (U 16.1525–6).4 Rewriting history in Ulysses, and, specifically, literary history in ‘Oxen of the Sun’, reveals subjectivity as split, as repetition rather than origin. In this double movement, the materiality of consciousness, language, confronts what itself cannot be articulated: the unconscious both of history and of Joyce’s text; the repressed and alien other; the untranslatable supplementary space of the other, beyond representation. The return of the repressed, of the subordinate, of the forgotten, as punctuation of the script

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of metropolitan history, forces a retelling, a re-citing, and a re-siting of historical and cultural knowledge.5 How is the unrepresentable seen as the space of cultural difference? In what ways does Joyce’s writing institute a postcolonial contra-modernity? That is, in what ways does Joyce construct a contra-modernity contingent to, bordering on, discontinuous with, in contention with, the modernity of Western European imperial powers? Bhabha argues that the site of rebellion, and the subject of insurgent subaltern agency, is that of cultural hybridity (LC 206). How does Joyce use the cultural hybridity of Irish borderline conditions to translate – reinscribe and thus reclaim – the social imaginary of both the metropolis and modernity (cf. LC 6)?6 In what ways does Ulysses in particular counter the narrative thrust of Western European bourgeois nationalism to refine the Irish into modernity?7 Narratives of national identity traditionally subsume the female ‘symbolically into the national body politic as its boundary and metaphoric limit’.8 The borders of race and gender circumscribe (and reinscribe) the imperialist – and nationalist – fantasy for borderless possession. What if one must live on the borderlines; of history and language, of race and gender? To live on the borderlines – what Jacques Derrida terms sur-vivre – is to inhabit the place of that splitting of the self, the shifting space of ambivalence in the structure of identification. To live on the borderlines is to be located in the elliptical space between the self and the other. This border then becomes a place of negotiation between incommensurable cultural differences (cf. LC 170).9 In an episode that posits history as text, and English and Anglo-Irish literary history as matrix for Ulysses, Joyce stages the extra-textual, the extralinguistic, as the body of the mother (mater, matrix) as other. The body of the mother as other functions in Ulysses as remainder, as the traumatic element at the very centre of the symbolic order which cannot itself be symbolized, as the indeterminate or the unknowable around which the symbolic discourse of human history comes to be constituted. Transgression, border crossing, takes place, takes its place, across the reproductive space of a woman’s body. And as unsublimatable body, as remainder, the mother survives – lives on – for the subject as a constitutive loss; it is on that inaugural loss of the mother that any being, meaning, language or desire is founded. Framing the discourse of the fathers – the patrilineal discourse of (literary) history – by the womb of the mother, Joyce posits the maternal body as the border that frames the subject, the border that forms the subject. ‘Oxen of the Sun’ serves as Joyce’s ‘hymen minim’ (U 14.349).10

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transl ation To apprehend differences, even radical and incommensurable ones, in economic, political and cultural terms, and their embodiment in ethnicity, gender and sexuality, is to apprehend how identities are constructed in transit, as process (Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity, 82). To inscribe incommensurable cultural differences is to perform a paradoxical act of cultural translation, confronting the language of translation with its uncanny double: the untranslatable, the alien, the other. The writing of cultural difference lies, Bhabha claims, in the staging of the colonial or sexual signifier in ‘the narrative uncertainty of culture’s in-between: between sign and signifier, neither one nor the other, neither sexuality nor race, neither, simply, memory nor desire’ (LC 127). As Stephen Heath has noted: Joyce’s writing resists the movement of Hegelian idealism and the sublimation of oppositions; its force is the ‘inhabiting’ of oppositions that opens not onto a sublimation but, demonstrating limits, onto, as it were, an excess that is the unmasterable foundation of the movement of oppositions, their ‘wake’. It is a question here not of the fusion of a new identity but of an illimitation, of a reference to multiplicity.11

Transitory and in transit, writing traces an elsewhere, an other, an opening onto an excess or d´e-bordement, an overrunning of boundaries, that leads to unforeseen, unknown possibilities. It is that act of translation, that middle passage, that movement between, that Joyce stages in ‘Oxen of the Sun’, estranging the languages of a totalizing imperial and colonial culture through parody, pastiche and citation, reinscribing history through the writing of difference. To write the politics of difference is to reorient the axis of power and knowledge. What he dramatizes in this hybrid writing is the political and cultural remainder of imperial history or patriarchal canons: a remainder that resists assimilation into the totalizing narratives of modernity, narratives whose concealed but central logic is imperialism. Through this remainder, this ‘unthought’ of both politics and the psyche, Joyce reveals how a minority culture can construct political and personal agency. Such a transgressive agency negotiates its own authority through a process of iterative reinscription and incommensurable, insurgent relinking; it negotiates and translates cultural identities in a ‘discontinuous intertextual temporality of cultural difference’ (LC 185). Indeed, as Bhabha reminds us, ‘it is the “inter” – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture’. This liminal site of enunciation, of translation,

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this site where minority agency can be created through negotiation among incommensurable positions, provides a place from which to speak ‘both of, and as, the minority, the exilic, the marginal and the emergent’ (LC 38, 149). ‘[M]y action’, Joyce claims in a 1906 letter to his brother Stanislaus, ‘is a virtual intellectual strike’ (SL 125). His revolutionary act of writing anticipates the future through repeating history differently, thus redeeming the past retroactively. Writing marginalizes the monumentality of history in Ulysses – a history that is, indeed, troped as writing in the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode. If, as Bhabha maintains, the force of writing – its metaphoricity and its rhetorical discourse – is a productive matrix which defines the ‘social’ and makes it available as an objective of and for action, then writing can be apprehended as an act of resistance, defiance, insurgency (LC 23). How does cultural translation as a tropic movement transform the heliotropics of a dominant culture, the heliopolitics of imperialism? The ‘heliotropics’ of a dominant culture would be that which returns to itself, replicates itself under the law of the same: the circle of heliotrope is a specular circle, ‘a return to itself without loss of meaning’, an interiorizing turn that is the philosophical desire to master the division between origin and self.12 Translation as wandering, errancy, exile decanonizes the ‘original’, fragments it, reinscribes it. Translation as migrancy travesties the metaphysics of authenticity or origins: ‘For the nomadic experience of language, wandering without a fixed home, dwelling at the crossroads of the world, bearing our sense of being and difference, is no longer the expression of a unique tradition or history’; migrancy suggests a dwelling at the crossroads: in language, in histories, in identities constantly subject to mutation.13 Translating the canon of British and Anglo-Irish Ascendancy literary styles into pastiche, Joyce questions assumptions of cultural supremacy and priority. And he also questions the demand for the mythical uncontaminated space of an authentic ‘native’ culture, a demand that ‘perpetuates the imperial gesture through a seemingly opposed modality’.14 Repeating literary history with a difference, restaging the past into the present, reproducing ‘origin’, Joyce calls into question the possibility of an originary identity, estranges the received tradition of a national narrative, mocks modernity’s linear narrative of progress. In such an insurgent repetition, both the past and the present are displaced, disjunct, estranged. In this doubling of modernity, he opens up a space for political revision and initiation. Taking the place of that tradition, Joyce’s new literary history reconfigures the national narrative from a minority perspective, re-members a national

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narrative through a willed act of ‘forgetting’ its origins. Writing as repetition, reinscription, reproduction translates what Stephen Hero terms the ‘chaos of unremembered writing’ (SH 78) by dismembering and re-membering it – ‘redismembers’ it, as Finnegans Wake suggests (FW 8.6). ‘Redismembering’ – or what Joyce calls, elsewhere in the Wake, ‘tabularasing’ (FW 50.12) – reveals origin as a myth of annulled supplementarity and a myth of erasure, a repetition that exposes the minus in the origin. This re-membered narrative positions itself on the borderline of history and language, on the limits of race and gender, in an attempt to write the other (see LC 155, 170). transgression How can the other be written? Subjectivity is constructed through language, through others’ words and through the word of the other: ‘I’m in words, made of words, other’s words’, claims the protagonist of Beckett’s The Unnamable (390). How can cultural and political identity be constructed, and how can it be interpreted? ‘Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world?’, the Wake asks, and posits the telling as a retelling; the construction, a reconstruction (FW 18.18–19). It is a loss and a finding, a ‘meandertale, aloss and again’ (FW 18.22–3), a tale of migrancy and irretrievable or impossible origins. And it is an illicit reproduction: ‘It is the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations on miscegenations. Tieckle. They lived und laughed ant loved end left. Forsin.’ The writing on the wall (mene, tekel, upharsin) foretells a doom that is constructed as past: ‘Thy thingdome is given to the Meades and Porsons’ (FW 18.18–22). For the colonized, re-membering sutures the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present. Etienne Balibar, analysing how cultural identity as national identity could be constructed in relation to the Lacanian real, or that which resists symbolization, asks: what transgression threatens the symbolic order, what transgression makes ‘the limits of that order apparent in a way that is unbearable for the passion of identity: Is it betrayal, crime, heresy, unbelief? Or is it rather abnormality, monstrosity, deviance, representable “difference”? And why has a whole literature continually – whether to stigmatise it or to valorise the paradox – sought to translate one of these forms into the other?’15 How does Joyce stage cultural identity as national identity through the transgressions of ‘Oxen of the Sun’? Conscious heresy, Richard Brown points out, is a ‘curiously hybrid mode of rebellion’:

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not an ignorance nor a rejection of orthodoxy but, like Joyce’s idea of Wilde’s art, a deliberate kind of sinning. It is a mode of thinking which, rather than presuming to forge new ground from first principles, offers a deliberately perverse or provocative revision of an established view or system: its rebellion couched in the very terms to which it objects.16

As radical revisions and rereadings, as translations of belief, heresies ‘seem especially emblematic of a fiction built out of revisions and re-readings of earlier fictions, one whose attitudes are expressed as a “reading” of past literature such as Joyce’s seems to be’ (Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality, 161–2). The reading he stages is a labour of reading at the borders of knowledge, at the uttermost boundaries of the symbolic.17 In ‘Oxen of the Sun’ Joyce produces such a radical revision of culture’s role in the production of national identity by troping the trope of history itself. By decentring history, he intersects the knowledge/power axis of the centre – and its economic, political and cultural traffic – with the space of the subaltern, the periphery.18 Subversion, subalternity, emerge from acts of displacement, from decentring strategies of signification (LC 145). ‘English’ – as language, literature, history, national identity – becomes a palimpsest of traces of doubtful origin. Joyce’s heretical rewriting opens up the space of the other in the languages of excess, transgression, transmutation. Joyce provides double interpretations for the crime of ‘Oxen’: first, as ‘fraud’, in the formal sense of betrayal, of breaking a vow. On the level of narrative, ‘Le F´econdateur’ (U 14.778) Mulligan, Ireland’s ‘gay betrayer’ (U 1.405), appears to have betrayed, ‘[s]kunked’ his friends: ‘But on young Malachi they waited for that he promised to have come and such as intended to no goodness said how he had broke his avow’ (U 14.1538, 195–7). Betrayal is universalized: betrayal by the first mother causes the fall of man: ‘our grandam, which we are linked up with by successive anastomosis of navelcords sold us all, seed, breed and generation, for a penny pippin’, Stephen claims (U 14.299–301). And betrayal is writ into the very act of colonization, figured as prohibited ‘act of sexual congress’ (U 14.1306) – that is, as an act of sex that transgresses the word, the law – as fornication and abomination: Remember, Erin, thy generations and thy days of old, how thou settedst little by me and by my word and broughtedst in a stranger to my gates to commit fornication in my sight and to wax fat and kick like Jeshurum. Therefore hast thou sinned against my light and hast made me, thy lord, to be the slave of servants. Return, return, Clan Milly: forget me not, O Milesian. Why hast thou done this abomination before me that thou didst spurn me for a merchant of jalaps and didst

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deny me to the Roman and to the Indian of dark speech with whom thy daughters did lie luxuriously? (U 14.367–75)

The congress is also commercial; this passage echoes and satirizes not only the songs of Tommy Moore and Moses but also Douglas Hyde’s 1892 warning in ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland’ against the Irish hastening to adopt, ‘pell-mell, and indiscriminately, everything that is English, simply because it is English’ and hence ‘neglecting what is Irish’. Thus the representative of colonial justification, appropriation, and usurpation in Ulysses is appropriately Haines, whose ‘old fellow made his tin by selling jalap to Zulus or some bloody swindle or other’ (U 1.156–7), and who rationalizes that ‘history is to blame’ (U 1.649; also in 14.1016): ‘My hell, and Ireland’s, is in this life. It is what I tried to obliterate my crime’ (U 14.1021–2). ‘Oxen’ links heresy with sexual and national betrayal. The pastiche of Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub plays on the 1155 papal bull, Laudabiliter, through which Nicholas Breakspear, Pope Adrian IV, the only English ‘sovereign pontiff’ (U 14.280), granted the overlordship of Ireland to Henry II of England by linking colonial gelding with sexual conquering: ‘farmer Nicholas that was a eunuch’ may have had the bull gelded ‘by a college of doctors who were no better off than himself’ before sending him to Ireland, but he also ‘taught him a trick worth two of the other so that maid, wife, abbess and widow to this day affirm that they would rather any time of the month whisper in his ear in the dark of a cowhouse or get a lick on the nape from his long holy tongue than lie with the finest strapping young ravisher in the four fields of all Ireland’ (U 14.589–99). The annunciatory intercourse of auricular confession appears to replace genital congress, the Pasipha¨ean ‘copulation between women and the males of brutes’ (U 14.993). Stephen claims that the device Daedalus constructed for Pasipha¨e to satisfy her desire is, in fact, a confessional: ‘Queens lay with prize bulls. Remember Pasiphae for whose lust my grandoldgrossfather made the first confessionbox’ (U 15.3865–7).19 The phallus is indeed the transcendental signifier, ‘Through yerd [penis] our lord, Amen’: ‘By this time the father of the faithful (for so they called him) was grown so heavy that he could scarce walk to pasture. To remedy which our cozening dames and damsels brought him his fodder in their apronlaps and as soon as his belly was full he would rear up on his hind quarters to show their ladyships a mystery and roar and bellow out of him in bulls’ language and they all after him’ (U 14.1527, 604–9). It is the Pasipha¨ean nature of the ‘earthly mother’ to be ‘but a dam to bear beastly’, and thus she ‘should die by canon for so saith he that holdeth the fisherman’s seal’, Stephen insists

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(U 14.249–51). Her trespass demands that she be ‘trespassed out of this world’ (U 14.206). Yet the unholy alliance of the ‘imperial British state’, ‘the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church’ and ‘a third [. . .] who wants me for odd jobs’ produces a progeny as monstrous and as captive as any Minotaur: the subjugated Irish (U 1.643–4, 641). Joyce’s second interpretation for the crime of ‘Oxen’ entails another meaning for ‘fraud’: contraception – famously, ‘the crime committed against fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition’ (SL 251). As Stephen asks of ‘[c]opulation without population’, ‘what of those Godpossibled souls that we nightly impossibilise, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord and Giver of Life?’ (U 14.1422, 225–7).20 In an episode titled after the sterile oxen of the sun-god Helios forbidden to Odysseus and his men, the very act of coition is sterilized by the guts of oxen: condoms, ‘Killchild’, were made of oxgut. Thus, although ‘Carnal Concupiscence’ is what the ‘party of debauchees’ (U 14.803) in the ‘Manse of Mothers’, those worshippers of Saint Foutinus, ‘most lusted after’ (cf. U 14.1520: ‘O lust our refuge and our strength’), they do not fear ‘that foul plague Allpox and the monsters’ because ‘Preservative had given them a stout shield of oxengut’ – what the Wake terms ‘immaculate contraceptives for the populace’ (FW 45.14) – and therefore ‘they might take no hurt neither from Offspring that was that wicked devil by virtue of this same shield which was named Killchild’ (U 14.454–67). To murder their goods with whores (cf. U 14.276), or to practise the gentle art of self-abuse, is to disobey the imperialist command of the ‘god Bringforth’, written in ‘the book Law’, to replenish the earth and subdue it (U 14.436, 443). Tellingly, Joyce parodies historians of the Roman imperium to articulate this mandate in the beginning of the episode: Universally that person’s acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind’s ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature’s incorrupted benefaction. (U 14.7–17)

Copulation without population subverts the law of the father, the paternal power of ‘yerd our lord’, by refusing to replenish the earth through progeny or to subdue it through colonial plantation:

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Wherein, O wretched company, were ye all deceived for that was the voice of the god that was in a very grievous rage that he would presently lift his arm up and spill their souls for their abuses and their spillings done by them contrariwise to his word which forth to bring brenningly biddeth. (U 14.470–3)

Yet, paradoxically, it is the very fecundity of the repressed that ‘Oxen of the Sun’ foregrounds, a fecundity that transgresses the bounds of racial difference. Theories of race in nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury Britain focused on sexuality: in the British empire, ‘sexuality was the spearhead of racial contact’; the metaphor of conquest and penetration calls attention to the violence of that ‘contact’ as well as to the prohibited progeny of that congress.21 The hybrid progeny of miscegenation embodies the very perversions of colonial desire, as in the analysis by the speaker in Thomas Carlyle’s ‘The Nigger Question’ (1849) of how the ‘unhappy wedlock of Philanthropic Liberalism and the Dismal Science’, that is, the anti-slavery lobby and an economic and social science based on ‘supply and demand’, led by any sacred cause of Black Emancipation, or the like, to fall in love and make a wedding of it, – will give birth to progenies and prodigies; dark extensive moon-calves, unnameable abortions, wide-coiled monstrosities, such as the world has not seen hitherto!22

The fertility of the colonized is potentially revolutionary precisely because its hybrid progeny contests the identitarian politics of the imperial state, a politics grounded in the privileging of the same. A claim such as Carlyle’s that a ‘connubial communion’ (U 14.355) of British social and economic forces, led by black emancipation, will give birth to ‘dark extensive moon-calves, unnameable abortions, wide-coiled monstrosities’ assumes that ‘species’ of humans are distinct; the offspring of miscegenation, minotaurian. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the fertility or sterility of offspring of parents of different races was thought to determine whether or not the human race consisted of distinct species. In his Physics, Aristotle reproduces Empedocles’ argument that random coupling in the first phase of creation produced monsters such as the sterile oxman: ‘Thus in the original combinations the “ox-progeny” if they failed to reach a determinate end must have arisen through the corruption of some principle corresponding to what is now the seed [origin]’.23 The first recorded use of the term ‘miscegenation’ was in the 1864 treatise Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, applied to the American White Man and Negro; ‘hybrid’ appeared as early as Ben Jonson’s 1630 The New Inn, or the Light Heart: ‘She’s wild Irish born, sir, and a hybride.’24

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Miscegenation was also believed, by nineteenth-century race theorists such as J. A. Gobineau, Louis Agassiz and Carl Vogt, to produce mongrels, corruptions of the originals, degenerate and degraded, what ‘Mr M. [Buck] Mulligan (Hyg. et Eug. Doc.)’ sees as the ‘fallingoff in the calibre of the race’ (U 14.1242–3, 1250), resulting in a ‘raceless chaos’. Tellingly, the catalogue of abnormalities, monstrous births and misbirths in ‘Oxen’ – ‘all the cases of human nativity which Aristotle has classified in his masterpiece with chromolithographic illustrations’ – is ‘eviscerated’ by a ‘strife of tongues’, a linguistic disembowelling that parallels the vivisecting of the fetishized female body in the illustrations of Aristotles Master-piece, or the Secrets of Generation Displayed in All Parts Thereof (U 14.975–7, 956, 952).25 Paradoxically, as Robert Young points out, these ‘raceless masses’ which ‘attain no new species through hybridization threaten to erase the discriminations of difference’: [T]he naming of human mixture as ‘degeneracy’ both asserts the norm and subverts it, undoing its terms of distinction, and opening up the prospect of the evanescence of ‘race’ as such. Here, therefore, at the heart of racial theory, in its most sinister, offensive move, hybridity also maps out its most anxious, vulnerable site: a fulcrum at its edge and centre where its dialectics of injustice, hatred and oppression can find themselves effaced and expunged. (Colonial Desire, 19)

Hybridity also inscribes sexual reproduction, the sexual division of labour, within the mode of colonial reproduction. The Carlylean pastiche of ‘Oxen’ exhorts Theodore Purefoy to ‘[t]oil on, labour like a very bandog and let scholarment and all Malthusiasts go hang’: ‘In her lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed possibility which thou hast fructified with thy modicum of man’s work’; ‘Thou sawest thy America, thy lifetask, and didst charge to cover like the transpontine bison’ (U 14.1412–15; 14.1430–1).26 Labour here produces reproduction. Indeed, the father’s ‘labour’ replicates the process ‘whereby maternity was so far from all accident possibility removed’ (U 14.45–6). Not only chance is erased. Jean-Joseph Goux points out that the position of labor within the capitalist ‘act of production’ reproduces in its specific domain the position of female reproductive labor within paternalist reproduction. The value produced (children, goods) is a lost positivity, a ‘surplus’ that becomes estranged from the producer. The relation between mother and offspring, under the father’s control, is like that between worker and product under capitalist domination. There is an inversion of fertilities.

But rather than read this alienation as ‘creation as emasculation’, as Karl Marx does, Goux suggests that, ‘as both father and capital play the role of

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intermediary, the illusion of the Immaculate Conception is in substance reiterated by the dominate ideology of capitalist economic relations – the capitalist relation as immaculate production’. The children’s game of Finnegans Wake reveals the consequences of the hope that, for the ‘“fertilization” of matter and the consequent generation of the product’, pure ideality – consisting of monetary value – could replace real labour upon matter.27 Here, the subtraction of desire results in the erasure of the mater, the material: ‘Think of a maiden, Presentacion. Double her, Annupciacion. Take your first thoughts away from her, Immacolacion’ (FW 528.19–21). transcription Vico argues in The New Science that, for the first theological poets, thunder, the word of the father god, inaugurates civilization – the birth of the nation, the birth of shame and the introduction of matrimony, the birth of metaphysics, the birth of language – thus ending the reign of the races that had ‘lapsed into a state of bestiality’ and consolidating ‘the cyclopean paternal power of the first fathers’.28 As with the ‘reverberation of the thunder the cloudburst pours its torrent’, in the final words of the pastiche of John Ruskin in ‘Oxen of the Sun’, ‘so and not otherwise was the transformation, violent and instantaneous, upon the utterance of the word’: ‘Burke’s! outflings my lord Stephen, giving the cry’, and thus begins the pastiche of Thomas Carlyle on the uttered word, the birth of a language that is itself ‘burked’ – suppressed; refused publication; erased; murdered by suffocation; leaving no mark, no trace, of violence (U 14.1388–91).29 But what the utterance of the word – what the Carlylean pastiche describing the exit of the men from the ‘antechamber of birth’, the Purefoy afterbirth – breeds is vocalic babel, linguistic chaos, verbal hybrids: what Joyce notoriously described as ‘a frightful jumble of pidgin English, nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel’ (Letters I 139; letter to Frank Budgen dated 13 March 1920). The ‘pregnant word’ errs and is errant (U 14.259). Such hybrid language breaches boundaries; stages itself as same and other in a double-voicing; unmasks and contests authorial intent through undecidable oscillation; politicizes cultural differences through dialogic contestation, a double-languaging.30 Such a language effects what Bhabha terms a ‘“hybrid” moment of political change’: the re-articulation, translation, transformation of authority, the staging of ‘elements that are neither the One [. . .] nor the Other [. . .] but something else besides which contests the terms and territories of both’, opening up a ‘third space’, the space of interrogation and intervention (LC 28).31 Such border

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disputes call into question the authority of imperial history. As a figure for cultural difference itself, hybridity, a kind of ‘retrogressive metamorphosis’ (U 14.390), Young claims, ‘becomes a third term which can never in fact be third because, as a monstrous inversion, a miscreated perversion of its progenitors, it exhausts the differences between them’ (Colonial Desire, 23). The end product of English and Anglo-Irish literary history, then, is a ‘redismembering’ of that history through the hybrid languages of the dispossessed, the migrant, the diasporic. These hybrid, liminal languages – these border tongues32 – reveal the impossibility of a culture’s containedness, its limits, and the boundary ‘in-between’, the uncanny space of the subaltern. The trying on (‘Just you try it on’, evangel Alexander J Christ Dowie exhorts, ‘you triple extract of infamy!’ (U 14.1591, 1583–4)) of text-style translates, transcribes the word. Ulysses itself, that ‘chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle’ (U 14.1412), is a mixture, a hybrid. Its script of heterogeneous traces makes strange the familiar; its chronicle of linguistic, cultural, social diasporas estranges the possibility of origins. A monstrous birth, indeed. n otes 1 Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment, 89. 2 Judith Butler, ‘Subjection, Resistance, Resignification: Between Freud and Foucault’, 238. 3 Bhabha, ‘Culture’s In-Between’, 212. 4 See Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 172, 237. Further references are given in the text as LC followed by page identification. 5 Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity, 3. 6 As Joyce famously argued in his 1907 Triestine lecture, ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’, Richard Kearney, in Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy, also argues for the political necessity of the Irish and the British to perceive themselves as ‘mongrel islanders’: ‘There is no such thing as primordial nationality. Every nation is a hybrid construct, an “imagined” community which can be reimagined again in alternative versions. The ultimate challenge is to acknowledge this process of ongoing hybridization from which we derive and to which we are constantly subject. In the face of resurgent nationalisms fired by rhetorics of purity and purification, we must cling to the recognition that we are all happily mongrelized, interdependent, impure, mixed up’ (188). Dismissive of Bhabha’s work, Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake nevertheless agree with his argument that the local ‘posits interstitial spaces of alternative imagining: modes of living and memory undoing the dominant space-time of the nation-state and the transnational superstate’ (Global / Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, 7). On theorizing the global and the local, see also Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization; and

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Jameson and Miyoshi, eds., The Cultures of Globalization, especially Dussel’s ‘Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity’ for a critique of the Eurocentric horizon of modernity, a modernity that fails to subsume ‘the populations, economies, nations, and cultures that it has been attacking since its origin and has excluded from its horizon and cornered into poverty’. Thus, Dussel argues, the globalizing world-system ‘reaches a limit with the exteriority of the alterity of the Other, a locus of “resistance” from whose affirmation the process of the negation of negation of liberation begins’ (21). Lloyd, ‘Nationalisms against the State’, 177. This essay is reprinted in his Ireland After History, 19–36. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, 354. See also Kaplan, Alarc´on, and Moallem, eds., Between Woman and Nation: Nationalism, Transnational Feminisms, and the State. See Derrida, ‘Living On: Border Lines’. On intractability and incommensurability, see Lyotard, The Differend . In ‘The Double Session’ Jacques Derrida analyses how the hymen in Mallarm´e’s text produces the effect of a medium, that which envelops opposing terms simultaneously, that which, as the in-between, ‘takes place’ in the ‘inter-’, in the spacing between desire and fulfilment, between perpetration and its recollection: ‘At the edge of being, the medium of the hymen never becomes a mere mediation or work of the negative; it outwits and undoes all ontologies, all philosophemes, all manner of dialectics. It outwits them and – as a cloth, a tissue, a medium again – it envelops them, turns them over, and inscribes them’ (Dissemination, 212, 215). For a full discussion of Joyce’s writing of the mother as the sexual other that remains the fantasy of a certain cultural space or knowledge that is in Joyce forever the horizon, the unfolding, the boundary of difference, see my ‘Textual Mater: Writing the Mother in Joyce’. There I argue that the (male) writer approaches the body of the woman – of the mother – so that he might speak of what eludes speech, so that he might provide that mute border with a language. At this border of the symbolic and the semiotic, the artist attempts to speak from a place where the mother is not, from where she knows not. He delineates what, in her, is a body rejoicing in a maternal experience beyond figuration. But in the artist’s attempt to return to the impossible origin, to the ontological boundary of the speaking being, the mother as speaking subject – indeed, woman-as-subject – does not return. Heath, ‘Ambiviolences’, 68 n.107. For excellent analyses of related points, see, also in Post-structuralist Joyce: Rabat´e, ‘Lapsus ex Machina’; Topia, ‘The Matrix and the Echo’; Derrida, ‘Two Words for Joyce’. Important interventions on translation in Joyce’s work include Senn, Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation and Inductive Scrutinies; Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’; Milesi, ‘Finnegans Wake: The Obliquity of Trans-lations’. Derrida, ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, Margins of Philosophy, 207–71, especially 268. See also Derrida’s essay, ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, Writing and Difference, 79–153.

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13 Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity, 4–5. Such a concept, based on forced diasporas, migrations, exiles, internments of the colonized, decolonized and non-privileged, rejects the claim for the nomadic imperial subject of postmodern cosmopolitanism as promoted by Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition. Kumkum Sangari critiques the failure to recognize the political dissymmetries between these positions in ‘The Politics of the Possible’. As Lloyd points out, ‘the experience of colonized cultures such as Ireland’s, with differing but increasing degrees of intensity, is to be subjected to an uneven process of assimilation. What is produced, accordingly, is not a self-sustaining and autonomous organism capable of appropriating other cultures to itself, as imperial and postmodern cultures alike conceive themselves to be, but rather, at the individual and national-cultural level, a hybridization radically different from Bakhtin’s in which antagonism mixes with dependence and autonomy is constantly undermined by the perceived influence of alien powers’ (Anomalous States, 111–12). 14 Chambers notes that in rewriting the discourse of roots and tradition to produce an authentic native culture, the colonized subject inverts the metropolitan myth of origins but reproduces the ‘same oppressive disposition of power, positioning, subjectivity, agency and attendant modes of hegemony’. Because it is determined in advance, because its identity is never singular or pure, because its origin is impossible, ‘tradition masks the powers and complexities of its heterogeneous configuration in the repetition of the identity of the same’ (Migrancy, Culture, Identity, 72–3). For the necessity of resistance to such siren calls of inversion and reproduction of hegemonic power, see Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth and Anderson, Imagined Communities; and, in the context of Irish culture, see, e.g., Kiberd, Inventing Ireland and Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture. 15 Balibar, ‘Culture and Identity (Working Notes)’, 190. As Bhabha points out, ‘[i]f hybridity is heresy, then to blaspheme is to dream. To dream not of the past or present, nor the continuous present; it is not the nostalgic dream of tradition, nor the Utopian dream of modern progress; it is the dream of translation as “survival”, as Derrida translates the “time” of Benjamin’s concept of the after-life of translation, as sur-vivre, the act of living on borderlines. Rushdie translates this into the migrant’s dream of survival: an initiatory interstices [sic]; an empowering condition of hybridity; an emergence that turns “return” into reinscription or redescription; an iteration that is not belated, but ironic and insurgent. [. . .] The focus is on making the linkages through the unstable elements of literature and life – the dangerous tryst with the “untranslatable” – rather than arriving at ready-made names’ (LC 226–7). 16 Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality, 161–2. 17 See Rey, ‘Freud’s Writing on Writing’. 18 See Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity, 84. Gramsci defined the subaltern group as that group which ‘has not yet gained consciousness of its strength, its possibilities, of how it is to develop’; it is, Gramsci argued, ‘the conception of a subaltern social group, deprived of historical initiative, in continuous but

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disorganic expansion, unable to go beyond a certain qualitative level, which still remains below the level of the possession of the state and of the real exercise of hegemony over the whole of society which alone permits a certain organic equilibrium in the development of the intellectual group’, the educators and leaders of a society (‘Some Theoretical and Practical Aspects of “Economism”’ and ‘[The Philosophy of Praxis and] Intellectual and Moral Reformation’, An Antonio Gramsci Reader, 210, 351). Insisting that radical practice should attend to the ‘double session of representations’ – representation as ‘speaking for’, as in politics, and representation as ‘re-presentation’, staging, signification, as in art or philosophy – Spivak asks: ‘can the subaltern speak?’ Claiming that the ‘colonized subaltern subject is irretrievably heterogeneous’, Spivak asserts that the subaltern, in the context of colonial production, ‘has no history and cannot speak’. But both as object of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgence, ‘the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant’. Recognizing that within the ‘effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject, the track of sexual difference is doubly effaced’, Spivak argues that ‘the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow’ (‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 279, 275, 283–4, 287). She is doubly in shadow precisely because she has been constructed as a homogeneous ‘other’ by intellectuals who speak for her and speak her, who represent her, both politically and aesthetically, as sexual as well as racial, ethnic, or class difference. Thus, even within the space of the subaltern, ‘the woman’s body is the last instance, [. . .] it is elsewhere’ (Spivak, ‘Woman in Difference’, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 79). 19 In his 1704 satire of Roman Catholicism in A Tale of a Tub, Jonathan Swift details as one of the inventions erected by Lord Peter (who signs himself as a ‘man’s man, EMPEROR PETER’) the whispering-office ‘for the public good and ease of all such as are hypochondriacal, or troubled with the colic; likewise of all eavesdroppers, physicians, midwives, small politicians, friends fallen out, repeating poets, lovers happy or in despair, bawds, privy-councillors, pages, parasites, and buffoons: in short, all such as are in danger of bursting with too much wind . An ass’s head was placed so conveniently that the party affected might easily with his mouth accost either of the animal’s ears; which he was to apply close for a certain space, and by a fugitive faculty, peculiar to the ears of that animal, receive immediate benefit either by eructation, or expiration, or evomition’. His (papal) bulls, ‘whose race was by great fortune preserved in a lineal descent from those that guarded the golden fleece’, appear to have degenerated: ‘Though some who pretended to observe them curiously, doubted the breed had not been kept entirely chaste, because they had degenerated from their ancestors in some qualities, and had acquired others very extraordinary, but a foreign mixture.’ Nevertheless bulls from this ‘foreign mixture’ preserve an ‘appetitus sensibilis deriving itself through the whole family from their noble ancestors’: ‘they continued so extremely fond of gold, that if Peter sent them abroad though it were only upon a compliment, they would roar, and spit, and belch, and piss, and fart, and snivel out fire, and keep a perpetual coil, till you flung them a bit of gold [. . .]’ (‘A Tale of a Tub’ and Other Works, 51, 53).

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20 In the schema for Ulysses Joyce sent to Carlo Linati on 21 September 1920 (printed as an appendix to Ellmann’s Ulysses on the Liffey and compared to the schema Joyce lent to Valery Larbaud in 1921, eventually published in Stuart Gilbert’s 1934 James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ ), the word frodi (frauds) is listed as a symbol; ‘fraud’ is listed as ‘crime’ in the ‘Correspondences’ section of the GormanGilbert plan. On the intervention of Joyce’s work in the debates on population control, see Mary Lowe Evans, Crimes Against Fecundity: Joyce and Population Control. Intratextual echoes link heredity with heresy when Stephen’s argument that the pregnancy of ‘our mighty mother and mother most venerable’ was ‘Entweder transubstantiality oder consubstantiality but in no case subsubstantiality’ (U 14.296, 307–8) reproduces the heresies he recalls in ‘Telemachus’ (U 1.656–60). 21 Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience, 211. 22 Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, IV, 354. 23 Aristotle, Physics 2:8; see also On the Generation of Animals 1:1. Cited in Gifford and Seidman, ‘Ulysses’ Annotated , 420. 24 Quoted in The Oxford English Dictionary; noted by Young, Colonial Desire, 184 n.15. Young expertly analyses the permutations of this term in nineteenthcentury scientific, social, political and cultural theories. As Young points out, the debates about theories of race in the nineteenth century, ‘by settling on the possibility or impossibility of hybridity, focussed explicitly on the issue of sexuality and the issue of sexual unions between whites and blacks. Theories of race were thus also covert theories of desire’ (9). 25 Molly Bloom thinks of these illustrations as Bloom, ‘the manchild in the womb’, lies ‘laterally’ next to her semilateral position in their bed, his ‘right and left legs flexed, the indexfinger and thumb of the right hand resting on the bridge of the nose, in the attitude depicted in a snapshot photograph made by Percy Apjohn’ (U 17.2314–17): Bloom is ‘tucked up in bed like those babies in the Aristocrats Masterpiece he brought me another time as if we hadnt enough of that in real life without some old Aristocrat or whatever his name is disgusting you more with those rotten pictures children with two heads and no legs thats the kind of villainy theyre always dreaming about with not another thing in their empty heads [. . .]’ (U 18.1238–41). For reproductions of illustrations published in later editions of the 1684 Aristotles Master-piece, or the Secrets of Generation Displayed in All Parts Thereof , see Stephen Soud’s ‘Blood-Red Wombs and Monstrous Births: Aristotle’s Masterpiece and Ulysses’. Soud points out that Aristotle’s Masterpiece is ‘a male inscription of a female process’: ‘This male appropriation of the female body achieves explicit, visual representation in the chromolithographic illustrations, which treat a fetishized female body as the object of vivisection. The illustrations depict the flesh peeled away from the womb in a graphic example of inscription and incision of the female torso’ (202). 26 Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Act of Union’ (in North (1975)) analyses within the context of the coercions of the 1800 Irish Act of Union and of heterosexual congress the ‘imperially / Male’ gestures of John Donne’s Elegie 19, ‘Going to

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Bed’, in which the lover addresses his mistress, ‘O my America! my new-foundland’: ‘[. . .] I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder / That you would neither cajole nor ignore.’ The masculinized empire concedes the ‘half-independent shore’ of the feminized colony, ‘Within whose borders now my legacy / Culminates inexorably’ (Selected Poems 1965–1975, 125). In Carlyle’s ‘The Nigger Question’, the wedding and its resultant monstrous progenies originate in the law of supply and demand to import African labour to the West Indies, according to the speaker: ‘To bring-in new and ever new Africans [. . .] till the country is crowded with Africans; and black men there, like white men here, are forced by hunger to labour for their living? [. . .] To have ‘emancipated’ the West Indies into a Black Ireland; ‘free’ indeed, but an Ireland, and Black! The world may yet see prodigies; and reality be stranger than a nightmare dream’ (‘The Nigger Question’, 353; on ‘Black Ireland’ see also 378, 380). Labour alone can prevent such an inconceivable conception. Lest we believe Carlyle’s disavowal of ‘The Nigger Question’ in his preface, we should compare the modest proposals he publishes on ‘The Nigger Question’ with those he advocates on ‘The Irish Question’, made on a trip to Ireland – ‘driven’ there, he claims, ‘as by the point of bayonets at my back’ – in the same year, 1849, the fourth year of the Famine: ‘Ireland really is my problem; the breaking point of the huge suppuration which all British and all European society now is. Set down in Ireland, one might at least feel, “Here is thy problem: In God’s name what wilt thou do with it?”’ (‘The Nigger Question’, 348; Reminiscences of My Irish Journey in 1849, Preface, v: J. A. Froude quotes from Carlyle’s 17 May 1849 journal entry). Infamously, what he will do with the Irish and their ‘problem’ is ‘Black-lead them and put them over with the niggers’ (cited in Hackett, Ireland: A Study in Nationalism, 227). Carlyle, who admits that he has ‘no respect for Ireland as it now is and has been’, ‘said and again said’ to one of his landowner hosts: ‘“No hope for the men as masters; their one true station in the universe is servants”, “slaves” if you will; and never can they know a right day till they attain that.’ Confronted during this journey by a man who asserted the Irish were ‘very ill governed’, Carlyle confesses: ‘I thought to myself “Yes indeed: you govern yourself. He that would govern you well, would probably surprise you much my friend, – laying a hearty horsewhip over that back of your’s.”’ The Irish refuse to labour: ‘Beggars, beggars; only industry really followed by the Irish people’ (Reminiscences, 50, 242–3, 84, 79–80, 223). But in the fecundity of the repressed, ‘labour’ has not produced worth, but misbred ‘possibility’ into waste: ‘[. . .] I was struck in general with the air of faculty misbred, and gone to waste, or more or less “excellent possibility much marred”, in almost all these faces’ (ibid., 15–17). ‘Society is at an end here’, Carlyle ghoulishly says of Famine Ireland, ‘with the land uncultivated, and every second soul a pauper. – “Society” here would have to eat itself, and end by cannibalism in a week, if it were not held up by the rest of our empire still standing afoot!’ (ibid., 206). 27 Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud , 233 (both quotations). 28 Vico, The New Science, I.xlii.195, II.i.517.

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29 The word derives from W. Burke, who was hanged in 1829 in Edinburgh for committing murders by suffocation, leaving no marks of violence. The pub Stephen names, ‘Burke’s of Denzille and Holles’, was owned by John Burke, tea and wine merchant, at 17 Holles Street, Dublin (U 14.1399). Osteen notes this derivation in ‘Cribs in the Countinghouse: Plagiarism, Proliferation, and Labor in “Oxen of the Sun”’, where he argues that, by paralleling intertextual and political economies, ‘“Oxen” ultimately illustrates how Joyce privileges artistic labor – an Irish labor of excess that emerges from debt – over both the female labor of childbearing and the male labor of physical and financial begetting’ (237). 30 Bakhtin positions hybridity between stylization and parody. Hybridization, he asserts, is ‘a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor’. He distinguishes between ‘mute and opaque’ unconscious hybrids – various languages co-existing within the boundaries of a single dialect, a single national language – and intentional, conscious hybrids – double-voiced, double-accented, double-languaged. Intentional hybrids mix not only two individual consciousnesses, two voices, two accents, but also two socio-linguistic consciousnesses, two epochs, that ‘come together and consciously fight it out on the territory of the utterance’. Authoritative discourse, Bakhtin points out, ‘demands our unconditional allegiance’; it ‘permits no play with the context framing it, no play with its borders [. . .]’ (The Dialogic Imagination, 358, 360, 343). Young aligns unconscious hybridity with ‘creolization’; hybridity as a whole, with pidgin languages (Colonial Desire, 21). See Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770–1820, and History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. 31 If ‘the act of cultural translation (both as representation and as reproduction) denies the essentialism of a prior given original or originary culture’, then for Bhabha, ‘all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity. But for me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which a third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the “third space” which enables other positions to emerge. This third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives [. . .]’ (Bhabha, ‘The Third Space’, 211). 32 See Anzald´ua, ‘How to Tame a Wild Tongue’.

chapter 10

Errors and expectations: the ethics of desire in Finnegans Wake Patrick McGee

In the final version of the letter in Finnegans Wake, the one most directly linked to ALP, she remarks: ‘Well, here’s lettering you erronymously anent other clerical fands allieged herewith’ (FW 617.30–1). The author of the letter, who goes by various names in this book, including that of ALP herself, suggests here that she writes anonymously. As Yawn’s interrogators have already stressed, the Wake itself is a letter ‘selfpenned to one’s other’ (FW 489.33–4). That the letter is ‘selfpenned’ suggests that it is addressed to the self who pens it; that it is penned to one’s other suggests that the self is the other, so that the letter can be said to be from the other to the other. In terms of its ultimate sender and receiver, or its origin and end, the letter is anonymous, though one could argue that particular subjects – for example, Maggie, ALP, Issy, Shem, Shaun, and so forth – mediate the other in themselves insofar as they occupy the location of the sender or the receiver. Shem as the writer who transcribes the speech of the mother, Shaun as the postman who carries the letter from sender to receiver, both signify the subject as a figure of mediation between the radical alterities that the women embody as objects of HCE’s or the sons’s patriarchal desires. In some sense, the letter comes from and goes back to the women. From another perspective, however, the letter is anonymous because it is the basic unit of communication, the letter of the alphabet. The word ‘alphabet’ contains the name of the mother, ALP, who figures the letter as a matrix of communication, the trace-structure that pre-exists and grounds the formation of words and sentences. The letter as trace-structure is always anonymous. Yet the word ‘anonymously’ can only be derived from ‘erronymously’ by cutting off the first three letters ‘err’ and replacing them with ‘an’. It could be argued that in this context ‘an’ is the unconscious of ‘err’. One can easily enough generate from the letters ‘an’ the name Anna which can be said to represent the unconscious of the signifying errors that make up the symbolic surface of this text. The Wake is a tissue of errors, of signifiers 161

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made up of letters that have wandered away from their proper locations in the body of language as a symbolic system. If the giant body of the father is usually identified as the referent of the Wake, this body is not what constitutes the materiality of its writing, the body of its text. On the contrary, the father is an imaginary construction (or, as Stephen Dedalus notes in Ulysses, a legal fiction). He is, in a sense, the absence at the centre of the Wake that animates all of its linguistic play as the play of the desire for meaning, for origins, and for a name that would not be anonymous – a proper name. Unfortunately, the Wake repeatedly undermines this quest for the proper name by showing that it can only be spelled erroneously. It is the letter itself as the material condition of language, its trace-structure, that makes it impossible to construct a proper name that would become the property of the father, the articulation of his true identity as the referent of historical representation. ALP herself, at the end of the version of the letter I have quoted from, remarks that ‘we’ve lived in two worlds. He is another he what stays under the himp of holth. The herewaker of our hamefame is his real namesame who will get himself up and erect, confident and heroic when but, young as of old, for my daily comfreshenall, a wee one woos’ (FW 619.11–15). The giant under the Hill of Howth is the whole man or the man in the hole, the imaginary projection onto real history of something that belies its material reality. If I may extrapolate from the contemporary American context, this giant is like the JFK figure that haunts the films of Oliver Stone. It belies the real historical man, the ‘herewaker of our hamefame’, who bears the ‘real namesame’ or namesake. Actually, the name of this father is never the same except in its difference, in the manifold erroneous spellings of Earwicker which finally contaminate the original itself in such a way as to call into question its authority, its property of identification. This concept of the proper and of property in the name of the father is also identified with his erection, both in the sexual sense and in the monumental sense. The Wellington monument embodies the historical erection of the father’s identity, while the sexual erection depends on the intervention of the other, on her daily ‘comfreshenall’, or her confession of all her love and the subordination of her desire to his as the means of wooing his ‘wee one’ or of answering the ‘wee one’ which woos. The historical truth, however, is that the monument is only a stone; and the phallus that monumentalizes masculine erection is an imaginary construction, an idealized image of the father’s penis that, memorialized by Finnegans Wake on at least one occasion, ‘never wet[s] the tea’ (FW 585.31).

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The father’s ideological erection misses the Real because it requires the letter as its support. It requires the body of the mother as the letter that introduces alterity into the heart of self-identical masculine desire. But what about the mother’s desire? Must it always remain anonymous? Must it always be improper or without a relation to property, authority and law? How do we distinguish the mother’s signature as the sign of her desire from the ‘other clerical fands’ in her letter? The word ‘fands’ suggests the presence of other hands in the writing of the letter and the presence of fiends (from the Danish fand). The latter would be the demonic forces that seem to be unleashed by the writing of the mother’s desire, that emerge as the supports of that desire. The fiends or other hands in the Wake who discover their own desire in the desire of the mother, in her letter, are the children: Shem, Shaun and Issy. Their desire is fiendish simply because it is desire, because as the desire of the other it subverts the self-identity of masculine desire by postulating the goal of desire as something beyond property and the other as object. The father would make the children and the mother into the objects of his desire, into his property, without recognizing their desires as the desire of the other, the desire that destroys the self-identity of the proper. The good son, Shaun, identifies with the desire of the father through his own desire to be the father and to own the (m)other. The bad son, Shem, identifies with the desire of the mother as a desire that has no object, that remains irreducible to anything proper or to any property relation. Issy, as I have argued elsewhere,1 articulates desire as something in excess of the law, something forbidden that delights. Hers is the desire for nothing nameable or what Lacan calls the Thing. For the truth is that the desire of the mother is not without relation to property, authority and law; it is the condition of those relations, their ultimate ground in the letter or trace-structure of the documents of civilization and in the human body as the letter of desire. The mother’s desire is the letter of the father’s desire, its ground and the force that exceeds it. It is, quite simply, desire itself. The mother letters the other, that is to say, supports the desire of the other that explodes the property of the proper name and thus liberates those other hands ‘allieged herewith’. The word ‘allieged’ suggests several forms of relationship between human subjects. First, the mother’s letter, or the letter as matrix of desire, alleges the existence of the other through what Derrida would call its iterability. The trace-structure of the letter presupposes the relation of intersubjectivity or the existence of subjects that can encode and decode the letters through an act of communication that always produces an excess in the letter itself. In other words, the trace-structure of the letter

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survives the acts of encoding and decoding and may even be said to bear psychic investments of incommensurable value that cannot be reduced to propositional logic. This means that the letter facilitates symbolic exchange, a form of exchange that cannot be translated into forms of economic or conceptual equivalence. Another word buried within the word ‘allieged’ is the word ‘allied’. The letter is the material means by which subjects that are not proper, that are not bound together through an identification with the name of the father, construct relationships with one another. It is possible to relate to the other – even to love the other – without identifying the other with the self or the self with the other. An alliance with the other is not a form of self-identification but a recognition of kinship between cultural locations of irreducible difference. The letter allies those subjects that are alleged to exist by virtue of the letter itself as the material condition of subjectivity. While there is no collective subject in the sense of a subject that sums up all forms of subjectivity, the master subject with which all other subjects identify, there is a material ground of the subject in the iterability of the letter that implicates every subject in every other subject. Iterability, according to Derrida, ‘supposes a minimal remainder (as well as a minimum of idealization) in order that the identity of the selfsame be repeatable and identifiable in, through, and even in view of its alteration. For the structure of iteration [. . .] implies both identity and difference.’2 In Finnegans Wake the letter, in both of its senses, constitutes the minimal remainder and the minimal idealization that underlies interhuman relationships. It grounds intersubjectivity as the alliance of different subjects that can communicate with one another and relate to one another through an identification with the other’s irreducible difference, an identification that does not result in self-identity. Such an alliance subverts the identity thinking that one associates with nationalist ideology, which insists that every subject identify with the master subject or the national archetype. Nationalist ideology insists on the exclusion of difference and the perpetuation of the selfsame without alteration. The alliance of the letter, by contrast, recognizes that there can be no true relation to the other without the recognition of irreducible difference. It is not the selfsame or the namesame that is identified with but the difference; it is the alterity of intersubjective relations that is the basis of such an alliance. For example, in the tale of the Ondt and the Gracehoper, the Ondt as a Shaun-figure passes judgement on the Shem-like Gracehoper and refuses to associate with him ‘for he is not on our social list’ (FW 415.31). The crime of the Gracehoper is his desire for ‘joyicity’ (FW 414.23), a desire not for the object or commodity that can be added to the sum of accumulated

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wealth, a means taken as the end or goal of desire, but for the thing as a process, a means to an end, the support of desire that reproduces desire itself. He privileges use-value over exchange-value, expenditure over accumulation, the pleasure principle over the death drive, time over space. By contrast, the Ondt cannot imagine any form of pleasure that is not a form of conquest and accumulation; he does not live in the present but attempts to annihilate time through the absolute mastery of space. The passage in which the Ondt rejects the Gracehoper contains numerous references to Wyndham Lewis’s critique of time and Joyce in Time and Western Man and to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, references which suggest that the Ondt identifies with authoritarian politics as a form of narcissistic death worship. He makes ‘chilly spaces at hisphex affront of the icinglass of his windhame’ (FW 415.28–9). He constructs the world spatially through the projection of his own image onto the other, through the subordination of temporal intersubjectivity to spatial egoism. In this way, he virtually represses any form of historical or temporal consciousness that must necessarily recognize the other as the limit of the self, the radical difference that bears the imprint of time as the postponement of any final identity, any closure to the dialectical relation between self and other. Lewis and those other European intellectuals who aligned themselves with Nazism and Fascism wanted to substitute a politics dominated by the aesthetic, by monumental or spatial forms of value, for an aesthetic riddled with politics as the sign of art’s temporality, its historical emplacement. Such monumental art is allied with death through its transcendence of history and through its insistence on a radical purity that belies the body as a temporal process. As the Ondt dreams of the Egyptian Elysian Fields, Sekhet Hetep, he remarks: ‘May he me no voida water! Seekit Hatup! May no he me tile pig shed on! Suckit Hotup!’ (FW 415.34–5). Urination and elimination are forms of impurity to the Ondt that belie the monological view he takes of his own body not only as self-contained and self-adequate but as containing all the world insofar as it is the model of that world. In lines that mock the inscription on the pyramid of Pepi II, the Ondt proclaims: ‘As broad as Beppy’s realm shall flourish my reign shall flourish! As high as Heppy’s hevn shall flurrish my haine shall hurrish! Shall grow, shall flourish! Shall hurrish!’ (FW 415.35–416.2). The Ondt relates to the world not only as an extension of the self but as a form of property; and his self can flourish only so long as it can proclaim the universality of its properties. The happiness of the Ondt, the heaven he not only longs for but to some extent already realizes, is founded on a hatred (French haine) of the other. The Ondt is happy because, as the denier of time and the

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denunciator of the other, he can never entertain hope, which arises out of temporal consciousness. His happiness lies in the fantasy of the totalized self that excludes all forms of alterity and can only relate to others as forms of the same, extensions of the self. The Ondt is a ‘weltall fellow’, that is, an all-world (German Welt) or universal fellow, ‘raumybult and abelboobied’ (FW 416.3). His obsession with space (German Raum) and his identification of all the world with his own body makes him into the archetype of the imperialist subject. Like the Fascist leaders who, even as Joyce wrote, were attempting to transform Europe into forms of absolute space that were meant to transcend history, at least for a thousand years, the Ondt is ‘sair sair sullemn and chairmanlooking when he was not making spaces in his psyche, but, laus! when he wore making spaces on his ikey, he ware mouche mothst secred and muravyingly wisechairmanlooking’ (FW 416.4–8). The Ondt is sehr, sehr or very, very solemn, and looks like a leader even when he is not making spaces in his psyche; but when he is making spaces on his ‘ikey’, that is, constructing a world through the projection of his own phallic self-identity, the I as the key to the subject, he is much more sacred and the epitome or embodiment of social wisdom. Though he is only an Ondt, he represents the true identity of all insects, including the louse (German Laus), the fly (French mouche), the moth, and so forth. While the Ondt accumulates and subordinates, the Gracehoper spends freely with the confident belief that there will be renewed grace and redemption. Of course, the result is that he becomes ‘heartily hungry’ (FW 416.20) and falls sick. He resorts to devouring his own means, including the ‘whilepaper’, ‘forty flights of styearcases’, the ‘records’, and the ‘timeplace’ (FW 416.21–4). After ravaging time with his insatiable appetite, the Gracehoper returns to his home, ‘Tingsomingenting’ (FW 416.27), a name which sounds out the Danish words for ‘a thing like no thing’. This name suggests that the Gracehoper lives in the place of the incommensurable, a timeplace in which no thing can be measured in relation to another thing, a place in which a thing has no abstract value but only use-value. In such a place, there is no reason to accumulate things for there is no intrinsic value in things that can be accumulated: they are either used and enjoyed or they are without any use or purpose. Though the Gracehoper truly suffers from his moral indiscretions and spendthrift ways, he nevertheless always lives in the present, what Benjamin called the time of the now ( Jetztzeit), in which history is never a monument or timeless tradition but a living process. Rather than accumulating like a scholar, he consumes, like Shem the Penman or the author of Finnegans Wake, the papers, the records, and the other traces of time. He absorbs them into the process of life, into the realm

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of use-value, by which I mean a place beyond measurable value. He suffers from what he has lost, but from that suffering comes new hope as he jumps back into the process of history: he ‘promptly tossed himself in the vico [. . .], tezzily wondering wheer would his aluck alight or boss of both appease’ (FW 417.5–7; my emphasis). The words emphasized echo the riddle of the Prankquean and suggest a link between the marginalized woman and the Gracehoper. As Patrick McCarthy has demonstrated at great length, the Prankquean’s riddle is rich in meanings; but I want to emphasize only a few of them in this context, though I believe the interpretive turn I give to the riddle is consistent with all the meanings that have been hypothesized.3 In the first version of the riddle, the Prankquean asks: ‘Mark the Wans, why do I am alook alike a poss of porterpease?’ (FW 21.18–19). As McCarthy suggests, at the most elementary level, she asks two things: ‘Why am I like a pot of porter, please?’ and ‘Why am I a pod for Porter’s peas’ (The Riddles of ‘Finnegans Wake’ , 114). In my view, the answer to the first question is that, like a pot of porter, this woman flows. This reading should recall Luce Irigaray’s argument that women have been historically identified with fluids and fluidity in patriarchal culture – that as a speaking subject, the ‘woman-thing’, as she calls it, ‘speaks “fluid”’. She later qualifies this statement by noting that ‘[f ]luid – like that other, inside/outside of philosophical discourse – is, by nature, unstable. Unless it is subordinated to geometrism, or (?) idealized.’4 The woman speaks fluid not because in some essential way she is made up of liquids that flow – for example, in the process of menstruation – while the man is a solid, which would express his phallic nature. Rather, the phallus, insofar as it has meaning as an idealization of the penis, is a product of the masculine imaginary, or the semantic residue in language of masculinist ideologies, which has had the historical effect of repressing the woman’s body, her sexual organs and the other means by which she experiences pleasure. Within the same imaginary system, the woman has always been identified with fluidity but a fluidity that has been channelled into the geometrical or spatial forms of phallocentrism. In other words, within the masculine imaginary, fluidity represents the body as a process, a process that is repressed by the rule of patriarchal norms. This effectively answers the second meaning of the Prankquean’s question (without, however, closing off other possibilities of interpretation). As McCarthy notes, it is the woman’s womb that is like a pod for the little Porters (The Riddles of ‘Finnegans Wake’ , 114). The body as a process that seems ungovernable because it resists the law of exchange-value can be brought under government, under the rule of masculine authority, only by the reduction of that process to its reproductive function.

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Insofar as the woman has been silenced by the masculine discourse that still dominates Western culture, she speaks fluid when she speaks in her own voice. But even this formulation becomes problematic if we keep in mind that the voice as property, as the adequate representation of the speaking subject, is precisely what the masculine logic of identity projects as the universal human voice. Women can always be heard by the patriarchal culture if they speak like men, that is, if they speak in the voice of the proper, in the language of the autonomous subject that stands outside and above history as a process. Historically, women have generally been denied access to that voice and to the language of the proper through their exclusion from education and the other institutional supports of the dominant cultural system. Women, of course, have not been alone in the margins of such culture since there are also racial, sexual and class determinants of marginality; but historically women have experienced the extreme limit of marginality since they have been marked by race, sex and class as well as gender.5 Finnegans Wake repeatedly illustrates the marginality and oppression of women through its pervasive references to their historical rape and violation by the various conquerors who collectively constitute the great father of patriarchal history, and through its dissection of marriage as a form of institutionalized rape that finds its historical parallel in the Act of Union of 1800, which finally sanctioned the forced marriage of England and Ireland. The Prankquean comically embodies the historical woman who shows us how to speak fluid. She comes to the castle of the father and demands admission for several reasons that are buried in the riddle. One reason is that she resembles all three children who resemble each other like three peas in a pod, and thus demands recognition as their true mother. If you will, she demands the right to be more than an instrument of the masculine, the right to be admitted on her own terms to the symbolic order through the recognition of maternity as a symbolic as well as a reproductive process. Second, she demands the recognition of her body as a piece of the Real – her need, in Bernard Benstock’s reading of the riddle, to ‘pass water, please’ – that remains incommensurable with respect to masculine fantasy.6 The Prankquean speaks fluid by urinating on the door of Jarl van Hoother’s castle when he will not let her in. She is like a pot of porter because what has flowed into her body must eventually flow out of it transformed. Finally, as McCarthy stresses, the Prankquean’s request for admission and her act of urination articulate her desire as a demand for sexual pleasure (The Riddles of ‘Finnegans Wake’ , 115). In other words, the story of the Prankquean can be read as an allegory not only of the relations between the genders but of the subject as a form

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of property in Western culture. As her name suggests, the Prankquean is a whore because that is what Western masculinist culture in some sense makes of the woman: as a sexual machine for the pleasure and reproduction of the One sex, she is the property of the father, an extension of the father’s sexuality, without an identity of her own. She does not belong to herself; and the language of the father does not permit her to articulate her own desire, and to experience her own pleasure, without transgressing the father’s law and, as she demonstrates by urinating on the door of Jarl van Hoother’s castle, desecrating the father’s property. When Jarl van Hoother lays ‘cold hands on himself’ (FW 21.11), shakes ‘warm hands with himself’ (FW 21.36), and has ‘his hurricane hips up to his pantry-box’ (FW 22.22–3), he is not simply masturbating but demonstrating the nature of sexual pleasure in a patriarchal economy that excludes the pleasure of the other. If the woman is the instrumental extension of masculine sexuality, then all legitimate sexual pleasure is masculine and masturbatory. The castle of Jarl van Hoother is the masculine body itself, and the Prankquean’s desire for entrance is the desire for a piece of the other, for an exchange of bodies that recognizes the other as another subject and another body. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray argues that ‘[t]o inhabit is the fundamental trait of man’s being’ (141). Throughout this study, she suggests that man constructs himself in and takes possession of language as a form of property by excluding the woman from any property, identity or language of her own. Irigaray seems to say that woman, like the Prankquean, has to speak fluid because she has no other language than the language of her body with which to speak in her own voice – that is, in a voice that has escaped the codifications of patriarchal discourse. I have problems with this formulation and will return to the question of sexual difference in language at the end of this essay; but here I want to consider briefly the Prankquean’s desire as a desire for something beyond private property, a desire for a place and a dwelling that is not property. The meaning of the Prankquean’s war with Jarl van Hoother, if one may refer to it in that way, is ambiguous in the way of other key fables running throughout Finnegans Wake. By kidnapping the twin boys, Tristopher and Hilary, she demonstrates the power she has to subvert the authority of the father by controlling and dominating the sons. Of course, after she takes Tristopher, she does not transform him into the simple opposite of the patriarch but rather subverts patriarchy from within by calling on ‘her four owlers masters for to tauch him his tickles and she convorted him to the onesure allgood and he became a luderman’ (FW 21.28–30). In this case, the four old masters are owlers, that is, illegal exporters of wool. These outlaws, in

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effect, make questionable representatives of paternal authority; and though the Prankquean’s goal is to turn the boy around ethically by teaching him the ‘onesure allgood’, the result is that he becomes a luderman. This word may sound like Lutheran, but it also contains the word Luder (German for ‘scoundrel’) and sounds like the Irish word ludram´an or ‘lazy idler’, according to McHugh’s Annotations. In effect, the Prankquean subverts the patriarchal system by revealing its internal divisions and contradictions in order to disrupt or challenge its moral authority. After taking Hilary, she ‘punched the curses of cromcruwell with the nail of a top into the jiminy and she had her four larksical monitrix to touch him his tears and provorted him to the onecertain allsecure and he became a tristian’ (FW 22.14–17). This time the Prankquean perverts the boy by first teaching him the ideology of Puritanism (which once took the form of Cromwell’s curse on Ireland) and then having four instructresses touch him in order to teach him his tears and his terrors. The idea here is not that the Prankquean has sexually molested the boy but that woman as the object of masculine desire has the power to reverse that relation and transform the masculine subject. She introduces a radical alterity into the relation of the masculine subject to itself; and though she confuses the boy by disclosing the contradiction between paternal authority (puritanism) and masculine desire, she also makes it possible for him to break out of the closed circle of masculine subjectivity (the father’s castle) and to recognize the terrors or forms of violence that masculinism has introduced into the world. As the object of feminine desire and touching, the boy may learn to identify with the other as another subject. He becomes a ‘tristian’, which is not only a Christian but a Tristram, a true lover devoted to the desire of the other. Hilary merges with Tristopher: cheerfulness (from the Latin root of Hilary) with sadness (from French tristesse). When the Prankquean returns yet a third time to Jarl van Hoother’s castle, she not only finds him still locked inside a narcissistic relation to his own body but discovers the outcome of her first kidnapping: ‘the jiminy Toughertrees and the dummy were belove on the watercloth, kissing and spitting, and roguing and poghuing, like knavepaltry and naivebride and in their second infancy’ (FW 22.24–6). One can think of the children and the mother (i.e. the Prankquean) as the unconscious of the patriarchal subject, Jarl van Hoother. As such, the sexual exchange between Tristopher and the dummy is less incestuous than what Freud called polymorphously perverse, the articulation of a transgressive desire that the father’s psychic fortification, his castle, is meant to repress and to subordinate to the autonomous, selfcontained subject of the masculine economy. As the dummy, the daughter

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embodies the speechlessness of the feminine subject within that economy. She signifies what the mother becomes as a function of the patriarchal subject into which she has been incorporated as the other. For it is not quite accurate to say that the mother is the unconscious of the patriarchal subject but rather that the patriarchal subject incorporates the mother into its symbolic structure as the other, the excluded, the supplement of the masculine sex. The Real mother is the body and symbolic subject position that lies outside the masculine economy, though from within that economy she must remain unconscious and occupy the place of the big Other. Her discourse is the discourse of the Other, the act of speaking fluid that makes itself heard in the dominant discourse of the father if one knows how to recognize and interpret the movements of desire. The children are not only below in the father’s castle; they are beloved to one another and make love in the fluid realm of the unconscious. The mother’s kidnapping of the boys represents the displacement of the patriarchal subject by opening it up to the desire of the Other as the true origin of desire. For the last time, the Prankquean makes ‘her wittest in front of the arkway of trihump’ (FW 22.28). Jarl van Hoother, as all the sons of thunder and the ‘old terror of the dames’, finally emerges from ‘the arkway of his three shuttoned castles’ (FW 22.33–4), or the three bodies that make up his unconscious, the three children. He comes to ‘the whole longth of the strongth of his bowman’s bill’ (FW 23.2–3); that is, he reveals the phallus that symbolizes his authority and identity. He reveals himself as the imperialist subject, Strongbow, the Earl of Pembroke, who led the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1170. At that point, like the Russian General, ‘he ordurd’, or rather responds to the fluid speech of the Prankquean with the solid speech, the shit, of the father. He tells her both to ‘shut up’ and to set up ‘shop’. He both gives her a place and denies her a voice; but in response ‘the duppy shot the shutter clup’ (FW 23.4–5). According to The Oxford English Dictionary, ‘duppy’ is a name used by West Indian blacks for a ghost or spirit. In my reading of this section, the Prankquean as a black ghost, her marginalized image in the eye of the father, shoots the shutter up, or the one who intends to shut her up, and, like Buckley when he shoots the Russian General, takes command of her own desire. There is one loud clap of thunder, after which ‘they all drank free’ (FW 23.7–8). Perhaps the thunder is the father’s scream after he has been shot or the sound of the Prankquean’s weapon. In any case, to say they all drank free suggests that by symbolically killing the father (for, as Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses, it is in the mind that one must kill the priest and the king; U 15.4436–7), the mother, the sons, and the daughter have found freedom, the right to a pot

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of porter ‘on the house’, the right to speak fluid in the house of culture that has been liberated from the father’s law. However, the next line suggests that this freedom may be a pipe dream: ‘For one man in his armour was a fat match always for any girls under shurts’ (FW 23.8–9). This line supports the more traditional reading of this section, which argues that the Jarl is the duppy, the black or melancholic Irishman, who shuts the door in the mother’s face. I would argue that both readings are correct, for what is described in the Prankquean episode is not a unique event in history but the process that underlies the patriarchal-imperialist system. The mother shoots the father, the father shuts out the mother, and an unstable peace is achieved through a compromise that allows the man to keep his fantasy (his dream of a self-enclosed empire) while the woman articulates her own desire (to break down the door). The man imagines himself a fair match for any girl – or rather fantasizes about his erection as a fat match for what any girl has under her shirts or skirts. The Jarl may not be a changed man, but at least he has had to take into account the desire of the other. In the process of doing so, he also drinks freely because in the desire of the other, he discovers the truth of his own desire, the truth that desire always comes from the Other, that desire can never be reduced to or answered by property. So as the tale concludes, ‘[t]he prankquean was to hold her dummyship and the jimminies was to keep the peacewave and van Hoother was to git the wind up’ (FW 23.12–14). The mother fuses with the daughter and constructs her identity as a place in the symbolic where she can at least desire freely; the sons as the warring aspects of the father – the cheerful optimism and the melancholic pessimism – resolve themselves into a temporal wave of peace; and the father gets the wind up, that is, articulates his own desire within the masculine economy. Of course, this ending is too simple to be satisfying, and nothing in Finnegans Wake operates on one level only. By taking hold of her ‘dummyship’, the Prankquean may also be resigning herself to silence and disempowerment within the patriarchal-imperialist system. Yet, as McHugh parenthetically notes in the Annotations, the dummyship also suggests the pirate ship that we associate with the real character on whom the Prankquean is based, Grace O’Malley. This name appears in the section as another name for the Prankquean, ‘grace o’malice’ (FW 21.20–1). Though I admit to the speculative nature of this proposition, I believe that Finnegans Wake is about the force that enables not only Jarl van Hoother but also the Prankquean herself (in her role as pirate) to get the wind up, that is, to set sail on the wit, wet and wind of human desire. In my view, the key word in the Prankquean episode, and in the episode of the Ondt and the

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Gracehoper to which I am about to return, is ‘grace’. What the Prankquean brings to Jarl van Hoother, even when she kidnaps his children, is the possibility of grace. As the Irish legend goes, Grace O’Malley, an Irish pirate during the reign of Elizabeth I, sailed to Howth Castle and asked to be admitted. The Earl of Howth (a title echoed by the name Jarl van Hoother) was at his dinner and ignored her. In return, she kidnapped his son and would not bring him back until the Earl promised that he would always leave his doors open at mealtimes. According to Adaline Glasheen, Grace as the Prankquean mixes up the natures of the children and ‘changes the nature of the father, sets him free from the sins of isolation, provokes him from passivity to action’. Like the pirate that she is, she mixes things up by challenging the boundaries that constitute the proper and property. By forcing the masculine subject to open itself to the desire of the Other, Grace calls into question the rule of sexual difference that constructs the masculine as the One sex. As Glasheen concludes, she represents ‘“graceout-of-malice,” good-out-of-evil, felix culpa’.7 Her name also suggests the possibility of grace-out-of-the-male or grace-for-the-male. She destroys the father’s relationship to himself as a form of property and to his children as extensions of himself by introducing him to the radical desire of the Other. This Other is not the woman per se, though she occupies the Other’s place as a function of the masculine unconscious. Grace is openness to the Other as the foundation of the subject; it is a relation to the radical alterity within the subject that makes it forever impossible for that subject to be self-identical, self-adequate, as a form of property. In this context, grace does not mean loving the other as you love yourself but loving your self as the Other. After this lengthy detour, let me return to the moment when the Gracehoper accepts his historical destiny but wonders ‘wheer would his aluck alight or boss of both appease’ (FW 417.7). McCarthy translates this version of the Prankquean’s riddle thus: ‘where would he get lucky and appease his father, the boss of both the boys’ (The Riddles of ‘Finnegans Wake’ , 131). The first part of this remark testifies to the Gracehoper’s infinite optimism, while the second hints at the means by which he nourishes that hope by putting faith in his ability to change or appease the father. But perhaps another translation is possible: ‘where would his look-alike or boss of both appear appeased’. This suggests that the Ondt or Shaun and the father are both bosses in one way or the other, that they both present themselves as masters in a master–slave relationship that the Gracehoper would like to escape through appeasement. He can appease the master not by surrendering his own desire but by transforming the master from the boss of both to the poss of porter, that is to say, into both the pot of porter and the pa of

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the Porters. As the pot of porter, or a Bass’s Ale, according to McCarthy (131), the father is transformed from solid to liquid, from the rigidity of the patriarchal subject to the flow of the desiring subject, from the bank (in both senses) of accumulated wealth, which is also sublimated shit, to the urinary river of expenditure. As the pa of the Porters, the father is no longer the monumental authority, the patriarch, but rather the specific father of a specific family, the imperfect public-house porter or the porter who stands at the gate of the father’s castle, on the margin, so to speak. This is the porter who, at the end of the tavern scene in FW II.3, consumes all the liquids on the premises, all the remainders of the drinks that have been left behind, and drinks them all free. He consumes the fluids until he is consumed by fluid and, collapsing to the ‘flure of his feats’, he sails away on the ‘stout ship Nansy Hans’ (FW 382.24, 27). This is not just a sturdy ship but a ship of stout, a liquid ship which bears the name of a woman who may have been the object of the father’s desire (see FW 244.20). In effect, the father as porter has gone out of himself into the Other, into the intoxication of the Other’s desire, into the desire that comes from the Other to the Other and has no absolute place of its own, no object or final goal, no property. This desire without property, what Lacan calls the desire for nothing nameable, is the grace that comes from hope. The Gracehoper can change the father or the patriarchal subject not because it is something external to him, something outside of the subject, but because it is something inside that he must release from the tyranny of accumulation. The Ondt continues to pass judgement on the Gracehoper for ‘writing off his phoney’, while the Ondt himself is ‘Conte Carme’, or Count Money, who ‘makes the melody that mints the money’ (FW 418.3–4). The Gracehoper, like Shem, is a writer who transforms his shit into ink, that is to say, into grace for expenditure as writing.8 But in order to do this, he has to touch his shit and mix it with urine. The Ondt, on the other hand, hates everything that comes from his body, both shit and urine, but redeems what he hates by transforming it into exchange-value. In other words, he reduces the body to an abstraction. The Ondt can never forgive the Gracehoper for being different and for wanting nothing more than ‘a world of differents’ (FW 417.10) because every radical difference, or that which remains incommensurable in relation to a system like money that subordinates everything to the calculus of exchange-value, must be excluded as evil itself. By contrast, the Gracehoper says: ‘I forgive you, grondt Ondt [. . .] / For their sukes of the sakes you are safe in whose keeping.’ He forgives the Ondt for the sake of those whom he, the Gracehoper, has loved, those who now love the Ondt; for the Gracehoper has loved selfishly himself and

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has accumulated in order to spend: ‘As I once played the piper I must now pay the count.’ He accepts the Ondt’s judgement because the Ondt is the other side of his own identity; they are ‘the twins that tick Homo Vulgaris’ (FW 418.12–13, 16, 25). By forgiving the Ondt, he merely forgives himself and gives himself to himself, not as private property but as the Other. The Gracehoper represents the potential for redemption inside the great father or boss of both. He articulates the moment of ethics in patriarchal history as the moment in which the patriarchal subject bestows grace upon itself – and, in that sense, becomes feminine – by learning to forgive – which is to recognize and to love – the Other that is his true identity. He becomes feminine in the sense that he identifies with his symptom and takes responsibility for the fantasy that he has projected onto the other, including the other gender. As the Gracehoper concludes his poetic address to the Ondt: Your feats end enormous, your volumes immense, (May the Graces I hoped for sing your Ondtship song sense!), Your genus its worldwide, your spacest sublime! But, Holy Saltmartin, why can’t you beat time? (FW 419.5–8)

As these words suggest, the Gracehoper is addressing not just the Ondt but the great father whose dead body constitutes the spatial order of the imperialist world. His enormous feet, immense volumes, universal identity, and sublimation of the species (through racial theory) constitute his monumental form. Yet he lacks the grace that can only come from the other, from someone like the Gracehoper, from the temporal realm of historical change and difference. The Ondt fears change and hates difference because it undermines the stability of his univocal world and threatens not only the property of the self but the concept of property itself. This challenge to property and the accumulation of value as the basis of ethics brings me back to the sentence with which I began this discussion: ‘Well, here’s lettering you erronymously anent other clerical fands allieged herewith.’ There is one more possible meaning in the word ‘allieged’ that I need to consider. The word liege refers to the lord or superior and to the vassal or inferior in a feudal relationship. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, there is also an obsolete verb-form of the word which means ‘to render (homage) as a liege’ (s.v.). Although the examples given suggest that this verb refers to the homage given by the liege man to the liege lord, the ambivalence of the word liege, especially in the context of the Wake, opens it up to the meaning of rendering homage and respect in general. The

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constructed verb-form alliege, therefore, could be said to signify rendering homage and respect to all or everyone. This reading permits me to offer the following, rather open-ended, translation of the sentence: ‘Here’s writing to you anonymously – that is, to the Other that constitutes both you and me – and in error – insofar as I am not identical to the letter that constitutes me as a subject in the Other – concerning other writing hands that may be considered to be implicated in this letter, even to the point of authoring the letter without in any way adding up to the collective author, and rendering homage to one another as both lords and vassals, masters and slaves.’ In the letter as the Other, everyone is both lord and vassal because no one can be lord over any other or vassal to the other – because in the big Other there is no other, and terms like lord and vassal are only signifiers or ontologically empty structural locations, the traces or markers of historical time. Genealogically, one cannot escape the histories of these words and the social relationships they have signified and still signify; but as material signifiers they are also subject to displacement and reinvention. It is always possible to transform the historical context that determines the meaning of words, however difficult it may be in practice. As Stephen Dedalus observes in Ulysses, the signifiers of history cannot be wished away; but that does not mean they cannot be recontextualized and transformed. In the sentence that follows the one above, ALP remarks: ‘I wisht I wast be that dumb tyke and he’d wish it was me yonther heel’ (FW 617.31–2). She appears to wish that she could go back to the past, to the silence of her early womanhood when she was her dummyship; and she recognizes that her man, the sleeping giant, would like nothing better than to have her once again under heel, or under the hill, as she was before she learned how to speak fluid. But the truth is that Finnegans Wake makes that nostalgic desire, like all desire, impossible. The terms man/woman, like the terms master/slave, continue to signify long after they have outlived their binary logic. The work of Irigaray argues that men and women experience and relate to language in ways that are historically specific and different. In effect, she seems at times to cast women completely outside of language and to make language into the property of man, both the object of his ownership and the nature of his identity. She writes: ‘The maternal-feminine remains the place separated from “its” own place, deprived of “its” place’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 10). But I would argue, in the light of Finnegans Wake, that one cannot imagine human history as the simple absence of feminine desire or the realization of masculine desire. In some sense, desire is always the desire of the other, always transgresses the dominant order of representations and social relations,

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and always disappoints our expectations. ALP, like the Prankquean, represents the historical attempt of women, and all the others who have occupied the margins of hegemonic Western culture, to find a voice within that culture, to speak fluid against the norms of Western discourse, which founds itself on the exclusion of the other. The woman’s desire for a voice, however, is not necessarily, as Irigaray seems to imply sometimes, purely the desire for property of her own, which would only reinforce the legitimacy of property relations and the logic of exclusion on which such relations are based. On the contrary, I would argue that the desire for a dwelling or a place is not strictly the desire for the proper or property. If ALP desires to be the young woman she once was, the voiceless object of masculine desire, it is not simply that she does not want a voice of her own but rather that she wants to reinvent the desire of the other she once was and still is insofar as she can be said to occupy the place of the big Other. It is to reinvent desire as the foundation of her true voice. In the same passage, she goes on to recall ‘our’ much admired ‘shape as a juvenile’ which she somehow connects with ‘the Married Woman’s Improperty Act’ (FW 617.33–5). Joyce transforms the Married Women’s Property Act of 1833 into its opposite not because he is against women having property but because he recognizes the unintended liberatory possibilities of such an act. It opens the door to feminine desires for something more than property, for the improper as the only true property of desire. Of course, I do not mean that women should not desire property. Nor am I so foolish as to imagine that those without property or privileges would desire anything less than what has been denied them by those who are in the habit of taking everything. However, I am saying that desire itself is never strictly a desire for property or the proper, that these are merely the supports of desire, the means to its process. The real object of desire is desire itself; and if there is anything that the patriarch, the imperialist, the capitalist and the fascist fear, it is the desire for desire, which has another name: hope. The last section of the Wake, which culminates in the voice of the mother, is about hope and the call to hope, which is why this section so frequently echoes the rhetoric of The Communist Manifesto (a point to which I will return elsewhere). In the paragraphs immediately preceding ALP’s final letter, from which I have quoted, we read: ‘Have we cherished expectations? Are we for liberty of perusiveness?’ (FW 614.23–4). The first question hides the acronym HCE; and the second, ALP. The ‘we’ is the anonymous subject of this section that ultimately flows into the letter and voice of ALP which flows, via the transitional ‘the’, in and through the w/hole of Finnegans Wake. It defines our expectations of freedom, of the

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liberty to peruse without censorship, to wander along the pathways of desire and even to fall into error as the condition of renewing desire. Such freedom is the necessary condition for reading a book like the Wake, which articulates a desire that crosses genders, sexualities and nationalities, yet is never whole or self-adequate. This desire is the antithesis of property, though it makes possible a place in the symbolic for the improper subject, a place where one may dwell not through the exclusion of the other but by the grace of the Other, a grace that lies beyond the ideologies of gender and nationality. In the Wake, this grace as the articulation of desire is the answer and the antidote to the domination of place through the concept of private property and to the domination of language – whether by a gender, a race or a class – through the concept of the proper; it is the opening to the Other that makes it possible to begin to imagine an ethics not only of sexual difference, as Irigaray desires, but of difference itself as the incommensurable. In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan makes much of Freud’s absolute horror at the commandment of Christ to love your neighbour as yourself . The point seems to be that as long as the human subject constructs itself through the hatred of the other in itself, through the repression of its own desire and the disavowal and sublimation of the body as a process – and can one imagine a relation to the body that does not contain elements of disavowal and sublimation? –, one must necessarily hate the neighbour, the brother, the wife, and so forth (in a word: the other) insofar as they disclose to us the truth about our own desires. I may recoil from the evils I see in my neighbour just as the Ondt recoils from the hedonistic Gracehoper; but, as Lacan notes, ‘it is no different from the evil I retreat from in myself. To love him, to love him as myself, is necessarily to move toward some cruelty.’9 Though Lacan never reaches exactly this conclusion, it seems to me that it is consistent with the ethics of psychoanalysis and with the ethics of Finnegans Wake to say that the basis of a true ethics of difference is not to love the other as oneself but to love the self as the Other. Even Christianity can be read in this light; for through the Incarnation, God became a human being, the thing he had created out of himself, and identified with his own symptom in order to bring grace into the world. Christ did not love human beings as he loved himself but loved himself as a human being. In Finnegans Wake, the voice of the mother contains the letter that is the material basis of the book itself; but that letter is not some version of ´ecriture feminine, some fantasy of women’s writing as the expression of an originary essence. Joyce did not love the woman as himself and did not write the book from her viewpoint. He loved the Other in himself, which he recognized as the

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margin, the abject shit and urine of patriarchal culture, that bound him to all those who have been excluded by the patriarchy and the empire, who have been forced to live outside the closed castle of masculine property in order to represent and virtually embody everything that the identity of the masculine and the ideology of the proper reject as the condition of their truth. This is why Finnegans Wake is one of the most ethical books ever written. Unlike The Communist Manifesto, with which it nevertheless has much in common, it does not present us with a spectre coming from the future but with the grace that demands that we live in the present, that we never surrender our desire (not even to utopia), and that we learn how to love what we hate the most – Sinn F´ein Amhain, ourselves alone. n otes 1 See my Telling the Other: The Question of Value in Modern and Postcolonial Writing, 81–92. 2 Derrida, Limited Inc, 53. 3 McCarthy, The Riddles of ‘Finnegans Wake’ , 105–35. 4 Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 111–12. 5 For the purposes of this discussion, gender refers to the cultural construction of a subject as masculine or feminine, while sex refers to sexual orientation in terms of object choice. 6 Bernard Benstock, Joyce-Again’s Wake, 270. 7 Glasheen, Third Census of ‘Finnegans Wake’ , 214–15, especially 215. 8 See Boldrini’s essay in the present volume. 9 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, 198.

chapter 11

Ex sterco Dantis: Dante’s post-Babelian linguistics in the Wake Lucia Boldrini

Dante has long been acknowledged as a pervasive presence in Joyce’s works, and Mary Reynolds’s Joyce and Dante, the fullest study to date, has shown at great length the importance of some key Dantean characters and themes in Joyce’s oeuvre. In this essay I shall look at a text which has often been mentioned1 but whose relevance for Finnegans Wake has never been studied in detail: Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia. The De vulgari represents an important force behind the Wake’s experimentations with narrative form, its exploration of new notions of character, its integration of such typical and pervasive themes as the battle between father and son or the artist’s original creation and his transcendence of the vulgar, the commonplace, the daily – even the excremental – into the eternity of art. This study will thus show, through a reading of HCE’s naming, ennobling and fall in FW I.2, of Shem’s distillation of an ‘indelible ink’ from his own excrement in FW I.7, and of HCE’s concoction of a new cocktail from the dregs of his customers’ glasses in FW II.3, how Joyce’s narrative, poetic and linguistic masterpiece situates itself at the intersection between a radically modern narrative technique and a mediaeval poet’s linguistic theory. According to a mediaeval topos, all secular literature, even the best poetry – i.e. that written in imitation of Virgil – was ‘excrement’; in the words of Robert Hollander, ‘[w]hatever gold one might sift ex sterco Vergilii, excrement was still excrement’.2 Dante walked in the wake of Virgil, and it is quite appropriate that Joyce’s text, written in the wake of Dante, should also treat as precious excrement the theory from which it ‘sifts’ the ‘gold’ of narrative, thematic and linguistic material, and it is this theme that I shall explore in these pages. Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia is at once a history of language, a descriptive theory of linguistics, a programme of linguistic reform, and, in the unfinished second book, the outline of a poetics of the Italian vernacular. In the first part of the treatise Dante reconstructs the history of the vernacular from its origins to its fall, when God struck the builders of the tower 180

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of Babel and made them forget their initial and sacred idiom. When they reinvented new, imperfect tongues, Dante writes, they did so according to their professions: all the architects thus spoke the same post-Babelian language, the masons another one, and so on, and these groups became the peoples that scattered over the earth. Dante then describes the present variety of Italian dialects, which he compares to a thorny and intricate linguistic forest. In this tangled wood, Dante hunts the ‘beautiful panther’3 by first ‘uprooting’ and ‘clearing away’ the worst dialects, and then by ‘sifting’ the rest in order to find the illustrious Italian language that can rise above the differences and approach, if not quite replace, the perfect idiom of the origins, thus restituting a redeemed language to mankind. Although traces of the illustrious vernacular can be ‘scented’ in many places (Dve I.xvi.1), Dante’s research does not lead to any tangible result, and it is then up to the poet himself to choose the best elements from each local dialect and fashion a superior and universal vulgare illustre, cardinale, aulicum et curiale, that is, the language ‘which belongs to all the towns in Italy, but does not appear to belong to any of them; [. . .] that by which all the local dialects of the Italians are measured, weighed and compared’ (Dve I.xvi.6).4 Dante constantly identifies the noble idiom with the poet: the vernacular is enlightened by the poets who use it and reciprocally gives them lustre; Dante seeks it through the wood of dialects and must prune and extirpate bushes, and the language is like a gardener that weeds and cuts brambles and keeps the garden tidy; both the poet and the vulgare illustre are exiled and must seek shelter in humble homes. Dante’s search for the ‘panther’ through the forest, where he has to weigh the diverse dialects, evaluate them, and give his verdict on each, reflects the ‘curiality’ of the vernacular (‘because curiality is nothing else but the justly balanced rule of things which have to be done’ (Dve I.xviii.4)). The story of the name of the Wake’s ‘hero’ recalls Dante’s search for the illustrious vernacular that should unify the scattered languages of Italy. True, the investigation into the origins of HCE’s name (FW I.2) appears from the start as a doomed quest more likely to raise doubts than dispel them: Comes the question are these the facts of his nominigentilisation as recorded and accolated in both or either of the collateral andrewpaulmurphyc narratives. Are those their fata which we read in sibylline between the fas and its nefas? No dung on the road? [. . .] We shall perhaps not so soon see. (FW 31.33–32.2)

When HCE is given the name of ‘Here Comes Everybody’ (FW 32.17–18), his universality is emphasized (‘magnificently well worth of any and all

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such universalisation’ (FW 32.20–1)). HCE, who, like both Dante and the Italian vernacular in the De vulgari eloquentia, is described as a ‘grand old gardener’ (FW 30.13), a ‘bailiwick’ and a ‘turnpiker’ (FW 31.27), soon becomes a viceroy, watching a representation of A Royal Divorce from ‘his viceregal booth’ (FW 32.36). Elevated to a kinship with royal figures and through the coincidence of his personal story with the performance of the comedy staged for him, HCE himself is the protagonist of a comic plot that can be summarized as going ‘from good start to happy finish’ (FW 32.24–5), a formula which also describes the linguistic plot according to the De vulgari eloquentia (from the Edenic language to Dante’s redemption of the babelian confusion) and may parody Dante’s own definition of comedy as that which ‘inchoat asperitatem alicuius rei, sed eius materia prospere terminatur’ (‘begins with sundry adverse conditions, but ends happily’5 ). The setting of HCE’s ‘nominigentilisation’ supports the identification with the illustrious and courtly language assembled from the local ‘vulgar’ languages: the scene takes place ‘in that King’s treat house of satin alustrelike’, where ‘a truly catholic assemblage gathered together’ (FW 32.25–6) by a ‘courteous permission for a pious purpose’ (FW 32.30–1), while HCE looks on, a ‘cecelticocommediant in his own wise’ (FW 33.3–4), perhaps a Celtic embodiment of the ‘divine comic Denti Alligator’ (FW 440.6) and of his supreme work, the pious and divine Comedy. As a ‘folksforefather’, the father of the people (also, later, ‘multipopulipater’ (FW 81.5) and ‘folkenfather of familyans’ (FW 382.18)) who has ‘the entirety of his house about him’ (FW 33.4–5), HCE is in the same position as Dante’s vulgare cardinale, the ‘pater familias’ and hinge around which the family of dialects turn and revolve (Dve I.xviii.1). HCE’s ‘nominigentilisation’ thus parallels the De vulgari eloquentia’s elevation of the ‘populace’ of vulgares into a single, superior language representative of the whole class of Italian vernaculars as well as of the notion of ‘Italianness’ itself (Dve I.xvi.2–5). Strikingly, Dante-as-hunter of the panther (the illustrious language) casts himself into the role that had belonged to Nimrod, the giant and hunter who instigated the building of the tower of Babel. Of course, whereas the hunter Nimrod caused the language to break up into a multiplicity, Dante adopts a similar role in his quest but reverses its function and searches through the confused plurality in order to transcend differences and found a unified, unifying language. HCE, both hunter and hunted, also embodies this coincidentia oppositorum: in chapter I.6 ‘hounded become haunter, hunter become fox’ (FW 132.16–17), and in the last chapter the ‘huntered persent human’ (FW 618.36) combines both roles. Sometimes disguised

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as ‘Ramrod, the meaty hunter’ (FW 435.13–14), HCE is Nimrod, and like Dante’s ‘Nembrotto’ in Inferno XXXI,6 he is both a giant and a tower: as ‘Holy Saint Eiffel’ (FW 88.23–4) HCE is a modern giant who commits a modern fault but bears within himself both results of the sinful act. He is the tower as well as its ‘happy’ outcome; he is ‘holy’ and foreshadows rebirth. Dante’s panther-hunter is now downgraded to a ‘molehunter’ (FW 576.25; HCE was buried and spent some time in an ‘underground heaven, or mole’s paradise’ (FW 76.33–4)), and becomes ‘the eternal chimerahunter Oriolopos’ (FW 107.14), hunter of the mythical monster with a composite body, a fancy that does not actually exist anywhere (like the panther) and which is made up of parts of different animals, as the vulgare illustre is made up of parts taken from many different dialects. Through the identification with such fragmented, shattered or dismembered characters as Humpty Dumpty or the Egyptian god Osiris, and through his own dismembering in FW I.4, HCE also becomes one with the fragmented condition of post-Babelian languages and with the (chimeric?) recomposition of the language achieved through the illustrious vernacular. The buried HCE also identifies with the coffin and with the letter dug out of the midden heap by the hen. The damaged missive which re-emerges from the dung and is analysed in chapter I.5 can be both the text and the remnants of the fragmented/fragmentary body of HCE. Not being whole and thus needing (re)composition, the letter/language/HCE, or its/his parts, are also subject to being changed, modified in ‘variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns’ (FW 118.26–7). HCE the ‘grand old gardener’ (FW 30.13) also subsumes Adam’s role as ‘gardener’ of Eden and the one common to the illustrious language and the poet: Dante must cut off branches and root out the bushes in the tangled wood of dialects, while the vulgare cardinale ‘[. . .] daily root[s] out the thorny bushes from the Italian wood [. . .] daily insert[s] cuttings or plant[s] young trees’ (Dve I.xviii.1). Shem the Penman, the poet-figure in the Wake, shares something of this function with HCE, perhaps having inherited it from the father. As a child in the ‘garden nursery’, just before asking ‘the first riddle of the universe’ (FW 170.4), he plays with ‘thistlewords’ (FW 169.22–3) and is described as having ‘an artificial tongue with a natural curl’ (FW 169.15–16), reminiscent of the vulgare illustre, a natural tongue (Dve I.i) extracted by the poet from the local dialects but which, through a process of refinement, is transformed into a somewhat artificial product. Artificiality comes quite natural to Shem the artist, aka ‘Vulgariano’ (FW 181.14), who, in a parodic

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allusion to the Convivio,7 also likes gathering the crumbs of other people’s tabletalk: All the time he kept on treasuring with condign satisfaction each and every crumb of trektalk, covetous of his neighbour’s word, and if ever, during a Munda conversazione commoted in the nation’s interest, delicate tippits were thrown out to him touching his evil courses by some wellwishers, vainly pleading by scriptural arguments [. . .] he would pull a vacant landlubber’s face [. . .] let a lent hit a hint and begin to tell all the intelligentsia [. . .] the whole lifelong swrine story of his entire low cornaille existence [. . .] unconsciously explaining, for inkstands, with a meticulosity bordering on the insane, the various meanings of all the different foreign parts of speech he misused [. . .] (FW 172.29–173.36)

Dante’s vulgare illustre is, in a way, the result of a process of distillation of the existing imperfect dialects. Somewhat similarly, Shem the Penman fabricates a ‘synthetic’,8 ‘indelible ink’ out of the vulgar matter of his own excrement after having produced speech as if through culinary-alchemical processes often reminiscent of sorcery. Shem, who is ‘chanting’ (FW 184.23) ‘his cantraps of fermented words’ (FW 184.25–6) and pronouncing magic formulae, is boycotted, and so he winged away on a wildgoup’s chase across the kathartic ocean and made synthetic ink and sensitive paper for his own end out of his wit’s waste. You ask, in Sam Hill, how? Let manner and matter of this for these our sporting times be cloaked up in the language of blushfed porporates that an Anglican ordinal, not reading his own rude dunsky tunga, may ever behold the brand of scarlet on the brow of her of Babylon and feel not the pink one in his own damned cheek. (FW 185.5–13)

The passage may bear biographical references to the linguistic and literary training that enabled Joyce to achieve the artistic maturity and independence which, in turn, made it possible for him to ‘fly by’ the ‘nets’ (P 203) that kept Ireland in cultural as well as political and social subjugation and which he escaped through the choice of voluntary exile (cf. the ‘wildgoup’s chase’). Intersecting with this possible biographical strand, references to Dante’s project of synthetic linguistic composition accumulate after the significant mention of the ‘synthetic ink’: ‘ordinal’, in opposition to ‘cardinal’ and through the association with ‘Anglican’ and ‘blushfed porporates’ (the colour of the cardinal’s robe), suggests both cardinale and curiale, insofar as it refers to ecclesiastical matters; purple, as a symbol of royalty, may also hint at aulicum, while the ‘rude [. . .] tunga’ evokes a ‘vulgar tongue’. The ‘chase’ in this context can then acquire overtones of Dante’s pursuit of the illustrious vulgar language while already in exile.

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Having fed on artificial food, Shem now digests and further processes it, and concocts the ‘synthetic ink’ from the ‘byproducts’ as an artist who, making use of all the elements at his disposal, including the basest ones, re-elaborates them – ‘digests’ them – and transforms them into an indelible and eternal work of art (the reader knows, however, that Shaun’s ironic narrative voice in FW I.7 throws some doubt over the ‘eternal’ value of Shem’s synthetic/digestive process. More about this later): Primum opifex, altus prosator, ad terram viviparam et cunctipotentem sine ullo pudore nec venia, suscepto pluviali atque discinctis perizomatis, natibus nudis uti nati fuissent, sese adpropinquans, flens et gemens, in manum suam evacuavit (highly prosy, crap in his hand, sorry!), postea, animale nigro exoneratus, classicum pulsans, stercus proprium, quod appellavit deiectiones suas, in vas olim honorabile tristitiae posuit, eodem sub invocatione fratrorum geminorum Medardi et Godardi laete ac melliflue minxit, psalmum qui incipit: Lingua mea calamus scribae velociter scribenti: magna voce cantitans (did a piss, says he was dejected, asks to be exonerated), demum ex stercore turpi cum divi Orionis iucunditate mixto, cocto, frigorique exposito, encaustum sibi fecit indelibile (faked O’Ryan’s, the indelible ink). (FW 185.14–26)

One may wonder whether this Latin narrative of Shem’s distillation of vulgar matter may refer to Dante’s Latin account of the history and ‘distillation’ of the vulgares. One could however also be reminded of the custom, still widespread until the early part of the century, of masking obscene or saucy passages under the appearance of a learned language which not everyone would be able to read or, in the case of translations, of leaving them in the original language.9 However, when Shem fabricates his excremental ink, the short but very explicit English interpolations – ‘crap in his hand’, ‘did a piss’ – give us the down-to-earth substance of the Latin description. The artistic process is thus connected to the complete biologicalphysiological cycle of nutrition and fertilization, or re-employment of the wastes of digestion (and of his mind: ‘out of his wit’s waste’ (FW 185.7–8)) as nourishment for the artist’s creation of the work of art. At the same time as it purports to celebrate a process of distillation and renovation, the episode carries over some echoes from the implicitly ambiguous position taken by Dante when he takes up Nimrod’s role as hunter while searching for a noble, redemptive language. Shem, called divi Orionis, also shares traits of the hunter (HCE was associated with the mythical hunter Orion at FW 107.14), sounds a trumpet and sings a psalm which underlines his role as scribe, rather like Nimrod who sounds a horn (Inferno XXXI.12, 71) and whose confused babble is ironically described by Dante as a ‘psalm’ (Inferno XXXI.69).

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Not unlike Dante’s ‘synthetic’ universalizing of the vulgare into an illustrious redemption of Babel, Shem’s production of the indelible ink would perform an alchemical act of linguistic distillation and prepare one of literary production, while at the same time purporting to effect a eucharistic transubstantiation that would transform bodily matter into a transcendent and eternal substance. Shem poses as the ‘priest of the imagination’ who can convert ‘the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own’,10 and this process of purification can be especially performed and achieved by the artist who has purged himself by flying into exile ‘across the kathartic ocean’ (FW 185.6). It could be argued that Shaun’s ironic voice, deflating Shem’s eternalizing desire, trashes his aesthetics and turns it back into nothing more than an aesthetics of trash, or an early form of merdismo. Is Shaun’s irony in portraying his brother then comparable to that of the narrator of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who methodically deflates Stephen’s highest artistic visions? Yet Joyce himself had been accused of vulgarity, of pornography, of writing the ‘literature of the latrine’;11 is then Shaun’s obtuse critique of the vulgarity of the Artist as a Young Man in turn ironized in order to satirize the writer’s own critics? How seriously are we to take Shem’s vulgar sources and his use of them? And Joyce’s? If it is true that in the Middle Ages ‘[w]hatever gold one might sift ex sterco Vergilii, excrement was still excrement’, yet the modernist Shem-like Joyce, in distilling the ‘excrement’ of Dante’s theories, was also transubstantiating its remedial linguistics into a new technique of characterization, a narrative of fall and rebirth, of sons overturning fathers (see below), and into a plot of artistic redemption of the commonplace or trivial – literally, what is found at the trivium or crossroads – into a gigantic epiphany of language. In any case, the common (and trivial) Irish expletive ‘Holy shit’ becomes highly and uncannily appropriate. Shem’s artistic distillation of excrement is counterbalanced by his father’s more prosaic brewing and drinking of alcohol, but the linguistic substratum is still there, facilitated by the similarity between glutton(y) and ‘glot-’. Thus HCE is a ‘parleyglutton’ (FW 240.27–8), the men in his pub drink ‘through their grooves of blarneying’ (FW 371.15–16) and, after the closing of the pub (FW II.3), HCE uses up the dregs left in the customers’ glasses and mixes them all in a new alcoholic concoction. Carole Brown has identified several theories of language in the last pages of the chapter; besides Grimm’s Law (‘Gramm’s laws’ (FW 378.27)), these include three humorous speculations on the origins of speech formulated by philologists at the turn of the century: the Pooh-pooh theory, the Bow-wow theory and the Ding-Dong, Tick-Tock, Bang-Bong, or Knock-Knock theory.12 To this list of fanciful

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theories we can add Dante’s rather more serious but equally debunked vulgare illustre. As HCE drinks his composite brew, he is ‘thruming through all to himself with diversed tonguesed’ (FW 381.20) ‘like a blurney Cashelmagh crooner’ (FW 381.22) and sending it down ‘his woolly throat’ (FW 381.26), ‘in some particular cases with the assistance of his venerated tongue’ (FW 381.31–2). Among other dregs, HCE drinks the remnants from a product of the ‘Phoenix Brewery’ (FW 382.4), thus bringing together the themes of distillation and of the rebirth in/of language by now indistinguishable from the motif of the linguistic and spiritual felix culpa. Ironically, it is at this point that the ‘folkenfather of familyans’ (FW 382.18), saturated with his alcoholic mixture, drops down to the floor, his drunken fall echoing the Divine Comedy: in canto III of the Inferno, as an earthquake strikes and a high wind rises, Dante falls down ‘come l’uom cui sonno piglia’ (‘like a man who is seized by sleep’ (Inferno III.136)) and, at the beginning of the next canto, he is awakened again by a ‘greve tuono’ (‘a heavy thunder’ (Inferno IV.1)). Shortly after, Dante, moved by Francesca’s story, drops down ‘come corpo morto cade’ (‘as a dead body falls’ (Inferno V.141)). Whereas HCE, his mind clouded by alcohol, ‘just slumped to throne’ (FW 382.26). Sitting on the throne, or slumping to it, brings us back to Shem’s distillation of his excrements, but the best-known instance of defecation in Finnegans Wake is in the episode of ‘How Buckley Shot the Russian General’, in chapter II.3. Butt/Buckley tells about the moment when, during the battle of Sebastopol, he saw the Russian General defecate and did not have the heart to shoot: But when I seeing him in his oneship fetch along within hail that tourrible tall with his nitshnykopfgoknob and attempting like a brandylogged rudeman cathargic, lugging up and laiding down his livepelts so cruschinly like Mebbuck at Messar and expousing his old skinful self tailtottom by manurevring in open ordure to renewmurature with the cowruads in their airish pleasantry I thanked he was recovering breadth [. . .] and I couldn’t erver nerver to tell a liard story [. . .]. But when I got inoccupation of a full new of his old basemiddelism, in ackshan, pagne pogne, by the veereyed lights of the stormtrooping clouds and in the sheenflare of the battleaxes of the heroim and mid the shieldfails awail of the bitteraccents of the sorafim and caught the pfierce tsmell of his aurals, orankastank, a suphead setrapped, like Peder the Greste, altipaltar, my bill it forsooks allegiance (gut bull it!) and, no lie is this, I was babbeing and yetaghain bubbering, bibbelboy, [. . .] I confesses withould pridejealice when I looked upon the Saur of all the Haurousians with the weight of his arge fulling upon him from the travaillings of his tommuck [. . .] I adn’t the arts to. (FW 344.12–345.3)

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In the flare of the babelian battle of Sebastopol, amid the clash of weapons and the ‘wail’ of ‘bitteraccents’, Butt/Buckley stands ‘babbeing’ and ‘bubbering’ like a ‘bibbelboy’, watching the father-figure of the Russian General (‘altipaltar’) expose his bottom and defecate to produce dung-bricks (‘manurevring in open ordure’) with which to build anew (‘to renewmurature’) something that sounds suspiciously like a new, tall, terrible tower of Babel (‘that tourrible tall’). HCE as Russian General frequently appears as an embodiment of the Tsar (‘Peder the Greste’), traditionally endowed with the title of ‘little father of all the Russians’, but the punning on the regal title through vocalic variations on the pan-Slavic root ser, ‘shit’ (‘Saur’; see also ‘the sur of all Russers’ (FW 340.35))13 also turns him into the excrement he produces. And if we follow up the associations previously made, we see the General/HCE as that same ‘tourrible tall’, a towering gigantic Nimrod-figure, the ‘Creman hunter’ (FW 342.20). It is when the General wipes himself with the ‘Irish’ sod of turf that Buckley shoots him, causing his death/fall: ‘I shuttm [. . .] Hump to dump! Tumbleheaver!’ (FW 352.14–15); ‘At that instullt to Igorladns! [. . .] Sparro!’ (FW 353.18–21; Italian sparo: ‘I shoot’). The shooting of the Russian General/builder re-enacts God’s ‘thundering’ punishment of Nimrod and of the builders of Babel. Buckley’s shot and the General’s fall are immediately followed by an interpolation on the consequences of Babel: [The abnihilisation of the etym by the grisning of the grosning of the grinder of the grunder of the first lord of Hurtreford expolodotonates through Parsuralia with an ivanmorinthorrorrumble fragoromboassity amidwhiches general uttermosts confussion [. . .]] (FW 353.22–5)

Universal confusion, the result of God’s blow from heaven (‘cum celitus tanta confusione percussi sunt’ (Dve I.vii.6)), coincides with the loss of the language shared until that moment; this can be described as an ‘annihilation of the etym’ insofar as, according to the interpretation given by Dante in the De vulgari eloquentia, the punishment consisted in the oblivio (forgetting) of the original tongue (Dve I.ix.6) which, in Wakean terms, takes place ‘at this deleteful hour’ (FW 118.32). By annihilating the etym, the memory of the language is erased, and men are left in a condition of ‘general uttermosts confussion’ (i.e. ‘confusion’ and ‘concussion’) to reinvent new languages ab nihilo. The fusion of ‘How Buckley Shot the Russian General’ and the story of Babel, patterned on Dante’s linguistic narrative, and their insertion into one of the basic plot structures of the Wake (the son overturning the father), involves yet another inversion of the Italian model. In the De vulgari

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eloquentia, at the precise moment when confusion sets in, hierarchical order is nevertheless reaffirmed in the punishment that God-the-Father ‘mercifully’ inflicts on his sons (‘not with the scourge of an enemy, but of a father [. . .] He chastised His rebellious son with correction at once pitiful and memorable’ (Dve I.vii.5)). This is the merciful punishment that enables Dante to present his own ennobling of the vulgar language as the happy outcome of the babelian fault. In the story of the Russian General, however, it is the son who punishes the father, and ends up taking his role (Taff calls Butt ‘ye, bragadore-gunneral’ (FW 352.23)). Significantly, moreover, in the sentence ‘His Cumbulent Embulence, the frustate fourstar Russkakruscam’ (FW 352.32–3) the ‘frustrated’ General becomes ‘frustate’ (Italian frusta: ‘whip’, ‘scourge’; frustate: ‘whiplashes’), as if he was directly hit by the metaphorical scourge of Dante’s God. (In his role as Attila the Hun, ‘the scourge of God’, HCE had earlier appeared both as the scourge itself and its victim: ‘Attilad! Attattilad! Get up, Goth’s scourge on you!’ (FW 251.1–2).) Jean-Michel Rabat´e has shown how Oedipal, homosexual and incestuous themes and the father–son relationship interweave in the Russian General story with the political significance of the episode, and how the political theme is inseparable from the linguistic, linking together idiom, idiolect and ideology.14 Glides between such similar words as ‘arse’, ‘erse’ or ‘aerse’, and ‘ark’ may transform the General defecating before Buckley’s eyes into Noah’s drunken exposition of himself, while implying that ‘[Erse] plays in Finnegans Wake the role of a “father-tongue”: it appears as the metamorphosis of a native language, voiced and soiled by the father, returning to the materiality of loam or humus. Only then can it really fertilize the earth’ (Rabat´e, James Joyce, Authorized Reader, 140). Rabat´e recalls that in Vico’s Scienza nuova, the giants at the beginning of human history were left by their mothers to roll in their own dirt in the post-diluvian primal forest. Excrement fertilized the earth and contributed to the origins of civilization: ‘it creates a new language, one blended with body products, that amalgamates “humus” and “human nature” in a type of very special “humor.”’ As Rabat´e comments, when Shem, who has inherited this language from his father, threatens to wipe the English language off the face of the earth/arse (FW 178.6–7), he is actually breaking down the (linguistic) English rule through the use of foreign languages: ‘Arse and Erse allied to a multinational earth both effect the murder of the mother language. The murder of the father is in fact only a dialectical climax in this indefinite struggle’ (Rabat´e, James Joyce, Authorized Reader, 141).

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The story of Buckley and the Russian General and Rabat´e’s interpretation help to throw new light on Shem’s production of a synthetic ink. Both Shem and the General/HCE use excrement in order to produce anew. However, whereas HCE uses the bricks to build something which is fated to fall and ‘abnihilate’, or ‘delete’, the ‘etym’, Shem concocts his ‘indelible’ ink in order to write a poetry destined to remain eternally undeleted. Dante’s performance of a role analogous to Nimrod’s but with opposite results is reflected in HCE and Shem performing the same action to opposite ends. Furthermore, the analogies between HCE and the post-Babelian vulgar, fragmented tongues imply that he is fated to be superseded by the ‘synthetic’ creative act of the son. Shem extracting a synthetic ink from excrement parallels the hen digging out the letter (buried like the coffin or HCE) from the midden-heap, but Biddy Doran’s extraction of the letter from the dung of the battlefield during a truce in chapter I.1 (cf. FW 11.8–28) also anticipates features of the episode of Buckley and the Russian General. When chapter I.2, retracing the genesis of HCE, asks, ‘No dung on the road?’ (FW 31.36–32.1), then, the answer must be ‘yes’. HCE, builder of Babel, tower of Babel and fragmented consequence of Babel, when dead, will himself return to the earth in order to be dug up again as letter by the hen, and purified into gold by his alchemist-poet son. The son, that is, has to kill the father (and the ‘fatherlanguage’) in order to find, in his own biological origin, the materials and instruments to ‘forge’ his own original artistic creation and his individual poetic language. Through this process the ‘sodomitic’ gun of his obscene defeat of the father can be transformed into the ‘fertile’ pen/penis of the poet. These various strands are brought together in chapter III.4 when the child Shem/Jerry wakes up in the middle of the night from a wet dream, having spilled tears from his eyes and (ink)drops from his pen(is): Hush! The other, twined on codliverside, has been crying in his sleep, making sharpshape his inscissors on some first choice sweets fished out of the muck. A stake in our mead. What a teething wretch! How his book of craven images! Here are posthumious tears on his intimelle. And he has pipettishly bespilled himself from his foundingpen as illspent from inkinghorn. (FW 563.1–6, emphases added)

Part of Shem’s activity as creator, however, also implies transforming himself into a written-over ‘integument’ (FW 186.1), a polysemic text which will finally coincide with the Letter and will thereby grant him the (unstable) status of ‘father’. Although dispossessing the father will lead to the inevitability of one’s own further displacement in the (Vichian) ‘cyclewheeling history’ (FW 186.2) of the Wake, what is stressed in this phase of the

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Oedipal struggle (what I have stressed in order to bring out the analogy with Dante’s text) are the differences implicit in the parallel between father and son: whereas the features of the father-aspect underlined are the fragmentation, the burial and the reduction to dung before being extracted/recreated, the son-aspect of the theme emphasizes this synthetic, creative phase, the extraction and writing. Thus the Letter becomes the locus of both literary creation and bio-logical generation and transformation – in the sense of filiation, but also of life-producing and life-giving discourse (see also Stephen forging the conscience of his race in A Portrait (P 253)), which is, in one sense, also the transmission of literary and linguistic material, the transformation (and appropriation) of previous literary/linguistic sources (such as, for instance, Dante’s) in order to generate a new, independent text/language (such as Finnegans Wake/Wakese). Babel is thus, as it is in the De vulgari eloquentia, a linguistic ‘happy fault’ which can afford the poet the role of redeemer and at the same time enable the later writer to retrace his origin back to his medieval ‘father’ while defeating him through his superior artistic achievement. The treatment of Erse in the Wake and its relationship to Anglo-Irish, highlighted by Rabat´e,15 finds a correlative in Dante’s theory of the vernacular. His project of transcending regional or municipal linguistic differences is expressed in terms which enable the reader to see it as a programme of political and cultural unification of Italy. Dante’s argument runs thus: Italy has no royal court, therefore the Italian vernacular has no seat; but if Italy had a court, this would be the place where the vulgare illustre would rightfully reside and be spoken (Dve I.xviii.4–5). The illustrious vernacular is furthermore the language that belongs to that dismembered curia which exists but has no permanent abode. As dialectal particularism needs to be transcended and governed by a superior, noble language, so the fragmented Italian nation must also be reunited in a superior political structure. Dante chooses the vulgare illustre and not Latin as the common language: Latin is an ‘artificial’ tongue, spoken by no Italian at birth – in fact, it was never natural for anybody, as it was invented, according to the De vulgari eloquentia, as a rational means to overcome linguistic multiplicity and historical variation. The vulgare, although refined and therefore vaguely suspicious of ‘artificiality’, is on the contrary the language that babies ‘suckle’ with their nurses’ milk at birth, the language spoken by ‘muliercolae’ (‘small women’; Epistle to Can Grande, § 10; cf. the washerwomen’s gossip in FW I.8 and ALP’s frequent descriptions as a little woman), the common language of any street-corner or crossroads – the trivial language of the ‘triv and quad’ (FW 316.12–13) learned by the children in their nightlesson in chapter II.2. Given the fundamental role

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attributed to language in the political and cultural unification of Italy, it follows that for the poet who has taken upon himself the mighty task of redeeming the language, every instance of linguistic use – not only the choice of subject matter but even the choice of words and grammatical structures – is also a political act: fragmentation and municipalism are rejected in the name of a linguistic and political universalism. While Joyce may not have shared the religious implications of Dante’s project, the linguistic-political significance of Dante’s treatise might have seemed more interesting to him. Joyce had always rejected as artificial the Celtic Revivalists’ plea for a return to the Gaelic language and culture: the language ‘suckled’ by the majority of the Irish children with their nurses’ milk and the language of modern emancipated Ireland was not Gaelic and it could only be Anglo-Irish. Ireland could be a bilingual nation, but could not turn back to a language that would have been as artificial as any imposed one. If Erse is the ‘father-language’, the language to be defeated and overturned, HCE can be called ‘Emancipator, the Creman Hunter’ (FW 342.19–20) only ironically, through an inversion similar to the one that makes him see the Wellington monument as the ‘sign of our ruru redemption’ (FW 36.24–5). But the politics of Dante’s medieval linguistics may have crystallized what a rather paradoxical circumstance was perhaps already suggesting. As Giorgio Melchiori has pointed out, Joyce’s ‘only public pronouncements in the political field on the state of Ireland and of the world in general, are in Italian’,16 and, at the time of these public political statements – the articles in the Triestine paper Il Piccolo della sera – Joyce was living in an environment where the variegated Italian of the Triestine ‘cross-roads of civilization’ (Melchiori, ‘The Language of Politics and the Politics of Language’, 111) was commonly used as lingua franca. And Joyce himself, as a consequence of his decision to leave Ireland, used the Triestine meltingpot version of Italian as the ‘lingua franca’ of the exile both in his ‘political’ position about his country and in his family, arguably turning into a personal truth Dante’s metaphorical statement about Italian as the language that babies ‘suckle’ with their nurses’ milk at birth. Personal circumstances and medieval linguistics appear to intersect from an early stage, but by the time Stephen Dedalus had left the stage to Shem the Penman, ‘Father Dante’17 had also been overturned in the battle for literary dominance, trivialized and reduced, in true medieval tradition, to ‘excrement’ from which gold could be sifted in order for the poet-son to recreate himself and his race. Joyce’s oeuvre lies at the crossroads between literary borrowing, aesthetic inspiration and biographical model – if Shem turns ‘the only foolscap

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available, his own body’ (FW 185.35–6) into ‘one continuous present tense integument’ (FW 185.36–186.1), Dante had already produced what is probably the greatest self-textualization of the Western world. Its relationship with Dante’s work may then remind us that intertextuality need not be conceived of as only the pure and achronic textuality that Kristeva’s and Barthes’s theorizations opposed to old-fashioned studies of sources and influence (nor the latter be restricted to Harold Bloom’s doomed Oedipal struggle); it may be more fruitful to see it instead as an intentional (at least to an extent) and historically grounded practice in which artistic choices reveal political/ideological implications and inscribe within the (inter)text the author’s negotiations – also in terms of metaphorical filiation and of dispossession, or t(h)rashing, of the ‘father’ – of his/her own place within the literary tradition. n otes 1 The first critic to do so was Beckett in his 1929 essay ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce’. 2 Hollander, ‘Dante Theologus-Poeta’, Studies in Dante, 49. 3 Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, I, xi, 1. The translation used is by A. G. Ferrers Howell (1890). Subsequent references to the De vulgari eloquentia (hereafter Dve) will be inserted parenthetically in the text. 4 ‘[W]hatever we call illustrious we understand to be something which shines forth illuminating and illuminated [. . .] [W]e call it cardinal [. . .] because, as the whole door follows its hinge, and whither the hinge turns the door also turns, whether it be moved inwards or outwards; so the whole herd of local dialects turns and returns, moves and pauses, according as this illustrious language does, which really seems to be the father of a family. Does it not daily root out the thorny bushes from the Italian wood? Does it not daily insert cuttings or plant young trees? [. . .]’ (Dve I.xvii–xviii). It is also called ‘courtly’, or ‘royal’, and ‘curial’ because it is the language worthy of being spoken at the royal court and in the court of justice, even though the Italian court does not exist as a single body; ‘[h]ence it happens that our illustrious language wanders about like a wayfarer, and is welcomed in humble shelters, seeing we have no Court’ (Dve I.xviii.3), or, as Dante writes shortly after, ‘we have a Court, though, as a body, it is scattered’ (Dve I.xviii.5). 5 Dante Alighieri, Epistle to Can Grande della Scala, 160–211, § 10. 6 Dante Alighieri, Inferno, vol. I of The Divine Comedy. Subsequent references to the Inferno will appear in brackets in the text. 7 ‘And I, therefore, who sit not at the blessed table, but, having fled the pasture of the common herd, gather, at the feet of them who sit at meat, of that which falls from them [. . .]’ (The Convivio of Dante Alighieri, I.i.10). In the treatise Dante explains with ‘meticulosity’ the ‘various’ (four) levels of meaning of his

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own poems – layered texts, similar to the ‘palimpsests’ which Shem ‘piously’ forges (FW 182.2). Beckett defines the language constructed by Dante as a ‘synthetic language’ (‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce’, 18) and finds that it is similar in method of composition and scope to that of the Wake. Between Dante and Shem the Penman, he writes, ‘there exists considerable circumstantial similarity’ (17). Edward Gibbon remarked in his Autobiography: ‘My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the obscurity of a learned language’ (173–4). My thanks to Jane and Antony Everson for bringing this to my attention. Quoted in Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 116. The eucharistic theme appears also in Dante, especially in Convivio (e.g., I.i). Review of Ulysses in the Sporting Times, 34, 1 April 1922, quoted in Richard Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality, 1. Brown lists a series of similar attacks on Ulysses (see 165 n.1). In a letter to Joyce, H. G. Wells attributes Joyce’s obsession with ‘waterclosets’ to his belief in ‘chastity and purity’ (quoted in JJ 607–8). Carole Brown, ‘FW 378: Laughing at the Linguists’. My thanks to Laurent Milesi for this piece of philological information. Rabat´e, James Joyce, Authorized Reader, especially 132–49. See also McHugh, The Sigla of ‘Finnegans Wake’ , 81–6. See also Milesi, ‘The Perversions of “Aerse” and the Anglo-Irish Middle Voice in Finnegans Wake’. Melchiori, ‘The Language of Politics and the Politics of Language’, 109. As Joyce is reported to have called him according to Ettore Settanni; quoted in Reynolds, Joyce and Dante, 203–4.

chapter 12

No symbols where none intended: Derrida’s war at Finnegans Wake Sam Slote

Kidoosh! Of their fear they broke, they ate wind, they fled; where they ate there they fled; of their fear they fled, they broke away. Go to, let us extol Azrael with our harks, by our brews, on our jambses, in his gaits. To Mezouzalem with the Dephilim, didits dinkun’s dud? Yip! Yup! Yarrah! And let Nek Nekulon extol Mak Makal and let him say unto him: Immi ammi Semmi. And shall not Babel be with Lebab? And he war. And he shall open his mouth and answer: I hear, O Ismael, how they laud is only as my loud is one. If Nekulon shall be havonfalled surely Makal haven hevens. Go to, let us extell Makal, yea, let us exceedingly extell. Though you have lien amung your posspots my excellency is over Ismael. Great is him whom is over Ismael and he shall mekanek of Mak Nakulon. And he deed. (FW 258.5–18)

Jacques Derrida’s abbreviated essay on Finnegans Wake, ‘Deux mots pour Joyce’,1 has undergone a most peculiar reception: detractors and admirers alike claim that the essay has more to do with Derrida’s project than with a cogent reading of the Babel passage that closes FW II.1.2 Such a claim is not immediately surprising considering Derrida’s typically circumlocutory style. It is my goal in the present essay to contextualize Derrida’s essay within his ethical polemic with Heidegger and then to offer my own reading of the Babel passage, which will follow from a number of the points raised by Derrida. I will fault Derrida for a number of interpretive strategies (strategies born out of a nominal – or rather pronominal – insistence), but I maintain that his argument is not without consequence for a serious consideration of Wakean language. The problem Derrida addresses in Finnegans Wake is that the difference between languages, or the fact (in French fait, which sounds suspiciously not unlike the English fate) of the multiplicity of languages, necessarily disarticulates time and being: Wakean peregrinism (exile; use of foreign linguistic elements) registers ontological disarticulation. This question concerning peregrinism is precisely what is at stake at the tower of Babel, the moment when – according to the two words that Derrida has chosen for his title – ‘he war’ (FW 258.12). The pluralization registered in the mutual 195

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contamination of ‘he wars’ by ‘he was’ disarticulates the statement of his conflict in the present tense. A statement of past being (was) is compromised by its enstatement as a declaration of war, an enstatement that hints at the Babelian confusion of tongues: ‘D´eclarer est un acte de guerre, il d´eclara la guerre en langues, et a` la langue et par la langue, ce qui donna les langues’ (DMJ 17).3 Wakean peregrinism – within which Derrida articulates his reading – operates upon an (apparently) English syntax and lexicon. Wakean language, ‘however basically English’ (FW 116.26), is eccentric. With Joyce, the English language – already a veritable gallimaufry of tongues – is opened out to the babelian exterior it already inhabits. Beckett phrased this nicely: ‘Mr. Joyce has desophisticated language. And it is worth while remarking that no language is so sophisticated as English.’4 English is disarticulated in and by its babelian confounding, ‘like engels opened to neuropeans’ (FW 519.1). Derrida argues that this translinguistic confounding, as registered in the word ‘war’, is highly polemical. This babelian confounding of language in Finnegans Wake makes it the exemplary text of and for translation: the text that a` la fois demands and resists translation (DMJ 15); the text that declares war with translation. Derrida’s emphasis of the Germanic overtones to war – war (the past tense of the verb sein) and also wahr (true) and wahren (to guard and preserve) (DMJ 16–17, 44) – suggests Heidegger’s characterization of the presencing of presence with the German word war in ‘The Anaximander Fragment’. For Heidegger the oblivion of Being, as experienced by the Greeks, is registered as a trace; the forgetfulness of Being has already been inscribed from the beginning. This characterization is described in a brief exegesis of a Homeric fragment: All things present and absent are gathered and preserved in one presencing for the seer. The old German word war [was] means protection. We still recognize this in wahrnehmen [to perceive], i.e. to take into preservation; in gewahren and verwahren [to be aware of, to keep or preserve]. We must think of wahren as a securing which clears and gathers. Presencing preserves [wahrt] in unconcealment what is present both at the present time and not at the present time. The seer speaks from the preserve [Wahr] of what is present. He is the sooth-sayer [Wahr-Sager].5

For Heidegger, Being belongs to an ek-static temporality registered in the manifold senses of the archaic use of the German word war (clearing, securing, protection). Indeed his essay could be read as a question concerning the potentiality of usage as disclosed by the ancient Greek phrase at the heart of Anaximander’s fragment: t¼ creÛn (fate, derived from cre©a: use, in

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turn derived from ce©r: hand6 ). The fragment hands the West to its destiny of oblivion. Accordingly, ‘war’ is the linguistic statement concerning the oblivion of this time of Being: Being belongs to a preservation (Wahrnis) as it comes into presence as a lingering withdrawal. Derrida’s essay suggests a critique of Heidegger by arguing that the event of Being’s linguistic self-appropriation (Ereignis) can only be remarked through a translinguistic trace that is not present in the present; that the effaced Greek trace can only be registered through translinguistic polemic.7 Derrida uses Joyce to counter Heidegger by proposing that the forgetfulness of Being has always passed and is always deferred: Heidegger has forgotten that the forgetfulness of Being is already linguistically preterite. To make this point Derrida plays with Philippe Lavergne’s translation of ‘he war’ – ‘Et il fut ainsi’ – to suggest his own Francophonic edition of ‘he war’: ‘Il se garde ainsi, a` declarer la guerre’ (DMJ 17).8 That is how he preserves himself, by declaring war (I defer the question who he is, for the moment). His event of war was (and is no more) but lingers ainsi (here, in this manner, so be it). If ‘he war’ remarks the fundamental conflict and confusion within the ek-stases of the temporality of being (is? was? war!), then the very possibility of a time of being depends upon its linguistic disarticulation. The effaced Greek trace bemoaned by Heidegger is already constituted by the babelian confusion of language. Reverting to Heideggerian parlance, the destiny of the West, wahr, is already war.9 Through the translinguistic polemic of Joyce’s ‘war’, Derrida further twists Heidegger’s ‘turn to language’ into a babelian detour, the linguistic turn is always already ‘des tours de Babel’. Le war allemand n’aura e´t´e vrai (wahr) qu’`a d´eclarer la guerre a` l’anglais. A lui faire la guerre en anglais. Une guerre qui n’en est pas moins essentielle – de l’essence – pour eˆtre fratricide. Le fait de la multiplicit´e des langues, ce qui fut fait comme confusion des langues ne peut plus se laisser reconduire, par la traduction, dans une seule langue, ni mˆeme r´eduire [. . .] dans la langue. Traduire he war dans le syst`eme d’une seule langue, c’est effacer l’´ev´enement de la marque [. . .] (DMJ 44–5)

Translation obliterates the trace of linguistic difference that is evident in, say, the word war. Lavergne’s translation is a perfect example of this: war has been obliterated. The event of war is erased by translation, yet it requires linguistic difference – the war between languages – for its odd enstatement. In a footnote, Derrida comments on Lavergne’s translation: ‘Et il fut ainsi.! Ce n’est plus la guerre’ (DMJ 45n.). The English edition remarks this necessary violence of obliterating war in a different manner: ‘But let us never malign translations, especially this one . . .’10

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The problem of iterating the event of Being (the es gibt: the ‘it gives’) that commands yet forbids translation follows from Derrida’s earlier essay ‘Des tours de Babel’, where he argues that ‘Babel’ is the name for the ) inadequation of one language to another. In Hebrew Bab’ El ( means ‘God, the father’ and Bavel ( ) means confusion. The city of God, Babel ( ), bears the name of God the father and the name of confusion. In the act of His wrath neither sense can be disengaged from the other. His name is spoken as the confusion that commands dispersal: the confounding of languages. The moment of His presence – the moment when He is present – is the moment when he war. God’s presence – the present or gift of languages – poisons the present by acting as the command to peregrination.11 His advent is uncannily equivalent to the event of babelian ruin. He (lui) is thus already hear-say (l’ou¨ıe):12 Il d´econstruit en prononc¸ant le vocable de son choix, le nom de confusion (bavel) qui par confusion, a` l’ou¨ıe, pouvait eˆtre confondu avec un mot signifiant en effet confusion. Cette guerre d´eclar´ee, il la fut (war) en e´tant lui-mˆeme un acte de guerre qui consiste a` d´eclarer, comme il le fit, qu’Il fut ce (Lui) qu’il fut (war). (DMJ 39)

As much as ‘he war’ is a command to retreat in the wake of the deconstruction of the tower of Babel, it is also an injunction to translate and to transform the commandment to obey laws. He war appelle la traduction, ordonne et interdit a` la fois la transposition dans l’autre langue. Change-moi – en toi-mˆeme – et surtout ne me touche pas, lis et ne lis pas, dis et ne dis pas autrement ce que j’ai dit et qui aura e´t´e: en deux mots qui fut. Alliance et double bind . Car le he war dit aussi l’irremplac¸able de l’´ev´enement qu’il est. Il est ce qu’il est, aussi inchangeable pour avoir d´ej`a e´t´e, un pass´e sans appel qui, avant d’ˆetre et d’ˆetre pr´esent, fut. Voil`a la guerre d´eclar´ee. Avant d’ˆetre, c’est-`a-dire un pr´esent, cela fut, fut Il, fuit, feu le Dieu de feu le dieu jaloux. (DMJ 40)

The babelian event, when he war, is no more: the advent is no longer accessible to the Shem (the descendants of Shem were the builders of Babel). Yet this event remarks the fundamental linguistic dislocation: the peregrinism of being (the peregrinism that suggests the German verb sein by the English word war). He war, for Derrida, is the call (appel) to translate, the call to respond to the state of linguistic diaspora: the impossible call (or double bind) to restitute postlapsarian linguistic difference. The oblivion of Being is disarticulated in the impossible yet necessary (ethical) act of translinguistic response and responsibility (l’appel).

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Derrida’s articulation of (Heidegger’s) war through babelian polemic translates Heideggerian Greek primordiality into a Hebraic register.13 However, in order for Derrida to make this point, he has to emphasize the p`ere that commands peregrinism. Derrida has articulated the translinguistic disarticulation of Being into a nominative event by conflating the pronoun he of ‘he war’ with Him: Yahweh. Derrida’s essay thus depends upon positing ‘he’ as a pronoun for the impossibility of citing ‘Him’ as a present subject in the present. ‘He’ stands as a pronoun for the polemic impossibility of naming Yahweh, He Who says ‘I am who I am’ (Exodus 3.14),14 He Who is Who He is. His being is already war. Il, c’est Il, le lui, celui qui dit Je au masculin, Il, la guerre d´eclar´ee, lui qui fut la guerre d´eclar´ee, en d´eclarant la guerre il fut celui qui fut et celui qui fut vrai, la v´erit´e comme l’ˆetre en guerre, celui qui a d´eclar´e la guerre v´erifia la v´erit´e de sa v´erit´e par la guerre d´eclar´ee, par l’acte de d´eclarer la guerre qui fut au commencement. (DMJ 17)

Throughout his analysis, and especially in the above citation, Derrida posits ‘he’ as the event (Ereignis) that gives linguistic confusion (otherwise known as Babel). By insisting upon the pronominalization of and at Babel (the name ‘he’ that takes the place of His name), Derrida risks reducing the Wakean polemic of multiple languages into a singularity that can be named, albeit named only by the belated proxy of a pronoun.15 He remains as a pronominative event within Derrida’s discourse: the event around which he strategically deploys confusion and peregrinism. There is, of course, another ‘he’ that informs Derrida’s essay: Joyce. Derrida characterizes reading the Wake as ‘ˆetre en m´emoire de lui’ (DMJ 21): being stranded within the memory of Joyce, the logodaedalus: an affirmative hear-say (l’ou¨ıe). In a sense Derrida is at war with Joyce (Derrida en touche deux mots a` Joyce). Indeed, he does admit of a ressentiment (DMJ 22). This ressentiment is evident even in the title, for if one were to lend it an ear one could hear ‘Dieu mots pour Joyce’: God words for Joyce. Supplementing Dieu with deux – replacing God with an antagonistic pair (thereby repeating Babel) – announces the two words ‘he war’, which are, as Derrida demonstrates, a call to he-ar (DMJ 39). To read the Wake, following Derrida, is to be abandoned by his impossible call to hear. God’s call has been erased and this erasure or withdrawal of Dieu mots is named by the pair of words that announce he war. Derrida ends his essay with a claim for a certain religiousness on Joyce’s part, Joyce’s laughter becomes the most radical negative theology ever to grace God’s green Earth: ‘Au commencement, ce ressentiment dont je

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parlais. Toujours possible a` l’´egard de Joyce. Mais c’´etait, par le petit bout de la lorgnette, consid´erer la vengence de Joyce a` l’´egard du Dieu de Babel’ (DMJ 52). This God, so the saying goes, had already confused Himself within the violent space of his articulation. Being and time are disclosed as the violence declared in the prepositional naming of God. It is in the spacing of this event – the gift of languages – that Joyce’s laughter re-sounds. ‘C’est l’art, l’art de Joyce, la place donn´ee pour sa signature faite oeuvre. [. . .] Dieu contresign´e, Dieu qui te signe en nous, laisse-nous rire, amen, sic, oc, o¨ıl’ (DMJ 53).16 After the forgotten that is named in ‘he war’ we are left with the countersignature (which is also always already a counterfeiture) of God. Perhaps Derrida’s ressentiment is that he is reading Joyce reading the Bible. In emphasizing some of the Biblical overtones that obviously inform the Babel passage in FW II.1, Derrida is in danger of reducing the ‘he’ of ‘he war’ to the absented and belated Yahweh. But within the Wake a different possibility seems to be suggested for the coming into presence of a peregrinistic statement such as ‘And he war’. Rather than being a call to hear, perhaps ‘he war’ is the entombed mark of a failure: to be heard. In the Babel passage it would appear that he could also be ‘Ismael’: a confusion of Israel (Jacob: father of the twelve tribes; and the state of Israel, the state enstated by a declaration of war, whose name in Hebrew means ‘he who strives with God’) and Ishmael (Israel’s uncle and father of the Arabs, whose name in Hebrew means ‘he whom God hears’). Derrida has thus misnumerated the ‘he’ of the two words ‘he war’: He is already bifurcated into Israel and Ishmael. It would seem that there is an event – a dispute, a war – marking the tomb of the dead and departed patriarchs.17 The war is not just his, but rather is a war between two antagonists, each of whom tries to speak His name and be the one who is heard by their absent God, and tries to be the one striving with this God.18 Each side thus construes the hear-say (both l’ou¨ıe and the lui) of the other as a heresy, hence the polemic in and of languages. Derrida has thus forgotten the second contentious state at war in the name Ismael. Perhaps one should call he Ismael, the name of the two ‘he’s’ at war, declaring war. The Babel passage starts with divine departure: ‘Gonn the gawds’ (FW 257.34), and is soon followed by ‘The timid hearts of words all exeomnosunt’ (FW 258.2–3). All of the words of man and God have gone away: the word has departed (exeunt omnes). However the anastomosis of exeunt omnes – the folding of all into exit – suggests some new possibilities. The rearrangement now proffers the Latin verb exeo, which carries a broad range of meanings associated with departure, such as: to die, to escape, to be spread abroad,

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to rise, to avoid, and to exceed. These name the plurality of situations that are (sunt). The remainder of exeo sunt is ‘mn’: men or man. This elided vowel suggests a Hebraic writing of a Romance word – the elision rendering their number undecidable. Indeed the Babel passage contains a number of ‘disemvowelled’ (FW 515.12) words. These two letters also suggest mneme (mnžmh), a memorial or record of a dead person, a crypt. By extension this suggests Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses – since memory had been the poet’s chief gift before the pharmacopoeic gift of writing. The word ‘exeomnosunt’ could also be heard and understood as ex-omniscient: a figure for a departed God. Perhaps ‘exeomnosunt’ is another edition of ‘he war’. But in the heart of the word exeomnosunt is something other than ‘he’: there is a crypt, a pharmacopoeic space of awaiting. Exeomnosunt stands as an encryption of withdrawal. In exile the Shem attempt to proffer obeisance to the figures of the departed Gods as a means of making their exile holy. They want to be able to say the ‘Kidoosh!’ (FW 258.5) – the prayer by which holiness is proclaimed. They hope that the figure of the exeomnosunt will perdure in holiness through their proclamations. They want to remember and to laud the ex-omniscient who is no longer in the heart of exeomnosunt. The Shem want to be heard (they want to be whom God hears: Ishmael); they want to subsume the power to speak: ‘Loud, hear us!/Loud, graciously hear us!’ (FW 258.25–6). But the time of this being has irretrievably passed: it can only be awaited, endlessly. Perdurance has already been lost. The declaration then might be an attempt by Ismael to be heard despite this loss. ‘And let Nek Nekulon extol Mak Makal and let him say unto him: Immi ammi Semmi. And shall not Babel be with Lebab? And he war. And he shall open his mouth and answer: I hear, O Ismael, how they laud is only as my loud is one’ (FW 258.10–13). ), Folded into the response to ‘he war’ is a variation of the Shema ( the great commandment, the pronouncement of a single God: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord’ (Deuteronomy 6.4). In the Bible this is the single invective to hear, before all others. The name, Yahweh, has commanded the ennamed (the Shem, the name of the name, shem being Hebrew for name ( )). This is precisely the impossible situation, commanded by Him ( ), of translation disclosed by Derrida: ‘Le double bind est en elle. En Dieu mˆeme, et il faut en suivre rigoureusement la cons´equence: en son nom’ (‘Des tours de Babel’, 219). He (Derrida and Yahweh) has commanded the Shem to Shema, to rigorously hear and pay obeisance to the impossible appel of the single God to translate: to hear God in exile: ‘`a savoir tendre l’oreille (e, ar, he, ar, ear, hear) et ob´eir au

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p`ere qui e´l`eve la voix, au seigneur qui parle haut (Lord, loud ). [. . .] Cette dimension audio-phonique [. . .] s’annonce dans la syllabisation anglaise du he(w)ar’ (DMJ 35–6). But His singular injunction is heard doubly in and by Ismael. The first words Nek uses to extol Mak seem to be an attempt to identify himself with babelian catastrophe: ‘Immi ammi Semmi’: I am Shem. This also suggests the Hebrew phrase immi ammi shemi: my mother my nation my name. The declaration of the ‘I’ (I am Shem) is overwritten by an allographic paronomasia that states the declarative self into multiple, paratactic loci of identification (my mother, my nation, my name). The unhomely is attempting to find a place for himself but his self-articulation is lost in the language(s) of exile. The pre-position that is named by the pronoun ‘he’ is thus not an absent God (as the auctor of the event of confusion), but rather the being-in-exile of two antagonistic states: he is (or, more precisely, he war) insofar as he is displaced in and by the displacement or exile of Ismael. It is Shem in the act of naming himself who proffers the Shema: the ennamed Shem, and not Yahweh, issues the injunction to hear; and it is Ismael (the confusion or war between Israel and Ishmael) who issues the injunction to be heard . This can only be done in the wake of the departure of Mak Makal: a variation of Finn MacCool, the fallen giant. Nek can only extol the exeomnosunt, such as Azrael, the angel of death in Judaism and Islam (for death remains common to all religious denominations). This extolling falls in a passage which recalls the Biblical account of the building of Babel: ‘Go to, let us build a city and a tower [. . .]’ (Genesis 11.4); ‘Go to, let us extol Azrael with our harks, by our brews, on our jambses, in his gaits. To Mezouzalem with the Dephilim, didits dinkun’s dud?’ (FW 258.7–9). To extol the exeomnosunt, scrolls (Tephilim) are placed in doorjambs called Mezouzah. The Dephilim are encrypted into the holy space of Mezouzalem in order to maintain the appearance of life. This perdurance of life is suggested by quotation from the song ‘Finnegan’s Wake’: ‘didits dinkun’s dud?’ – ‘souls to the devil, did ye think me dead?’ True to the song, this preservation is effected ‘by our brews, on our jambses, in his gaits’ – beer from Guinness’s brewery at James’s Gate. ‘[O]ur brews’ also suggests, not inappropriately, Hebrews. However, the ‘he’ of Hebrews has been supplemented by ‘our’. He is resisted by our in the description of the act of obeisance to Him. This is our bruise, our wound: the pluralization of the first-person pronoun when he war. Indeed the name of the encrypted Dephilim proffers an analogous resistance. This word buttresses the allusion to Finn MacCool by suggesting the Nephilim – literally ‘fallen ones’ – a

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race of giants whose wickedness brought about the flood (Genesis 6.4–7).19 But Dephilim also suggests sons in Latin: the filii. The pluralization of sons in the fili-im is itself doubled: an admixture of Latinate and Hebraic suffixes, a plural peregrinism. Mezouzalem marks the encryption of a twained peregrinism that supplements the father: he war maintwained in the crypt. At the end of the paragraph there is an odd confounding between Mak and Nek: ‘Great is him whom is over Ismael and he shall mekanek of Mak Nakulon. And he deed’ (FW 258.17–18). This recalls Genesis 17.20 where Ishmael the exile is blessed. But instead of being fruitful and multiplying, here he shall ‘mekanek of Mak Nakulon’. Ismael has been cast into the uncanny conflation of Nek Nekulon – the ‘havonfalled’ – and Mak Makal, who ‘haven hevens’ (FW 258.14). Ismael – he – has been cast into making Nek and neking Mak. He has been blessed into confusing the ‘exteller’ and the ‘extold’, and in being heard the exteller is exiled. In exile the extelling names a doubled Mak Makal: Mak and Nek. Lui is the heretical hear-say: the tale extold between the filiim, Shem and Shaun. The p`ere is expropriated in their peregrinism and is replaced by a filial maintwainance of his departed deeds: a good-night story of suppliant noise for ‘Pray-your-Prayers Timothy and Back-to-Bunk Tom’ (FW 258.35–6).20 After all is said and done, in this maintwainance there is no reconciliation between the figures of the brothers; they remain separate: ‘Till tree from tree, tree among trees, tree over tree become stone to stone, stone between stones, stone under stone for ever’ (FW 259.1–2). The awaited reconciliation remains eternally deferred. A linguistic Pentecost – ALP – is always to be awaited. The mummification at the end of this chapter silences the laughter containing ‘he’ as but one in a series of vowels appended to the guttural spirant ‘h’: ‘Ha he hi ho hu. Mummum’ (FW 259.9–10). This letter ‘h’ is absent in the name of Ishmael in this passage: Is(h)mael. There is a heard difference between Ismael and the name of Ishmael, ‘whom God hears’ – what is heard is the caesura in the exile’s name; an ellipsis to hear. This elided spirant in Ismael is echoed in the pronouncement ‘Immi ammi Semmi’, where the ‘h’ has been dropped from Shemmi. The selfmisidentification of the Shem as Ismael lies in what is neither voiced nor heard. The elided spirant thus serves as the border of nominalizing identity (linguistic, national, self ) that is transgressed through exile and peregrination: the mark of the schibboleth, a mark that is marked by absence and linguistic exile.21 Ismael’s identity is peregrination, a dual diaspora for Israel and Ishmael.22 Ismael is thus heard when he strives to be silenced by the aspirated laughter and the final murmur: ‘Loud heap miseries upon us yet entwine our

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arts with laughters low!’ (FW 259.7–8). Rather than serving as ‘God’s signature’ – a problematic concept, Derrida claims (DMJ 48) – this re-sounding laughter is voiced preparatory to being silenced; the laughter awaits its end but is met by a murmur. The end is always forthcoming. Indeed the Babel passage starts with a hundred-letter word (which, according to McHugh’s Annotations, can be parsed as a compound of phrases meaning ‘shut the door’) which follows an oddly truncated sentence cut off at the ‘the’ (FW 257.25–8).23 The re-sounding ecphonesis takes the place of a ricorso; it takes the place of an ‘end’.24 The end is forever disjoined from the ‘the’: the Wake remains ‘destined to be odd’s without ends’ (FW 455.17–18). The event war not, and is (not) heard and remembered as such. The lauds are too loud. The Wake remains an awaiting of a forgetting, the awaiting of hearing a failed or exeomnosunt being. In hearing this silence of the translinguistic lapse of Being, Derrida rigorously finds a complex ethical call to respond; hearing this passage otherwise we have found a cunningly babelian Shema of silence and exile.25 n otes 1 Hereafter cited as DMJ in the text. Derrida’s texts have usually been quoted in French, as my grappling with them is so often contingent on the subtleties of the original. 2 I take as my examples Alan Roughley and Herman Rapaport, both admirers. Roughley reads the essay as exemplary of the Derridian double strategy of overturning hierarchized values of speech/writing, male/female, etc. (a relatively common, if not entirely accurate, reading of the Derridian project); James Joyce and Critical Theory, 272–7. Rapaport provides a more nuanced reading of Derrida’s essay, suggesting that Derrida is using Finnegans Wake to critique Heidegger’s notion of Ereignis; Heidegger and Derrida, 221–34. 3 Babel thus marks the precession of languages that is the condition of translation. This is the concern of Derrida’s essay on Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’ called ‘Des tours de Babel’. The post-Babelian situation of humanity, that is to say the existence of a plurality of discontinuous languages, prescribes or demands a principle of translation and yet this same plurality also proscribes or forbids translation insofar as ultimately all that the task of translation can attest to is that there are many foreign and discontinuous languages. What happens in translation is ‘l’ˆetre-langue de la langue, la langue ou le langage en tant que tels, cette unit´e sans aucune identit´e a` soi qui fait qu’il y a des langues, et que ce sont des langues’ (‘Des tours de Babel’, 232). Eventually, all that translation does is bear witness to the gulf or strife between languages. 4 Beckett, ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce’, 15. Milesi has provided an admirable examination of English’s babelian transportation in Finnegans Wake: ‘On ne peut concevoir la traduction de l’oeuvre de Joyce comme une traduction fid`ele

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du sens en une autre langue, pas mˆeme dans un anglais d´ebarrass´e de sa gangue e´trang`ere pr´ecis´ement a` cause du substrat sur lequel repose le Wake’ (‘L’idiome bab´elien de Finnegans Wake’, 190). Heidegger, ‘The Anaximander Fragment’, Early Greek Thinking, 36. Heidegger’s gesture to Homer in this passage authorizes a trace of the primordiality of Being through an archaic formulation (i.e. prior to Anaximander) into the German language (the word war). The passage from Homer in question is the description of the soothsayer Kalchas in Book I: »v ¢dh t† t –»nta t† t –ss»mena pr» t –»nta [who had knowledge of all things that were, and that were to be, and that had been before]’ (Iliad , I.70). Heidegger would have been mindful of the fact that from the word creÛn we get the word Christ (crhst»v: useful), the messiah who is also (present as) God; the conceit of Christianity is to incarnate (to render manifest) the oblivion of Being as the (singular) Divine word. In ‘La diff´erance’, Derrida addressed this problem in Heidegger’s essay on the Anaximander fragment, but without recourse to the problems of the task of translation; Marges de la philosophie, 3–29, especially 13–14. Not inappropriately, Derrida’s translation of ‘he war’ is absent from the English edition of Derrida’s essay, which is based on an earlier and shorter French version. This point is very closely related to Derrida’s conception of literature as an act. Derrida’s ethical turn to responsibility arises out of conflict (or war), specifically in a conflict against some totalizing law (especially laws of responsibility). Perhaps the most explicit articulation of this can be found in Derrida’s essay on Paul de Man’s wartime writings: ‘[. . .] la d´econstruction est a` mes yeux la mise en oeuvre mˆeme de cette responsabilit´e, surtout au moment o`u elle analyse les axiomes traditionnels ou dogmatiques du concept de responsabilit´e’ (‘La guerre de Paul de Man’, M´emoires pour Paul de Man, 149–232 (224n.)). Derrida here modulates Levinas’s ethical gesture by positing deconstruction as the rigorous ‘putting into work’ (mise en oeuvre) of the responsibility which arises out of the powerlessness of the encounter with irreducible alterity. The power of responsibility is thus an act (or appel) that comes from the powerlessness of response. Derrida, ‘Two Words for Joyce’, 159 n.10. ‘La ville porterait le nom de Dieu le p`ere, et du p`ere de la ville qui s’appelle confusion. [. . .] En donnant son nom, en donnant tous les noms, le p`ere serait a` l’origine du langage et ce pouvoir appartiendrait de droit a` Dieu le p`ere. [. . .] Mais c’est aussi ce Dieu qui, dans le moment de sa col`ere [. . .], annule le don des langues, ou du moins le brouille, s`eme la confusion parmi ses fils et empoisonne le pr´esent (Gift-gift)’ (‘Des tours de Babel’, 204–5). See pp. 207–8 for a brief discussion of Finnegans Wake which anticipates ‘Deux mots pour Joyce’ (this essay originally appeared in 1980). Derrida’s argument here bears notable affinities to Dante’s treatment of Babel in De vulgari eloquentia (on the importance of Babel for Dante, see especially Sollers, ‘Dante et la travers´ee de l’´ecriture’, and Lucia Boldrini’s essay in

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the present volume). See also Milesi, ‘L’idiome bab´elien de Finnegans Wake’, 176–91. This paronomasia is crucial to Derrida’s other essay on Joyce: ‘Ulysse gramophone: ou¨ı-dire de Joyce’, Ulysse gramophone, 55–143. In this essay Derrida’s ethical gesture is especially strong as he posits Molly’s affirmative oui as an act of responsibility to which one cannot respond. In this way Derrida’s reading of the Wake as a critique of Heidegger is also a reading of Ulysses’s ‘Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form of life. Ba!’ (U 15.2098–9). Rapaport posits the presence of a Judaic ethics (via Levinas) in Derrida’s essay as the explicit counter to Heidegger (Heidegger and Derrida, 221–6). In ‘“it’s as semper as oxhousehumper!”: The Structure of Hebrew and the Language of Finnegans Wake’, Reichert has argued that the structure of Hebrew grammar (specifically its verbal structure) provides a model for the babelian infusion of languages in Finnegans Wake. Elsewhere in the Wake, God’s statement of autotelic identity is confused with the declaration of the cartoon character Popeye, who is also not without an antagonistic (or at least feisty) streak: ‘I yam as I yam’ (FW 604.23). Derrida does admit an onomastic jeu in the name of the father, El ( ), since once it is transposed into French it becomes elle. To name and call God (faire l’appel) is already to confuse Him, to confuse His genre and His law. His iteration renders the event of His Being undecidable: ‘Le palindrome (And shall not Babel be with Lebab? ) renverse la tour mais joue aussi avec le sens et la lettre, le sens de l’ˆetre et les lettres de l’ˆetre, de ˆetre (be, eb, baBEl, leBab), comme avec les sens et la lettre du nom de Dieu, EL, LE’ (DMJ 39). However, such onomastic dissemination derives entirely from having posited (or pre-positioned) ‘God es El’ (FW 246.6); the nominative shift still falls under His name. This ending signals the problematic of a (singular) act of translinguistic affirmation that is the concern of ‘Ulysse gramophone: ou¨ı-dire de Joyce’. Not surprisingly, the English version does not end on this note. Both Jacob and Ishmael are buried in the cave of the patriarchs in Hebron, site of massacres in 1929 – shortly before Joyce drafted the passage ( JJA 51:137) – 1980 and 1994. In ‘Des tours de Babel’ Derrida indicates the possibility of a dual/duel within the pronoun ‘he’: ‘And he war, lit-on dans Finnegans Wake, et nous pourrions suivre toute cette histoire du cˆot´e de Shem et de Shaun’ (207). However, Derrida does not pursue this dual tale told of Shem and Shaun in ‘Deux mots pour Joyce’. There is a tradition, followed for instance by Dante in Inferno, XXXI, of attributing the construction of the tower of Babel to the giant Nimrod. This tradition is in part based on the claims Augustine makes concerning Nimrod’s wickedness in the De Civitate Dei, which are founded on the Old Latin (Vetus Latina) mistranslation of Genesis 10.8–10 in the Greek Bible (De Civitate Dei, XVI.4).

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20 Margot Norris argues that Derrida has ignored the (by turns utopic and dystopic) play of the children in the Babel passage, displacing their play by the displaced voice of God (Joyce’s Web, 211–12). 21 Derrida’s essay on the poetry of Paul Celan, Schibboleth, follows from the problems of translation and Heideggerian Ereignis by addressing the implications of hearing the dropped guttural spirant in the watchword schibboleth (a borderguard that is inscribed by and proscribes linguistic difference) – pronounced by the Ephraimites as sibboleth. Their inability to pronounce the ‘shi’ sound became a test to exclude them from passage into Israel. ‘Multiplicit´e et migration des langues, certes, et dans la langue mˆeme, Babel dans une seule langue. Schibboleth marque la multiplicit´e dans la langue, la diff´erence insignifiante comme condition du sens’ (Schibboleth, 54). 22 In ‘Italian Studies in Musical Grammar’, Milesi notes that Issy’s attempt in FW II.2 to state her identity through vowels (reminiscent of Stephen’s debt in Ulysses) falters into silence and unpronounceability: ‘Adamman, Emhe, Issossianusheen and sometypes Yggely ogs Weib. Uwayoei! So mag this sybilette be our shibboleth that we may syllable her well!’ (FW 267.18–21). The vowel sequence (A, E, I, Y, o, W, (U)) of the sybilette is syllabled as a fractured declaration of subjectivity, a hardly auspicious nominalization of a schibboleth (‘Italian Studies in Musical Grammar’, 140; cf. 140–2). 23 Milesi notes that ‘Babel’ derives from the Acadian Bab-ilu, the gate of God; an etymology exploited elsewhere in the Wake: ‘till Daleth, mahomahouma, who oped it closeth thereof the. Dor’ (FW 20.19–20; Milesi, ‘L’idiome bab´elien de Finnegans Wake’, 180). The Babel passage at the close of FW II.1 thus begins from the wake of the already babelian (polylingual) foreclosing of Babel. The ‘Dor’ is cut off from the ‘the.’. 24 The ten thunder-words could be taken as a good example of linguistic miscegenation as silence: the painful prolongation of breath subsuming a babelian agglutination of thunder that is ultimately quite meaningless. These words cannot be pronounced in any one language, and thus parsing these words is a re-enactment or repetition of the hubris of the babelian fall, and not a Pentecostal redemption of meaning. Milesi writes: ‘Annonc¸ant l’origine de la langue et la dispersion en langues, le mot-tonnerre en 3.15–17 subsume tout le mouvement de l’oeuvre: de l’´emergence de la langue et l’exploration des diff´erents angles d’o`u l’on peut produire du sens a` partir d’une fusion de sons, a` la diss´emination bab´elienne et la possibilit´e d’une r´esolution dans la Pentecˆote’ (‘L’idiome bab´elien de Finnegans Wake’, 186). 25 I would like to thank the following for help and advice given during the writing of (the several versions of ) this essay: Laurent Milesi, Jean-Michel Rabat´e, Daniel Ferrer, Elaine Marks, Pr´ospero Sa´ız, David Hayman and Najat Rahman. However, all errors are – as ever – my own.

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Index

Adam 183 Adorno, Theodor 122 aesthetics 6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 22, 41, 60, 73, 76, 86, 90, 94, 95, 115, 120, 143, 165, 186 Agamben, Giorgio 114, 120, 123, 126, 127 Agassiz, Louis 152 Agathon 62, 69, 70, 71, 75, 77 Alarc´on, Norma 155 Alcibiades 62, 66, 69, 70, 71, 75, 76, 77 Alighieri, Dante; see Dante Alighieri ALP (Anna Livia Plurabelle) 62, 64, 65, 67, 75, 81, 89, 103, 108, 161, 162, 176, 177, 191, 203 anagram 44, 51–55, 64; see also hypogramme Anderson, Benedict 156 Andrews, Malcolm 115, 126 Anglo-Irish; see Hiberno-English Anglo-Saxon 138, 140 Annunciation 59, 62, 63, 64 Anzald´ua, Gloria 160 Appadurai, Arjun 154 Aquinas, Saint Thomas 73, 76 Ari`es, Philippe 115 Aristophanes 71, 72, 73 Aristotle 112, 151, 158; Physics 151, 158; Poetics 112 Attridge, Derek 5, 10, 15, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 126, 141 Augustine, Saint 59, 206; Confessions 59; De Civitate Dei 206 babble, babel 3, 5, 12, 153, 185 Babel 126, 181, 182, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207; post-Babelian (condition, language, etc.) 181, 183, 190, 204; see also Derrida’s ‘Des tours de Babel’ babelism, babelization 4, 14, 22 Bakhtin, M. M. 160 Balibar, Etienne 147, 156 Balzac, Honor´e de 78

Baron, Dennis 24 Barthes, Roland 26, 51, 56, 57, 193 Basic English 22 Bateson, Gregory 97, 98 Baudelaire, Charles 58, 59, 61, 62, 68; Les Fleurs du Mal 59, 61 Beatrice 60, 64, 69, 73 Beckett, Samuel 121, 123, 126, 147, 193, 194, 196, 204 B´edier, Joseph 60 Beja, Morris 23, 92 Benjamin, Walter 118, 119, 120, 121, 123–124, 126, 127, 156, 166, 204 Benstock, Bernard 168, 179 Benstock, Shari 22, 94 Ben-Zvi, Linda 22 Bernard, Saint 108 Bernini 88, 89 Bhabha, Homi K. 143, 144, 145, 146, 153, 154, 156, 160 Bible 65, 200, 201, 206; Genesis 62, 68, 69, 73, 203, 206; Exodus 199; Deuteronomy 201; New Testament 62 Bildungsroman 115, 116 Bishop, John 23, 26 Blessed Virgin Mary 58, 59, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 73, 75, 76; see also madonna Bloom, Harold 193 Bloom, Leopold 7, 11, 12, 16, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 47, 50, 57, 62, 64, 67, 75, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 98, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 109, 110, 116, 158 Bloom, Milly 103 Bloom, Molly 2, 12, 21, 29, 55, 56, 62, 64, 65, 75, 81, 92, 98, 99, 103, 104, 108, 109, 158, 206 Bloomfield, Leonard 50 Boldrini, Lucia 22, 179 Book of the Dead 165 Bovary, Charles 67 Bovary, Emma 67, 69 Boylan, Blazes 74

225

226

Index

Brathwaite, Edward Kamau 160 Breakspear, Nicholas (Pope Adrian IV) 149 bricolage: see L´evi-Strauss, Claude Bridges, Robert 136 Brisset, Jean-Pierre 132 Brivic, Sheldon 96, 111 Brown, Carole 22, 186, 194 Brown, Richard 147, 148, 156, 194 Browning, Robert 136 Budgen, Frank 8, 36, 42, 50, 57, 153 Burke, W. 160 Burns, Christy 94 Butler, Judith 154 Cadava, Eduardo 26 Caelius Sedulius 77 Camporesi, Piero 108, 109, 111 Carens, James F. 140 Carlyle, Thomas 151, 153, 158, 159; ‘The Nigger Question’ 151, 159 Carroll, Lewis 132 cat 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108; see also Joyce’s ‘The Cat and the Devil’ catachresis 100, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108 Celan, Paul 207 Chambers, Iain 145, 154, 155, 156 character, characterization 2, 3, 6, 13, 18, 21, 32, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 88, 89, 91, 93, 180, 186 Cheng, Vincent J. 25 Chevalier, J. 111 Chinese 51 Chomsky, Noam 104, 132; competence versus performance 132 Christ 74, 178 Cioran, E. M. 124, 125, 127 Cixous, H´el`ene 9, 23 claritas 71, 76 Clery, Emma 76, 77 Clifford, Martha 80 Clutton-Brock, A. 131 Cohen, Bella 80 Cohen, Marcel 22 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 114, 115, 116, 117, 126; Biographia Literaria 117, 126 colonialism, coloniality 13, 14, 24, 25 colonization 4, 14, 15, 17, 142, 143, 148, 156 Connolly, Thomas E. 3 Conroy, Gabriel 5, 64 Conroy, Gretta 64 Corcoran, Marlena G. 24 cosmopolitanism 4, 14, 156 Cranly 76, 139 creolization 6, 14, 160

Cromwell, Oliver 170 Cunningham, Martin 29 Da Ponte, Lorenzo 58 Daedalus 30, 149 Dante Alighieri 60, 61, 64, 69, 73, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 205, 206; Convivio 184, 193, 194; De Vulgari Eloquentia 180, 182, 188, 191, 193, 205; The Divine Comedy 181, 183, 187, 193, 206 Davin 67 De Man, Paul 115, 126, 205 Dean, Tim 26 Deane, Seamus 14, 126 Deane, Vincent 22 decolonization 6 deconstruction 24, 79, 106, 107, 115, 205 Dedalus, Simon 33, 138 Dedalus, Stephen 2, 4, 6, 13, 16, 17, 25, 26, 30, 31, 33, 34, 50, 53, 54, 62, 74, 75, 76, 77, 100, 110, 113, 115, 116, 117, 119, 121, 125, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137–138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 148, 149, 150, 158, 160, 162, 171, 176, 186, 191, 192, 207 defamiliarization 4, 5, 6 Deleuze, Gilles 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111; logos versus nomos 99, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109; major language versus minor language 99, 101, 109; order-word versus pass-word 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 104, 106, 109, 110, 111, 112; rhizome versus arborescence 99, 100, 102, 103, 104; A Thousand Plateaus 97, 98, 110 Deming, Robert H. 140 Derrida, Jacques 8, 9, 18, 22, 23, 24, 79, 92, 105, 106, 107, 111, 113, 126, 141, 144, 155, 156, 163, 164, 179, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 204, 205, 206, 207; ‘Des tours de Babel’ 198, 201, 204, 205, 206; ‘Deux mots pour Joyce’ (‘Two Words for Joyce’) 23, 113, 126, 155, 195, 197, 198, 199, 200, 205, 206; see also ‘he war’, s. v. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; Glas 23, 105, 106, 107, 111, 141; ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Here Say Yes in Joyce’ (‘Ulysse gramophone: ou¨ı-dire de Joyce’) 23, 92, 155, 206 Descartes, Ren´e 117, 118 Devlin, Kimberly J. 24, 25 diachronicity versus synchronicity 19 dialect 4, 181, 182, 183, 184, 191 Dickens, Charles 115, 116 Diez, Friedrich Christian 105 difference 17, 20, 63, 85, 145, 146, 151, 153, 154, 155, 162, 164, 165, 173, 174, 175, 178, 182, 191; in language(s), linguistic difference 11, 20, 169, 195, 197, 198, 207

Index Dionysus 62, 72 Diotima 61, 63, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77, 78 Dissanayake, Wimal 154 Docherty, Thomas 5, 126 Don Giovanni 58, 61, 64, 73, 74, 75, 78; see also Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Don Juan 58, 60, 66, 67, 74, 75; see also Moli`ere Donne, John 158 Dover, Sir Kenneth 78 Dowling, Linda 141 Downing, Gregory M. 22 Dowson, Ernest 136 Du Cange (Charles du Fresne), sieur 105 Dublin 4, 7, 75, 85, 89, 101, 109, 113, 121, 123, 124, 160 Duffy, Enda 25, 93 Dussel, Enrique 155 Eastman, Max 21 ´ecriture f´eminine 12, 178 Edgerly, Webster 22 Einstein, Albert 43, 48 Elam, Diane 6, 11, 24, 93, 96 Elijah 34 Eliot, George; Middlemarch 93 Eliot, T. S. 125, 137; The Waste Land 125 Ellmann, Maud 141 Ellmann, Richard 21, 74, 158; James Joyce 4, 21, 25, 43 Empedocles 151 epiphany 2, 5, 76, 77, 139, 141, 186 Eros 62, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77 Erse 189, 191, 192; see also Hiberno-English, Irish (Gaelic) Esperanto 22 ethics 6, 10, 13, 91, 118, 175, 178, 195, 204, 205, 206 etymology 5, 6, 16, 44, 105, 106, 188, 207 Evans, Mary Lowe 158 Eve 62, 63, 65, 67, 68, 71, 73 Everson, Antony and Jane 194 example, exemplarity 6, 11, 79–92 Fairhall, James 17, 26 Fanon, Frantz 156 felix culpa (happy fault) 62, 73, 100, 103, 106, 107, 187, 191 Felman, Shoshana 23 feminism 10, 11, 24, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 92 Fenollosa, Ernest 44, 48, 49, 50, 57, 121 Ferrer, Daniel 126, 207 Flaubert, Gustave 58, 59, 61, 67, 68, 69, 73, 116; Madame Bovary 61; Salammbˆo 59

227

Foucault, Michel 57 Frankenstein 116, 117 French 139 Freud, Sigmund 26, 27, 43, 60, 61, 63, 66, 68, 71, 75, 78, 103, 134, 141, 170, 178 Gabler, Hans-Walter 34, 140, 141 Garnett, Edward 28 Garnier, Marie-Dominique 10, 19 Gautier, Th´eophile 78 gender 11, 12, 20, 24, 84, 91, 93, 144, 145, 147, 168, 175, 178, 179 Genet, Jean 111 Gheerbrant, A. 111 Gibbon, Edward 194 Gibbons, Luke 156 Gifford, Don 57, 158 Gilbert, Sandra M. 92 Gilbert, Stuart 8, 158 Gilbert, W. S. 136 Gillespie, Michael Patrick 25 Glasheen, Adaline 173, 179 glossolalia 104, 133 Gobineau, J. A. 152 Gottfried, Roy 42 Goux, Jean-Joseph 152, 159 Goyert, Georg 39 Gramsci, Antonio 156 Greek 34 Groden, Michael 57 Guattari, F´elix 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 106, 109, 110, 111; see also Deleuze, Gilles Gubar, Susan 92 Hackett, Francis 159 Haines 17, 149 Hart, Clive 22 Hayman, David 21, 57, 78, 141, 207 HCE (H. C. Earwicker) 64, 161, 177, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192 Heaney, Seamus 158 Heath, Stephen 145, 155 Hebrew 198, 200, 201, 203, 206 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 94; Aesthetics 94 Heidegger, Martin 109, 195, 196, 197, 199, 204, 205, 206, 207; Being and Time 109 Henke, Suzette 92 Hermes 11, 104 Herodotus 109 Herr, Cheryl 25 Herring, Phillip F. 56 Hettche, Walter 140 Hiberno-English (Anglo-Irish) 3, 6, 15, 115, 130, 144, 146, 154, 191, 192; see also Erse, Irish (Gaelic)

228

Index

Hippocrates 109 history 11, 13, 14, 16, 17–19, 20, 24, 49, 63, 91, 114, 115, 116, 117, 122, 136, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 154, 162, 165, 166, 167, 168, 176; of language 3, 19, 180; see also language of history Hofheinz, Thomas C. 22, 26 H¨olderlin, Friedrich 71, 72 Hollander, Robert 180, 193 Homer 31, 205; Iliad 205; Odyssey 3, 42, 53, 142 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 136 Horkheimer, Max 122 Howes, Marjorie 15, 24, 25 Hugo, Victor 57 Hulme, T. E. 48, 57 Humpty Dumpty 47, 183 Husserl, Edmund 48 Hyam, Ronald 158 hybridity, hybridization 6, 8, 15, 17, 144, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 160 Hyde, Douglas 149 hypogramme 52, 53, 55; see also anagram Ibsen, Henrik 73 Imagism 137 infancy 112–125, 134 intertextuality 11, 160, 193 Irigaray, Luce 88, 89, 95, 96, 167, 169, 176, 177, 178, 179 Irish (Gaelic) 6, 192; see also Erse, Hiberno-English Iser, Wolfgang 126 Isolde 60, 61, 69, 73 Issy, Izzy 62, 66, 80, 81, 161, 163, 207 Italian 180, 181, 182, 191, 192 Jacopone da Todi 60 Jakobson, Roman 50 Jameson, Fredric 26, 155 Jaun; see Shaun Jespersen, Otto 22 Johnson, Jeri 92 Jolas, Eugene 2 Jones, Ellen Carol 15, 24, 155 Jonson, Ben 151 jouissance 9, 63, 88, 89 Jousse, Father Marcel 6 Joyce, James, works: ‘The Cat and the Devil’ 100; Dubliners 2, 5, 16, 29, 44, 45, 52, 59, 64, 80, 81, 101, 107, 133, 136; ‘A Mother’ 107; ‘Araby’ 46, 47; ‘The Boarding House’ 59; ‘The Dead’ 5, 21, 64, 76; ‘Eveline’ 133; ‘Grace’ 5, 29; ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ 5; ‘The Sisters’ 5, 21, 45, 46, 56; Exiles 63, 64, 65, 75, 76; Finnegans Wake 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 15, 16, 21, 25, 26, 41, 42, 52, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 73,

75, 76, 79, 81, 94, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 108, 110, 113, 116, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 132, 137, 140, 141, 147, 150, 153, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166, 168, 169, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 194, 195, 196, 199, 200, 204, 205, 206, 207; chapters and episodes: I.1 (the ‘Museyroom’, the ‘Prankquean’) 12, 167–173, 190; I.2 180, 181–182, 190; I.4 183; I.5 (the ‘Letter’ or ‘Mamafesta’) 7, 8, 183; I.6 182; I.7 (‘Shem the Penman’) 180, 185; I.8 (‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’) 7, 191; II.1 (the ‘Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies’) 195, 207; ‘he war’ 113, 195, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205; II.2 (the ‘Geometry Lesson’ or ‘Nightlesson’) 22, 27, 191, 207; II.3 (‘How Buckley Shot the Russian General’) 180, 186, 187–189, 190; III.1 (‘the Ondt and the Gracehoper’) 164–167, 173–175; III.4 190; IV (the letter, ALP’s final monologue) 16, 65, 182; Giacomo Joyce 63, 74, 75, 76; ‘Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages’ 15, 154; Letters 2, 6, 13, 21, 22, 42, 63, 64, 78, 100, 153; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 2, 4, 5, 13, 15, 16, 21, 26, 28, 41, 52, 62, 67, 74, 76, 77, 79, 81, 112, 113, 115, 117, 120, 122, 124, 125, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 186, 191; opening paragraphs 5, 113, 118, 130, 131, 134–135, 136; Scribbledehobble 3, 9; Stephen Hero 2, 6, 9, 74, 136, 147; Ulysses 2, 3, 5, 6, 16, 17, 21, 28, 30, 35, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 62, 63, 64, 65, 74, 75, 79, 81, 82, 85, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94, 98, 101, 108, 116, 122, 123, 126, 136, 137, 139, 142, 143, 144, 146, 149, 154, 158, 162, 171, 176, 194, 206, 207; ‘Aeolus’ 30, 32; ‘Calypso’ 47, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 107, 108; ‘Circe’ 12, 37, 39, 57, 82, 93, 140; ‘Cyclops’ 7, 47, 140; ‘Eumaeus’ 31, 32, 33, 35; ‘Ithaca’ 41, 55, 103, 104; ‘Lestrygonians’ 82, 86; ‘Lotus Eaters’ 7; ‘Nausicaa’ 12, 37–40, 67, 94; ‘Nestor’ 17, 18; ‘Oxen of the Sun’ 3, 5, 26, 41, 44, 54, 122, 123, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153; ‘Penelope’ (‘Molly’s monologue’) 21, 41, 62, 63, 75, 98; ‘Proteus’ 48, 49, 51, 53, 120; ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ 32; ‘Sirens’ 23, 36, 37, 53, 57, 140; ‘Telemachus’ 54, 158; ‘Wandering Rocks’ 19; Work in Progress 16, 21, 25 Joyce, Lucia 80 Joyce, Nora 63, 64 Joyce, Stanislaus 21, 146, 194 Joyce, Stephen James 100 Jung, Carl Gustav 26, 43, 48, 75 Kafka, Franz 116 Kant, Immanuel 94, 95; Critique of Judgement 95

Index Kaplan, Caren 155 Kearney, Richard 154 Keats, John 78 Kenner, Hugh 22, 29, 42, 56, 113, 126 Kershner, R. B. 25 Kiberd, Declan 156 Kipling, Rudyard 136 Kristeva, Julia 9, 193 K¨unstlerroman 115 Lacan, Jacques 9, 20, 23, 24, 26, 55, 63, 66, 78, 79, 88, 89, 90, 96, 101, 102, 107, 110, 147, 163, 174, 178, 179 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 93, 94 Lamos, Colleen 24, 140 language(s): of history 16, 17, 19; see also history of language; of infancy, see infancy; of philosophy 26, 102; of politics 13, 25; see also politics of language; of translation 145; major language versus minor language, see Deleuze, Gilles; see also ‘difference’, ‘poetics’, individual languages (French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, etc.) lap(ping) 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, 108, 109 lapsing, lapsus 50, 55, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, 108 Larbaud, Valery 158 Latin 138, 139, 185, 191, 203 Lavergne, Philippe 197 Lawrence, Karen 22, 23, 25, 26, 92 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 132, 134, 136, 140 Leda 72, 73 Leiris, Michel 56, 57 L´eon, Paul 25 Leonard, Garry 25 Leporello 58 Lernout, Geert 23 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 120; Laoco¨on 120 letter 8, 63, 105, 162, 163, 164, 176; as alphabetical unit 104, 161–162, 163, 183, 201, 203; as epistle 7, 63, 161, 162, 163–164, 177, 178, 190, 191; see also Joyce’s Finnegans Wake L´evi-Strauss, Claude 100, 106; bricolage 100, 106 L´evinas, Emmanuel 205, 206 Lewis, Janet E. 110 Lewis, Wyndham 43, 56, 137, 165 Linati, Carlo 158 lingua franca 15, 25, 192 linguistics 6, 11, 19, 43, 44–45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 55, 56, 100, 128, 132, 141, 180, 186, 192 Lipking, Lawrence 22 Lloyd, David 142, 143, 154, 155, 156

229

Luftig, Victor 26 Lynch 26, 76 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois 120, 121, 122, 123, 126, 127, 155, 156; discours versus figure 120, 121, 122 MacCabe, Colin 24, 92, 93, 121, 122, 126 MacCool, Finn 202 MacDowell, Gerty 37, 38, 39, 62, 67, 80, 81 madonna, Madonna 58–77 Mahaffey, Vicki 111 Malinowski, B. 44, 48, 49, 50, 51, 57 Mallarm´e, St´ephane 116, 136, 141, 155 ‘mamafesta’ see Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; letter as epistle Manganiello, Dominic 24 Mark, King 73 Marks, Elaine 207 Markus, R. A. 78 Marx, Karl 118, 152; The Communist Manifesto 177, 179 Massumi, Brian 110 Mauthner, Fritz 22 McCarthy, Patrick A. 167, 168, 173, 174, 179 McClintock, Anne 155 McGee, Patrick 12, 21, 22, 92, 179 McHugh, Roland 22, 25, 170, 172, 194, 204 Meillet, Antoine 22 Melchiori, Giorgio 192, 194 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 102, 103, 105, 110, 111 Michelangelo 68 Michelet, Jules 16, 19 Milesi, Laurent 22, 23, 25, 27, 56, 94, 126, 155, 194, 204, 205, 206, 207 Miller, Nicholas A. 110 Milner, Jean-Claude 57 mimesis 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 81, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123 mimicry 7, 8 Miyoshi, Masao 155 Mnemosyne 201 Moallem, Minoo 155 Modernism 4, 7, 12, 14, 15, 26, 52, 58, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 75–77, 78, 79, 112, 114, 116, 122, 126 modernity 14, 68, 71, 112, 116, 120, 122, 123, 124, 143, 144, 145, 146, 155 Moli`ere 68, 74; Don Juan 74 Monory, Jacques 123 Moore, George Edward 48 Morse, J. Mitchell 57, 92 Moses 34, 149 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 58, 59, 74, 75; Don Giovanni 74, 75–77 Mulligan, Buck 148 Musset, Alfred de 78

230

Index

Nancy, Jean-Luc 93 narratology 79 nation 11, 13, 15, 126, 143, 153, 202 nationalism 4, 13, 14, 142, 143, 144, 164 Nerval, G´erard de 78 Neumann, Harry 78 New Criticism 79 New Historicism 17, 79 Nietzsche, Friedrich 98 Nimrod 182, 183, 185, 188, 190, 206 Noah 189 Nolan, Emer 14, 25, 126 Norris, David 23 Norris, Margot 24, 25, 26, 94, 206 Nussbaum, Martha 78 O’Brien, Darcy 92 Odysseus 34, 35, 142, 150 Oedipus 61 Ogden, C. K. 22, 25, 44 Old Cotter 45, 46 Olson, Charles 18, 26; logos versus muthos 17, 18 O’Malley, Grace 172, 173; see also Prankquean, s. v. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Onions, C. T. 140 onomatopoeia 53, 113, 119, 122, 124, 128, 130, 141 Ortega y Gasset, Jos´e 60 Osiris 183 Osteen, Mark 160 Paget, Sir Richard 22 Parnell, Charles Stewart 35, 139 Pascoli, Giovanni 52 Pasipha¨e 149 paternity 9 patriarchy 10, 12, 17, 80, 82, 84, 85, 89, 92, 145, 161, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175, 179 Peirce, Charles Sanders 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 57; rheme (rhemata) 44–45, 46–47, 49, 57 Pelikan, Jaroslav 77 Penelope 56 Pentecost 203, 207 performative, performativity 2, 10, 12, 19–20, 143, 145 Petrarch 60 philology 11, 43 philosophy 11, 20, 44, 46–47, 48, 61, 81, 112, 118, 157 pidgin 160 Pindar 71, 72 Plato 26, 51, 60, 61, 62, 65, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 76, 78; Cratylus 51; Phaedrus 66; Symposium 61, 62, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 76, 78 Platonism 60, 72

poetics 6, 15, 18, 61, 65, 180; linguistic poetics 1–8 politics 6, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 22, 23, 24, 81, 86, 90, 115, 124, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 151, 156, 157, 160, 163, 165, 191, 192; of language (linguistic politics) 1–8, 13, 14, 25, 192; see also language of politics polyglottism 4, 14 Popeye 206 post-feminism 11, 80 postcolonialism, postcoloniality 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 18, 20, 23–24, 25, 79, 113, 114, 115, 126, 144 postmodernism, postmodernity 14, 79, 107, 117, 126 poststructuralism 13, 14, 55, 79, 122, 124 Pound, Ezra 7, 12, 26, 44, 48, 49, 50, 121, 137 Power, Arthur 4 Prankquean; see O’Malley, Grace Prodicus 62, 69, 70, 78 Proteus 50 Proust, Marcel 67, 119, 125, 127 psychoanalysis 11, 20, 23–24, 26, 27, 56, 75, 79, 88, 93, 178 queer (theory) 11 Rabat´e, Jean-Michel 22, 78, 103, 106, 108, 111, 155, 189, 190, 191, 194, 207 race 11, 13, 15, 20, 144, 147, 151, 158, 168, 178 Rahman, Najat 207 Rapaport, Herman 204, 206 Realism 7, 52, 79, 82, 87, 90, 93 Reichert, Klaus 26, 206 Reizbaum, Marilyn 24, 110, 111 remainder 5, 132–136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 144, 145, 164, 201 representation 6, 7, 9, 11, 16, 17, 19, 24, 69, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 96, 97, 111, 112, 113, 114, 117, 118, 120, 123, 137, 143, 157, 160, 162, 168, 176 Rey, Jean-Michel 156 Reynolds, Mary T. 180, 194 Rice, Thomas Jackson 56 Richards, I. A. 44, 48 Riefenstahl, Leni 124 Rimbaud, Arthur 51 Riquelme, John Paul 103, 111, 141 Romanticism 68, 71, 78, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 123, 135 Rose, Danis 21, 42 Rosen, Stanley 70, 78 Rosset, Cl´ement 112, 126 Rougemont, Denis de 60, 77 Roughley, Alan 23, 24, 204 Roussel, Raymond 56, 57, 132

Index Rowan, Bertha 63, 64, 65, 67, 80 Rowan, Richard 64, 67 Ruskin, John 153 Russell, Bertrand 44, 48 Russell, George William (‘AE’) 18 Sade, Marquis de 67 Sailer, Susan Shaw 23, 25 Sa´ız, Prospero 207 Sand, George 78 Sangari, Kumkum 156 Santas, Gerasimos 78 Sapir, Edward 43, 44, 48, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56 Saussure, Ferdinand de 44, 45, 52, 53, 54, 55, 121, 132, 141; langue versus parole 12, 44, 45, 46, 54, 132 Schlossman, Beryl 26, 77, 78 Scott, Bonnie Kime 92 Seidman, Robert J. 158 self-reflexivity 2, 8, 9, 115, 117, 118, 123 Semele 72 ‘semicolonial’ 15 semiotics 79 Senn, Fritz 10, 20, 23, 42, 57, 139, 141, 155 Settanni, Ettore 194 Shakespeare, William 61, 64, 66, 74, 78, 142; King Henry IV , Part One 142; Othello 66 Shaun 64, 66, 75, 161, 163, 164, 173, 185, 186, 203, 206 Shechner, Mark 92 Shelley, Mary 116 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 76, 78 Shem 62, 64, 75, 161, 163, 164, 166, 174, 180, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 192, 194, 198, 201, 202, 203, 206 Sirens 70 Skeat, Walter W.; Etymological Dictionary 6, 56 Slote, Sam 10, 20, 23, 56 Socrates 61, 63, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 77 Sollers, Philippe 24, 205 Solmsen, Friedrich 78 Soud, Stephen E. 158 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 25, 157 Spoo, Robert 17, 26 Starobinski, Jean 56 Stein, Gertrude 137 Steinberg, Leo 77 Stone, Oliver 162 structuralism 44, 79 subaltern 15, 144, 148, 154, 156, 157 Suter, August 21 Swann 67 Swift, Jonathan 149, 157; A Tale of a Tub 149, 157

231

Swinburne, Algernon Charles 136 syntax 5, 9, 12, 14, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 104, 196 Tadi´e, Benoit 5, 12 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 136 Theresa, Saint 88, 89 Tiresias 142 Topia, Andr´e 155 translation 10, 20, 25, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 119, 143, 144, 145–147, 148, 153, 155, 156, 185, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 204, 205, 207; cultural translation 145, 146, 160; reading-as-translation 10 Trench, Richard Chenevix 22 Tristan 60, 61, 73, 74, 75 Truffaut, Franc¸ois 70 Ulysses 50 Uncle Charles Principle 32 Unkeless, Elaine 92 Valente, Joseph 19, 24, 94, 140 van Boheemen(-Saaf ), Christine 13, 24, 92, 94 van Buren, Jane Silverman 61 van Hulle, Dirk 22 Vance, Eileen 130, 135, 141 Verene, Donald Phillip 26 vernacular, vernacularization 15, 17, 180, 181, 182, 183, 191; see also vulgar tongue Vico, Giambattista 6, 16, 19, 21, 26, 44, 61, 63, 65, 67, 73, 105, 153, 159, 189, 190; The New Science 153, 159, 189 Virgil 180 Virgin; see Blessed Virgin Mary Vlastos, Gregory 78 Vogt, Carl 152 Volap¨uk 22 Vorticism 137 vulgar tongue (vulgare) 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191; see also vernacular Wagner, Richard 60, 61 ‘Wakese’ (Wakean idiom) 2, 7, 14, 19, 25, 101, 104, 107, 191, 195, 196 Wales, Katie 22, 25 Wall, Richard 25 Walzl, Florence L. 92 Warner, Marina 77 Wawrzycka, Jolanta W. 24 Weaver, Harriet Shaw 21, 22 Weir, Lorraine 22, 100, 106, 107, 110 Wells, H. G. 131, 194

232 Whitaker, Thomas 18 Whitman, Walt 51 Wicke, Jennifer 25 Wilson, Rob 154 Wollaeger, Mark A. 26 Wollschl¨ager, Hans 39 Woolf, Virginia 12, 119 Wordsworth, William 112, 114, 117, 126; The Prelude 117

Yahweh 199, 200, 201, 202 Yawn; see Shaun Yeats, William Butler 61, 65, 69, 72, 73, 78, 136; ‘Among School Children’ 72; ‘Words For Music Perhaps’ 73 Young, Robert J. C. 152, 154, 158, 160 Zeus 72 Ziarek, Ewa 93