| HJS |
| volume 3, issue 2, 2003 |
| NOTES 1 Djuna Barnes, "James Joyce" [April 1922], Djuna Barnes: Interviews, ed. Alice Barry (Washington, DC: Sun and Moon Press, 1985) 288-96. This quotation, 294. 2 The aporia is, literally, an impasse, an impassable or irresolvable contradiction. The aporetic method, in a philosophic context, as defined in the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, is: "the raising of puzzles without offering solutions-typical of the elenchus in the early Socratic dialogues of Plato. These consist in the testing of definitions and often end with an aporia, e.g. that piety is both what is and what is not loved by the gods. Compare the paradoxes of Zeno, e.g., that motion is both possible and impossible." To say that Joyce's writing is "aporetic" is to suggest that it is predicated essentially on that which cannot be decided or determined rather than on a referent (a subject, a concept, a source) which can be more or less successfully identified, reflected upon, illustrated, interpreted. If you like, it is "aporetic" instead of being "mimetic." 3 Barnes, Interviews, 295. 4 Is it not interesting that the Aquinian qualities of universal beauty "integritas, consonantia, claritas" on which Stephen lectures Lynch in the Portrait, are denied this Beatrice? Should this, in itself, not encourage us to doubt "her"? 5 This exposure of handwriting as a trace (of an absent or incomplete, fragmented, presence) at this stage, in the opening movement, of this handwritten text is intriguing. Is this, perhaps, an ironic self-reflection, or confession, of the text as trace? 6 Do, please, feel free to read as much Lacan into this as you like. 7 Underlying this entire paper is the linkage of scepticism, dialectics and the aporia in the history of western philosophy. The definition of "aporetic method" offered by the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, part of which I quoted note 2, is usefully illustrative of this linkage: "In Aristotle's dialectic, the resolution of aporia discovered in the views on a subject is an important source of philosophical understanding [...]. The possibility of argument for two inconsistent positions was an important factor in the development of Scepticism. In modern philosophy, the antinomies that Kant claimed reason would arrive at in attempting to prove the existence of objects corresponding to transcendental ideal may by seen as aporia." (Joyce, of course, and Barnes, likely enough, would have been aware of this linkage.) But, my use of "aporia" and the "aporetic" is also already after Derrida-after Psyché and Aporias most particularly-and this will have its effects on my use of "scepticism" and "dialectics," bringing différance into play, foregrounding impossibility and undecideability. 8 It might be possible to read the "heart" as that of the I "this, my heart" but what then do we do with the following question? 9 See John 18.40. Not this one but Barabbas. I haven't commented at all on the intimations of the I's "christliness" in this text, but it might be worth considering the placement of this refusal of Christ, in lieu of or in preference for Barabbas, between the apology and the entrance to the tomb ("coffin of music"). The notion of sacrifice is certainly implicit, as also are the notions of death and, perhaps, iconography. |
| M.E. ROUGHLEY APOLOGY IN AN OTHER'S HAND: GIACOMO JOYCE: WHO? |