| HJS |
| volume 5, issue 2, 2004-5 |
| NOTES 1 Most readily available in James Joyce, Poems and Shorter Writings, Ellmann et al (eds.). 2 This collapse of the first and third terms of the Thomistic epiphany into the second term implicates both the syllogism and the Hegelian dialectic as forms of differentiating thought served by and serving the distinction between an object or subject and all that it isn't. Consonantia, in this sense, might be figured as a syllogism blocked at its second term, a subject or object as a postulate stuck with a predicate which has the potential to define it but which can never disclose the necessity of their relation. The subject or object co-exists absurdly with this hypothetical predicate. In Peculiar Language Derek Attridge refers to the Wake's "denial of the logic of opposites" (202), and in arresting the Thomistic epiphany at its second term, the episodic epiphany might be said to present a "logic of opposites" minus the logic, or a confrontation of statement and anti-statement without the synthesis, an unviable yet persistent state which hesitates between self-assertion and self-cancellation as possible solutions to its inconclusive engagement with dialectic as a principle of active understanding. 3 Interestingly, in Stephen Hero the "Villanelle of the Temptress" is mentioned before Stephen's exposition of his epiphany theory (see page 188). If in Portrait, the composition of the villanelle is inspired by Stephen's epiphanic waking, in Stephen Hero it is inspired by an actual epiphany--the Eccles' Street flirtation between the drawling Young Lady and the all but inaudible Young Man. While in the later version the object of inspiration is extra-textual, in the earlier work it is present as text, the epiphany, as it were, refuses to be displaced by the poem which it inspires. The two versions taken together, then, give us the object of inspiration and the composition of the finished poem; the narrative of this poem's creation, its consonantia, is spread across the two books, while its claritas, its presence, is squeezed into textual absence. 4 It is interesting that Joyce should have made such remarks in relation to Ulysses and not Finnegans Wake which would seem, at first sight at least, to be by far the more baffling book. We might speculate that Joyce considered academia to have been completely overtaken and routed in the shift of writing practice between the two books. It will be one of my contentions that the structures which make such riddling possible in Ulysses are no longer present in the Wake. 5 Lacan's seminar on Joyce, "Le Sinthome," is available on line at: http://gaogoa.free.fr/Seminaires_HTML/23-STH/STH11051976.htm 6 In "Mind your Genderous: Toward a Wake Grammar," Strother B. Purdy refocuses attention on the sentence as a unit of meaning in Finnegans Wake. His provisional grammar of the Wake is derived from a set of "selection restrictions" which exert downward pressure on the number of readings possible for each morpheme within a sentence. These restrictions are themselves based on context, which is a spatio-temporal model reliant on a logic of proximity: that which has the greatest influence on the meaning of any unit is that which is closest in space and time to the unit in question, hence Purdy's emphasis on the sentence. The assumption is that we understand language and the world sequentially; when the sequence is broken we are required to make a leap of understanding if we are to keep hold of meaning. The sentence provides a mediate check on this expanding sequence, permitting us to grasp its developing structure in convenient bits. Epiphany, however, offers a challenge to this episodic epistemology, raising meaning to revelation through the suspension of sequence and context. Within claritas it is not possible to think in terms of sequence and units. Revelation, indeed, might be defined as meaning without context, a form of knowledge that is unlimited by further proximate forms. While we do indeed employ contextuality as a tool in our attempts to read Finnegans Wake, its utility (or even validity), I would suggest, is severely compromised by the posthumous nature of the text's epiphanic project. The contextlessness projected by epiphany overbalances into a form of total contextuality, where the arbitrariness of any attempt to elect one thing as the context of another is so apparent that selection takes on an ironic, or even sardonic, inflection. While the text is divided into sentences articulated by conventional punctuation, the link between the unit and the sequence it serves is wholly conjectural; in spite of the sequential structure we don't know where to start. Purdy himself admits that he is intimidated by infinity (see page 60) and that his desire to limit each morpheme to one meaning is motivated by resistance to the almost infinitesimal number of possible combinations (see page 63). His grammar, we might say, is inspired by anxiety, which is itself triggered by the persistence of meaning in the wake of revelation. 7 Where we have the feeling that Stephen's text is running away with him and that he is caught between the generation of material as meaning and its mastery as revelation. His inward comment expresses his fear of never -ending consonantia, of being permanently arrested on the cusp of claritas: What the hell are you driving at? I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons. (170) Stephen asks himself if he has been "condemned to do this" (170) , and his question takes us back to Father Arnall's sermon in Portrait. By rejecting the biblical hell with his satanic non serviam, Stephen confirms his submissiveness to the scriptures as text. One may separate oneself from faith as a conscious state of mind, but the textuality of one's former belief lives on in language and iconography. The subtext of non serviam, then, might be "I will serve (the signifiers of the church)." The biblical hell which Stephen has rejected has been replaced, perhaps, by a discursive hell where the pain of loss as evoked by father Arnall becomes the subtler torment of consonantia, an eternity of studying the formal qualities of the object, of being led on from part to part, without ever pushing through to a realisation of its whatness. 8 From William T. Noon's Joyce and Aquinas, through Hugh Kenner's Dublin's Joyce to Jacques Aubert's The Aesthetics of James Joyce. More recently, we can find Laurent Milesi arguing in his introduction to James Joyce and the Difference of Language that the epiphany as a form of linguistic expression survives as a trace element in Joyce's ultimate work: "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." (2) 9 Though it might coincide with the drafting of Stephen Hero, which, according to Theodore Spencer's introduction, took place between place 1901-1906 (12). 10 Jacques Aubert traces Joyce's compulsive interest in "Names, those asemantic vocables, signifiers par excellence," to an anxiety he shared with James Clarence Mangan: "Joyce betrayed the same anguish when he decided to sign his private correspondence, not merely his public literary production, 'Stephen Dedalus' ." (73) 11 For Lacan it is the absence of the Name-of-the-Father which triggers the collapse of neurosis into psychosis: "It is the lack of the name-of-the-Father in that place which, by the hole that it opens up in the signified, sets off the cascade of reshapings of the signifier from which the increasing disaster of the imaginary proceeds, to the point at which the level is reached at which signifier and signified are stabilized in the delusional metaphor." See Ecrits, A Selection, 217. 12 Freed from the dialectical movement of narrative, "L'objet reste l?," writes Roland Barthes in relation to the descriptive practice of Alain Robbe-Grillet. (29-30) 13 This association of truth with stasis takes us back to the problem of eternal return and the Viconian structure of the Wake. If history is circular and the cycles will repeat themselves to infinity it is difficult to see how it can contain truth, if truth is stasis. In "Ecclesiastes" we can read: ...the eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. (1.8-9) This "nothing new under the sun" might be compared to the Joyce's Viconian notion of the "seim anew" (FW 215.23). In the biblical context, eternal return works as a proof of God's monopoly on truth since he is the stasis beyond the revolving system, a singulartity beyond duplication. Without God, eternal return functions as a negative representation of truth as repetition, the return of the same is all the truth there is. Eternal return precludes stasis and the truth of epiphany: the same, or that which is, is constantly renewed (or "anewed"), it is cyclical, but, more importantly, the cycle implies motion. To return to "Ecclesiastes" in the light of the Wake's godlessness, we might say that the senses are not satisfied because they have never perceived whatness, instead they are confronted through post-epiphanic style with an infinite sequence of whats. 14 In distinguishing the effects of the pun from those of the portmanteau word, Derek Attridge notes that in the Wake "the context itself is made up of puns and portmanteau words." (202) This loss of the bounding line of integritas, which is supposed to separate the thing from everything that it is not, may be taken as a symptom of the polykinesis of style. 15 The classical critical developments of this idea are Karen Lawrence's The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses, James Maddox's The Assault on Character in Joyce's Ulysses, both of which draw on Hugh Kenner's notions of the narrative norm in Dublin's Joyce. See also Kenner's meditations on objectivity and incursions of subjective style in Joyce's Voices. 16 While Joyce's earlier writing might be said to move towards "one great [epiphanic] goal," the Wake moves in every direction at once, making it impossible, as Attridge states, "to draw out any single thread as central--whether it be plot, time sequence, character, symbolic structure, mythic framework, voice, attitude, dogma, or any of the other threads that run through conventional novels." (217) 17 I am thinking, for example, of the answer to question eleven in I.vi, particularly 149.11-152.03 and 159.24-167.17. The bulk of I.v with its "exegesis" of the "untitled mamafesta" is also representative of this mode. |
| ANDREW NORRIS JOYCE AND THE POST-EPIPHANIC |