The Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida 9781472543240, 9780826498373

Citation preview

For Ziz and Pis

Soit un passe¨, soit un avenir, sans rien qui permettrait de l'un a© l'autre le passage, de telle sorte que la ligne de de¨marcation les de¨marquerait d'autant plus qu'elle resterait invisible: espe¨rance d'un passe¨, re¨volu d'un avenir. Seule, alors, du temps resterait cette ligne a© franchir, toujours de¨ja© franchie, cependant infranchissable et, par rapport a© ûmoiý, non situable. Maurice Blanchot

Abbreviations

When citing these works, the following abbreviations are used: Texts by Joyce: D ^ Dubliners FW ^ Finnegans Wake P ^ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man SH ^ Stephen Hero U ^ Ulysses Other sources: B ^ Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism CE ^ Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution NS ^ Giambattista Vico, The New Science TFW ^ Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will TI ^ Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image WoD ^ Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster References are included parenthetically in the body of the text.

Acknowledgements

While writing this book I have incurred a number of debts of gratitude. None of them can be repaid by a mere note of thanks, but thanks are due nonetheless. To Moshe Ron, who read the manuscript at various stages and helped steer it in the right direction; to Leona Toker and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan who o¡ered valuable advice and encouragement; to Ivan Callus who helped raise the stakes of the discussion; to Jean-Michel Rabate¨ who inspired the project and taught me a great deal about Joyce. I am also grateful to the Hebrew University for providing generous ¢nancial assistance. Portions of this book have appeared in a modi¢ed version under the following titles: `A Fadograph of Whome' in Partial Answers (2003); `Two Ps in a Pod: On Time in Finnegans Wake' in Journal of Modern Literature (2005); `Neologising in Finnegans Wake' in Poetics Today (2007). I thank the editors of these journals for permission to reprint the material. Finally, I wish to thank my family and friends for their support: my parents Abraham and Carmen who ¢rst taught me the value of a good book; Dani and Anat who welcomed me in their home; Aryeh and Aliza who provided a familial setting; and my brother Stephen and my wife Yael whose a¡ection made many things possible.

Chapter 1

Time's Nature

There is a certain super£uity in writing about time, particularly about a time that cannot be experienced, a time that, at its most characteristic, does not even lend itself to thought. It was Aristotle who famously voiced the suspicion that time `either does not exist at all or barely, and in an obscure way' (1941: ½218). Joyce adopted the claim and came to identify this obscurity with an element of time that, by its very de¢nition, is wholly resistant to ¢gural presentation: the past. The manner in which the obscurity of the past impinges on time's existential structure is a central concern in Finnegans Wake and a principal focus of this study. But precisely because it is in its nature to exceed all predicates, to frustrate every attempt at a stable de¢nition, our theme will have to be approached obliquely, always by way of an intermediary notion or a metonymically attributed trait. This, incidentally, is the Wake's own favoured procedure and its ¢rst valuable lesson on the subject in question. Time in the Wake does not come into view unmediated; it is a blind spot of abstract discourse and can only be thematized by way of a strategic association with something else . . . Joyce is on record as having once a¤rmed that Time is the real hero of his ¢nal masterpiece. `Time and the river and the mountain', to be precise ^ the three terms are singled out together, extrapolated from a vast assortment of largely undi¡erentiated material and given pride of place: `Time and the river and the mountain are the heroes of my book. Yet the elements are exactly what every novelist might use: man and woman, birth, childhood, night, sleep, marriage, prayer, death' (Ellmann 1982: 554). Before we proceed to test the validity of this statement against the evidence of the text it will be useful to re£ect on the unity of the triad it sets up ^ on the rationale that compels the author of an innovative and ambitious literary project to gather time, the river and the mountain in the same sentence. Notably we are dealing here with a logic of association on the one hand and, simultaneously, of contrast or disjunction on the other: time and the river . . . but also time rather than man, woman, birth and so forth (themes that are in no intuitive sense opposed to time, but that in this particular context are deemed to be commonplace by comparison ^ or, at the very least, available to every novelist in a manner that time is not). Within this conceptual scheme, the river and the mountain would seem to name not just any kind of spatial symbol or topographical feature in the work's ¢ctional universe. Even assuming they could stand for an abstract conception of space (a reading that would be consistent with the way in which all sorts of categorical opposites

2

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

are allegorically paired o¡ in the Wake), they denote a geographical setting that includes within it all the elements a novelist might use. And yet, as Joyce's logic suggests, they remain irreducible to these elements; which is to say that they exceed the space proper to traditional novelistic composition. Something altogether more primordial, more mythical than the novelistic universe, is invoked by the expression `the heroes of my book'. The river and the mountain are introduced on the book's opening page ^ as early, in fact, as the famous ¢rst word, `riverrun'. Jacques Aubert has unpacked the neologism to discover, among other things, an echo of Coleridge's KublaKhan: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man . . .(1997: 248) The allusion sets up a system of references which will come to frame the Wake's entire discourse on time. In addition to the obvious Heraclitean analogy ^ ¢guring time as a perpetual and irreversible £ow ^ the river Alph recirculates in ALP, a name borne by the mother-¢gure in the Wake's archetypal family, suggestive of the river Li¡ey and also, as Aubert notes, of a range of European mountains. Aubert's comment supports an interpretation of the Wake's topography as mythical or primordial space: Joyce has joined together the essential and the primordial: Alpha, ¢rst of all, then the Article, and Articulation, and ¢nally the Sacred; and in such a way that Coleridge's line can also no doubt initiate other series: the mountain (Alp) as source of every river, and nightmare (German Alp) . . . To put it brie£y, Joyce here includes, but in a tracing, all possible mythical dimensions: he leaves us with the echo of the mythical and not the Mythical itself. (1984: 76) From the start, then, the question of time in Finnegans Wake is linked to an idea of primordial origins. The association of time with a mythical dimension of which only a tracing remains organizes every aspect of the book's competing temporalities. This is not to say that all con¢gurations of time, all possible histories narrated in the Wake can be retrieved, summed up and synthesized in a single originary instant. Quite the opposite; as the hero of Finnegans Wake time traces the e¡ects of an `immarginable' (FW 4) evolutionary force. It will be shown that Joyce's obsession with lost origins is what commits the work's encyclopaedic memory to a movement of time without measure ^ in other words, to a time that cannot be de¢ned, still less summed up, while it remains in the process of being invented. Time's unrelenting work at the limits of recorded history triggers the text's desire to narrate and to invent ^ that is, to collect disparate narratives and explore the unimaginable past that is the source of narration itself. The numerous structural and stylistic di¤culties that readers of the Wake have encountered can be ascribed to this overwhelming concern with the measureless and the unimaginable. More than a mere nostalgia for lost origins, this

Time's Nature

3

concern coincides with an attempt to address time's paradoxical nature, to engage, as rigorously as the theme will ever allow, with time's de¢ning properties. It is a scienti¢c endeavour through and through: but one that takes as the object of its enquiry the very article science is structurally unable to bring into focus. Joyce draws on the work of several thinkers, combining philosophical positions that are normally considered to be incompatible, often adopting only the speci¢c insights that serve his project best. In the course of my analysis I will refer strategically to two of these thinkers, Vico and Bergson, whose in£uence on the Wake has already been documented. I will consider Vico's assumption that truth and ¢ction are co-implied ^ that truth is never more certain than when it is pursued through the activity of fabrication. I will also rely on Bergson's description of time as an unquanti¢able multiplicity, and on his distinction between duration and chronology culminating in the famous remark that physics can make nothing of the true nature of time which, properly examined, amounts to invention or to nothing at all.1 Ultimately my reading will show that by appropriating both these positions and insisting on the horizon of a past beyond human measure, Joyce ¢gures an account of time's constitutive paradoxes that is as ancient as it is new. Indeed these paradoxes have accompanied the history of philosophy ever since they were ¢rst codi¢ed by Aristotle in Book IV of the Physics. Essentially, the problem of understanding time, of comprehending its nature and knowing what its authentic experience amounts to, continues to be guided by Aristotle's question: `does [time] belong to the class of things that exist or to that of things that do not exist?' (1941: ½218). The riddle is inspired by a ¢rst simple observation: time is an in¢nitely divisible entity entirely comprised of parts that are not. This much, according to Aristotle, is in evidence: the future shall be but is not yet, whereas the past has been but is no more. Given this premise one may be tempted to conclude that it is only in the `now' () that time could be said to exist; yet, as Aristotle is quick to point out, the status of the `now' as a constituent part of present time is itself open to question. Time is not simply analysable as a concatenation of perpetually present moments. To begin with, it ought to be clear that in every now binding past and future there is one speci¢c instant di¡erent each time to every other (if the instant were not di¡erent each time, there could be no distinction between past and present, no experience of prior and posterior events; all of time would have to occur simultaneously). On the other hand, if every now were a totally singular and self-su¤cient unit, di¡erent from any other, what we call time would fail to describe anything like a continuous succession. The idea of a continuous succession requires the now to cease to be at some point; but, as Aristotle recognizes, this point could neither be the now itself (since that would mean that a moment in time exists at the same time as it does not exist) nor a later now (since that would require the now that is and the now that has ceased to be to coincide). Aristotle admits he is unable to pursue this line of argument further. The logical impasse at which he has arrived must su¤ce to illustrate the di¤culties with which every serious philosophy of time henceforth will have to engage. Already

4

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

at this early stage of the discussion, then, he decides to address a di¡erent question. It is this question that will establish, implicitly yet ever so securely, the authority enjoyed by the present in the protocols of philosophical and scienti¢c thought: what, Aristotle asks, is the nature of time? The form basic to every scienti¢c enquiry ^ `what is . . . ?' ^ predisposes the scientist (or the philosopher: there is at this stage no reason to distinguish between the two) to an investigation of those truths and only those truths already situated within the scope of the verb `to be' conjugated in the present. The hold of this verb (in this tense) on the entire tradition of Western philosophy is absolute and unavoidable. As Derrida remarks, paraphrasing Heidegger's account of the theme and its history, `[f ]rom Parmenides to Husserl, the privilege of the present has never been put into question. It could never have been. It is what is self-evident itself, and no thought seems possible outside its element' (1982: 34).2 With this premise in mind Derrida has re-read Aristotle's aporetic de¢nition of the now in order to expose a structural discrepancy, a gap in the very element that ought to have established, originally, time's selfevident participation in the category of things that exist: [T]ime is de¢ned according to its relation to an elementary part, the now, which itself is a¡ected ^ as if it were not already temporal ^ by a time which negates it in determining it as a past now or a future now. The nun, the element of time, in this sense is not itself temporal. It is temporal only in becoming temporal, that is, in ceasing to be, in passing over to no-thingness in the form of being-past or being-future. Even if it is envisaged as (past or future) nonbeing, the now is determined as the intemporal kernel of time, the nonmodi¢able nucleus of temporal modi¢cation, the inalterable form of temporalization. Time is what overtakes this nucleus, in a¡ecting it with nothing. But in order to be, in order to be a being, it must not be a¡ected by time . . . (ibid.: 34) Implied in this analysis is something akin to an uncanny doubling of time. It is clear that were it not for such a doubling which a¡ects time's elemental unit, there could be no division of the now into past and future. Derrida, here, resumes and expands a crucial Heideggerian insight: that all philosophical de¢nitions of time, in so far as they repeat, more or less explicitly, the argument of the Physics, have to rely on a temporal horizon that is always more original, more primordial, than the time they attempt to de¢ne.3 Having registered the logical impossibility that the now expires either in itself or in another now, Aristotle cannot quite return to the initial object of his investigation. After reviewing a number of received de¢nitions of time which he judges to be inadequate he proceeds to examine the idea that, though not the same as motion, time cannot be said to exist independently of motion. Motion is what marks time. It is what alerts us to the existence of a before and an after. Aristotle compares the two concepts in some detail and, having ascertained that the one is always measured in terms of the other, ¢nally settles on the following

Time's Nature

5

formula: `time is just this ^ number of motion in respect of ``before'' and ``after'' ' (1941: ½219b). In other words, time is the counting of a movement perceived in the context of a temporal succession. What is this context if not a primordial temporality, already more ancient than any present? Joyce's concern with the nature of time follows a di¡erent intellectual route, but a fairly similar logic. Joyce may have learnt from Vico that the study of nature is, in the last analysis, a science of beginnings. As Max Fisch has pointed out, throughout The New Science Vico exploits the etymological interconnection of several words, and among the most signi¢cant for the conduct of his argument are the etymons gens and natio, from which are derived the notions of generation, genesis and gentility on the one hand, and those of nation, nature and native identity on the other. In Fisch's words: `a ``nation'' is etymologically a ``birth'', or a ``being born'', and hence a race, a kin or kind having a common origin or, more loosely, a common language and other institutions. . . . The etymology of gens is the same as that of nation' (1968: xx^xxi). John Bishop brings the same cluster of ideas into play when he observes that `[i]n Vico's ``gentile history'', man creates over generations his own human nature ^ and exactly as he also creates human nations. Since human nature and nations evolve interdependently with language, Vico conveys their commutual coming-to-be, their nascimento, by weaving through The New Science an assemblage of words coming from the same root *gen- (``to come to be'') ^ whose meaning is also its evolution' (Bishop 1986: 184^5). In the light of the foregoing remarks a ¢rst working hypothesis suggests itself: to know the nature of time in Finnegans Wake is to imagine, after Vico's example, the unimaginable conditions of time's birth. The task is nothing short of heroic. It is necessary to go back to a stage before the beginning, to reconstruct the principles (another etymologically related term) by which time, as a phenomenon, was originally conceived. Assuming this to be the object of Joyce's new science, and the motive of its fascination with primordiality and myth, the reader must take stock of an inherently unscienti¢c passage essential to the entire operation. The technique employed by Joyce to carry his project through entails, as the book itself would put it, the `abnihilisation of the etym' (FW 353). It will be useful to rehearse some of the glosses to which this phrase, among the most memorable in Joyce's novel, has lent itself. The most pointed reading is developed by William York Tindall, who draws attention to the double meaning encoded in `abnihilisation'. The word suggests destruction and creation at the same time. It con£ates these two senses and ascribes them to a single gesture, at once inaugural and terminal. `Etym', in turn, refers to the origin of words; and by homonymic association to the smallest indivisible component of the material universe. Tindall provides the following paraphrase: `Atomic ¢ssion . . . joins the destruction of the word (etym) that creates ab nihil ' (1969: 200). Enlarging on this comment, Fritz Senn (1986) notes that `the word ``atom'' belongs to science as the smallest known quantity, the furthest one could go cutting up, or dividing, matter'. This was its meaning originally, preserved by the etymologist, till time and scienti¢c progress intervened to overturn the truth. By the time Joyce came to write

6

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

Finnegans Wake, `[t]he atom had become precisely what it said it was not by etymological de¢nition: a-tomos, indivisible. It now, after Rutherford, Bohr, Einstein, means its own intrinsic opposite; ever after it ought to be called ``tom'' but it isn't' (Senn 1986: 163). To sum up: Joyce's account of the nature of time combines a theological cliche¨ ^ the divine impulse by which an idea is ¢rst articulated ^ with the rhetoric of modern subatomic physics. In a split atom of abnihilized time the end of matter coincides with creation; creation doubles as the very last act. By the principles of this adjourned physics the two extremities of the Aristotelian `now' ^ the primordial `before and after' ^ appear to be simultaneous. They are in fact more than simultaneous. They come of nothing and return to nothing. In the forthcoming paragraphs we shall be well advised to reconsider this simultaneity, to approach it with some degree of suspicion; for, until it is re-programmed, the very idea of simultaneity cannot help reinstituting the metaphysical authority accorded to the present. Once the idea has been re-programmed, more than simultaneous will refer, for want of a better expression, to two terms that are coextensive, co-implied but not synchronized with the now. A simple consideration backs up the claim: `before' and `after' cannot be conceived one without the other. They share an obvious origin and a common term that are incommensurate with the origin and the term of the present. In the narratives born of this excess, of this `more than', Joyce undertakes to uncover something of the nature of time ^ perhaps a time that generates time as it obliterates all evidence of its formal unity.

Time of the Novel or Time of the Immarginable The discrepancy between a generative time more ancient than any present, and a generated time con¢gured in the `now' is at the heart of the Wake's peculiar temporal organization. In the obscurity of its style and in its principles of composition the book re£ects precisely the impossibility of reconciling two heterogeneous meanings of the word time. As we will see, such impossibility is not merely the marker of a logical or a semantic divide between two interpretations of time: the gap that separates two temporal orders is itself temporal in nature. There ought to be no confusion on this point: time as such is what divides; if it is anything at all, it is discrepancy. From the very start the Wake's narrative project appears to be founded on a structural contradiction. Beckett famously identi¢es the co-existence of cyclical and evolutionary motifs in the book with a quadripartite pattern that surfaces at regular intervals throughout Joyce's text expressing the inevitable character of the ideal sequence of events which make up human history. The view is sanctioned by Campbell and Robinson, and later by such in£uential commentators as Tindall and Clive Hart, who provides the following summary: It is by now thoroughly well known that in Finnegans Wake Joyce made use of the cyclic theories of history set out in Giambattista Vico's La Scienza Nuova.

Time's Nature

7

. . . Vico saw the history of the Gentiles as proceeding painfully onward, and to some extent upward, in broad spirals of social and cultural development. Each complete historical cycle consisted of an uninterrupted succession of three great `Ages' ^ the Divine, the Heroic and the Human ^ followed by a very brief fourth Age which brought that cycle to an end and ushered in the next. (Hart 1962: 46^7) Margot Norris is the ¢rst to take issue with the consensus this reading represents, objecting to what seems to be a slavish application of Viconian paradigms to the structure of Joyce's narrative. While Joyce's interest in Vico's fourfold history is undeniable, the logic that compels the Wakean cycles is di¡erent, or so Norris contends, from the one that characterizes Vico's ideal eternal history. For Vico, eternal recurrence and evolution are indeed commutual; `events, though repeated at the end of the cycle, unfold in a logical and necessary sequence' (Norris 1976: 24). In Joyce's book, by contrast, what repeats does not punctuate progress. The periodic re-emergence of a given motif or the reworking of a particular event will function independently of that sense of historical inevitability, of rational consequence, that is the mark of wellconstructed plots: This type of repetition does not appear to be merely predetermined like Vico's events, which repeat themselves because the logical progression of evolutionary change brings each cycle to a close in precisely the same condition as it began. Rather the repetition in Finnegans Wake appears to be compulsive, that is, produced by irrational rather than logical necessity, and therefore actively induced ^ the result of human impulse rather than time. (ibid.: 25^6) Two of Norris's claims concern me here. They provide the coordinates by which to re¢ne the distinction I am trying to put forward between a time of the book (generative, mythical, immarginable) and a time of the novel.4 First is the suggestion that the Wakean investment in circular structures implies not a recursive process but a repetition of identical moments that could well come to pass simultaneously. In this reading the circle is nothing but a negation of history's teleological drive. Time itself appears to have been immobilized, emptied of content, as its commitment to the principles of subsequence and irreversibility is replaced by a totalizing synchrony. The view of the Wake as a synchronized universe is not incompatible with the ¢gure of an abnihilized etym ^ that is, of a unit of time created from nothing and instantaneously destroyed. It does, however, overlook the speci¢cally creative-and-destructive operations that Joyce's expression foregrounds.5 In this respect Norris's reference to the Wake's compulsive repetitiveness is instructive. Both in its psychoanalytic and in its narratological determinations compulsive repetition implies a paralysis of sorts: a staying of time that precludes creation and destruction as it pre-empts change. More problematic than the interpretation of the Wake as an unchanging universe is Norris's attempt to di¡erentiate between a human impulse, which

8

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

she regards as irrational, and time itself, which she situates, by contrast, on the side of reason. Disregarding, at least for now, the merits of a description of Viconian history as `predetermined', it will be useful to re£ect on the implied conceptual intersection between time, human activity and reason. The convergence of these three terms is pivotal to my argument; but the link needs to be re-thought. How could a time divorced from human impulses be classi¢ed as rational? And what, indeed, might such a time be? The word `human' carries particular weight both in Joyce's vocabulary and in Vico's. The New Science singles out the human as a being who holds a privileged relationship with history. In order to explain the terms of this privilege Vico employs, though in a highly idiosyncratic fashion, concepts that belong to the ¢elds of philology, rhetoric, jurisprudence and theology. The human dimension is fully delimited by the knowledge pursued and preserved in these disciplines, of which every Viconian etymology, even the most eccentric, is an e¤cient synthesis. For Vico the historical reconstruction of words is at heart an anthropological endeavour, a search for human origins, with the humanly unknowable as its compass. To this e¡ect the author of The New Science links the coinage of the Latin word `Ius' ^ from which justice and jurisprudence are derived ^ with the history of god's divine name as contemplated by the ancient Romans. Jove, ruler of the earth and of the sky, speaks to all men with terrifying and incomprehensible signs. This, Vico insists, should be: our point of departure in the discussion of law, which was originally divine, in the proper sense expressed by divination, the science of Jove's auspices, which were the divine institutions by which the nations regulated all human institutions. These two classes of institutions taken together make up the adequate subject matter of jurisprudence. Thus our treatment of natural law begins with the idea of divine providence, in the same birth with which was born the idea of law. (NS ½398) Finnegans Wake adopts Vico's understanding of the human as a historical being ^ that is to say, as one who aspires to know himself by producing his own history. Only, here, the anthropological framework is abandoned as the very concept of human nature is tossed in a vortex of competing contexts. While the plot illustrates `a theory none too rectiline of the evoluation of human society' (FW 73), the word `human' is pulled apart and reassembled so that it comes to resonate now with humour, then with humming, then again with the fun of funerary jigs, with inhumation and exhumation (FW 77), and ¢nally with the memory of a word the text `can't whumember' (FW 493). This elaborate strategy of denying the concept any stable purchase is what motivates the shift from a scienti¢cally conducted etymology to a peculiarly Wakean `adamelegy' (FW 77). Etymology is transformed, here, into a literary genre, a narrative model closely related to the form of the novel but not to be confused with it. Even though it co-exists with the novel, and is by no means an object apart, it responds to di¡erent assumptions and requires of the reader a di¡erent set

Time's Nature

9

of interpretive skills. What distinguishes the adamelegiac mode is, ¢rst of all, the position from which its stories are launched and organized. Adamelegy, as the word itself implies, presupposes the demise of man. The mourning of mankind is the genre's de¢ning topic and the end of human history its historical precondition. The suggestion that the Wake's concern with the study of human nature supersedes the scope and method of anthropological research is a corollary of this idea. As we follow it through we begin to account for the hypothesis that the time con¢gured in the Wake's narrative is not only in excess of novelistic paradigms, but also in excess of received standards of human communication. In Margot Norris's account of the Wake's compulsive repetitiveness, narrative structure is already construed as something alien to novelistic form. Norris contrasts the conventions of the novel with a structural paradigm peculiar to dream sequences in order to illustrate the inadequacy of the former for an analysis of Joyce's masterpiece. To read the Wake as a novel, she argues, is to have false expectations about the manner in which the plot is constructed and the characters interact. `Only by abandoning the novelistic approach . . . can readers free themselves from waking conventions and logic enough to enjoy the wholly imaginative reality of a dream-work' (1976: 22). Naturally such a paradigmatic shift entails a distinctive temporality ^ one in which cause and e¡ect are void; in which the single moment is unindividuated and sequence is as uncertain as it is immaterial. This last claim borrows its main terms of reference from Ian Watt who famously identi¢es the rise of the novel with a new manner of construing and representing time in narrative. Watt cites two principles that are germane to novelistic narration: ¢rst, an increased awareness of the particularity of narrated events, and consequent upon this, an appreciation of the individuality of characters who act these events out; second, a heightened sensitivity to the logical and causal connections governing sequentially ordered moments. Note that, in both cases, any possible signi¢cance attributed to the unfolding of time is subordinated to a representation of human thoughts and actions. The novelistic plot, Watt explains, `is . . . distinguished by its use of past experience as the cause of present action: a causal connection operating through time replaces the reliance of earlier narratives on disguises and coincidences, and this tends to give the novel a much more cohesive structure' (1968: 23). Extrapolating from the evidence laid out in Watt's study, it might be argued that dream-narrative can be distinguished from novelistic structure on the grounds that it transgresses the principles of individualized action and of logical cause. I have no quarrel with this conclusion, but I should like to make it clear that when I speak of an immarginable time I intend an altogether di¡erent generic distinction than the one contemplated here. Though both are de¢ned in contraposition to the form of the novel, the oneiric and the adamelegiac amount to two wholly di¡erent narrative dimensions; and a precise understanding of this difference is of the essence if one is to grasp the singularity of Joyce's work. Admittedly, to read the Wake as a dream-narrative is not to misjudge the text. Much of the imagery warrants precisely such a treatment and the Wake emerges from the exercise as a more comprehensible literary artefact. The moment a

10

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

dreamer is posited as the source of the story the nature of the narrated experience becomes less mysterious and the manner in which it is narrated less singular. At this point, however, there is nothing to keep us from reading the Wake as a novel that imitates, in the most rigorous fashion, the inner workings of a dream. The book is thus recuperated to the most normative paradigm of mimetic literature. Indeed, as Charles Altieri has observed: [s]o long as we view the work as fundamentally a dream we remain subordinated to the quest for an explanatory typology; we keep the authorial subject in the text distinct from any object which the text can be said to engage; and we leave the writing subordinate in principle to the authority of a Freud or a Jung. All of these moves minimize the power of the letter to compose its own imaginative reality, and more important, greatly simplify our relation to the history that humans make. (1988: 243) In the last analysis, what we refer to as the temporality of dreams is still, unmistakably, a category pertaining to the order of human experience. It di¡ers from our common experience of time-by-day only as a distorted or complicated ¢gure di¡ers from its more straightforward and familiar version. To put it more simply, reported dream-sequences, like novelistic plots, are narrative representations of a given human history; the fact that the action de¢es commonsensical models of cause and e¡ect, or that the story-line is illogical, does not change the basic structural interrelation between the unfolding of time and the vicissitudes of the human subject. By contrast, the abnihilization of the etym is a textual event that is neither mimetic nor, strictly speaking, diegetic. The order of time which it brings to attention is not a series of narrated moments; nor is it a history shaped by human action. This is why it makes no sense to call it sequential or simultaneous, to plot it as a circle or as a line. Its only record is the work's resistance to interpretation. And while it does produce a narrative paradigm in the decomposition and recombination of words or in the slippage encoded within the folds of every etymological subdivision, it remains intractable to even the most sophisticated of narratological tools. To be sure, in tracing the displacement of this or that etymological root the Wake exhibits a distinct mythopoeic vocation. As Andrea Battistini has shown, Joyce appropriates Vico's insight that etymology is in fact a form of mythmaking. In contrast to the practice of the grammarians who refer to the history of a particular idea only as a means of illustrating and ultimately justifying its current sense, Vico and Joyce both tend to distance themselves as much as possible from words as they occur in modern usage. Vico's technique is to tease out the human potential for linguistic invention and metaphorical rede¢nition concealed in the history of any given vocable. The systematic recovery of lost meanings carried out in The New Science serves primarily to revitalize the power that words once possessed to express immediate sensations. But the process also yields an additional bene¢t. In the very act of bringing past meanings to light the

Time's Nature

11

Viconian philologist is compelled to create fables that account for (and negotiate between) all the accumulated semantic variations. As Battistini explains: It is this potentially narrative aspect [of Vico's etymologies] that must have impressed Joyce, who could discern, in the work of lexical reconstruction, a novelistic process concentrated in the semantic curve of a single word. If, as has been suggested, the aspiration that led to the composition of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake was that of ¢nding a universe in a grain of sand, what could be better suited to this project than a baroque etymology which, by condensing a digressive and encyclopaedic narrative, overcomes the confusion of Babel? (1986: 139) The etym's collective/dispersive power sums up, in the briefest of textual segments, an entire history in the making. Battistini's reference to a `novelistic process concentrated in the semantic curve of a single word' would suggest that it is possible to plot this history according to the classic narratological distinction between a time of narration and a narrated time. We ¢nd this insight discon¢rmed in the syntagmatic chain that records, across so many pages of Joycean text, the slippage between, say, such vocables as `etym', `time' (of which etym is an imperfect anagram), `atom', `adam', `adomic', `item', `intimologists', and so forth. Admittedly, something like a history of ideas ^ a movement of thought in time ^ comes to be represented by the selection and the stringing together of these words. If we accept Paul Ricoeur's understanding of narrative as a humanization of time we should have no di¤culty acknowledging the synthesis of `etym' and its etymologically related terms as an instance of narrative production. There is, however, no proper narrating activity here, nothing like a focal point from which to organize the sequence and launch the story. Nor is there any use for a ¢ctional clock to mark the time in which the action unfolds. Beyond the very basic narrative dynamic exempli¢ed in the series is an impersonal movement of time to which even the seriality of the series is subjected. At the end of the day, what matters in the Wake's etymological narratives is not the content of a given interval, nor the order in which a series of interconnected events is organized (in both these cases the reader's perception of time depends, invariably, on a representation of human action or on the evidence of physical change); rather, it is the manner in which time itself, as a primordial force, comes to bear on its own image, triggering the intention to represent while exceeding the act of representation. To think of time as a primordial force, then, is to re£ect on a temporal mechanics that is independent of human action or human understanding. Such a premise narrows the focus of my enquiry decisively, and begins to account for the methodological choices that orient my reading of Joyce's text. As a phenomenon that is `measureless to man', the time Joyce characterizes as the hero of his book inscribes itself immarginably beyond the limits of phenomenology, of anthropology and of the scienti¢c study of narrative. It calls upon a discourse of excess, upon a science that is able to interrogate its limits and thus to

12

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

think through what in Deleuzian terms would be described as the thought of a radical outside. Deleuze borrows this notion from Blanchot who speaks of an exteriority that is `always exterior to itself ' (Blanchot 1993: 161). Such exteriority is nothing if not an attribute of time's di¡erential nature. It operates at once creatively and destructively, marking an `originary disjunction' from which no unity or sameness can proceed. Deleuze describes a process of pure becoming that resists being contained within the system of oppositional categories (subject/object; self/other; male/female; organic/mechanic) governing dialectical thought. Such resistance is as uncompromising as it is open-ended. It requires thought to overtake itself to the point of realizing its own self-exclusion. To this e¡ect, Deleuze and Guattari write that: [t]o place thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with the forces of the outside . . . is a strange undertaking whose precise procedures can be studied in Nietzsche (the aphorism, for example, is very di¡erent from the maxim, for a maxim, in the republic of letters, is like an organic State act or sovereign judgement, whereas an aphorism always awaits its meaning from a new external force . . .). (1987: 376^7) Thought, they go on to explain, `is already a tribe, the opposite of a State. And this form of exteriority of thought is not at all symmetrical to the form of interiority. Strictly speaking, symmetry exists only between di¡erent poles or focal points of interiority. But the form of exteriority of thought ^ the force that is always external to itself, or the ¢nal force, the nth power ^ is not at all another image in opposition to the image inspired by the state apparatus' (ibid.: 377). To put it in the simplest possible terms, the exteriority of the Deleuzian outside is not to be construed as the negative of some indivisible element of reason. In its in¢nite openness it does not contradict a rational thesis; nor is it an exception to a philosophical argument. Rather, it entails `on the one hand, the presence of an unthinkable in thought, which would be both its source and barrier; [and] on the other hand, the presence to in¢nity of another thinker in the thinker, who shatters every monologue of a thinking self ' (TI 168). The presence to in¢nity of another in the same emancipates time from internal consciousness when it exposes dialectics to the chance of a non-synthesizable di¡erence. To claim that time does not come into view unmediated, or that its nature cannot be comprehended as such, is, in the last analysis, to recognize the e¡ect of the `originary disjunction' in which thought is at once created and destroyed ^ in which identity is both preserved and interrupted. As we have seen, Finnegans Wake addresses the full narratological consequences of this paradox. It returns to the question of time's nature ^ which is also to say, of time's origin and self-generation ^ by way of a compositional technique that pushes past all conventions of emplotment and narrative intelligibility. In so doing, it unsettles the commonsensical view of narrative as necessary outcome, or even simply as correlate, of an act of narration. The di¤culty of Joyce's style elaborates the thought of a time unmoored from thought, of a principle of

Time's Nature

13

pure becoming in excess of the history of being. Within the book's complex temporal economy, the Deleuzian dislocation of time from consciousness is re-inscribed, avant la lettre, as an enigma that motivates the entire narrativeetymological project. Two complementary ¢gures illustrate the workings of this project. Though they are little more than handy paratextual props they do provide my argument with something like a reliable signature key: ¢rst among these, I should like to consider the Wake's treatment of the myth of Penelope around which Joyce gathers a series of classical topoi concerning textual production and artistic selfpreservation; subsequently, I shall examine the theme of divine providence, which organizes the book's discourses on history, reason and truth, allowing them to be contemplated in relation to each other, but also in relation to everything that constitutes their outside. The story of Penelope belongs, as is well known, to the intertextual fabric of Ulysses. Within the Wake's system of references it is a relatively marginal item surfacing scarcely three times throughout the text. Yet its signi¢cance in the structuration of Joyce's last work is pervasive.6 I employ the concept of structuration, here, after Roland Barthes's example, to designate an activity of textual production in constant progress. Unlike the term structure, which cannot help referring to a ¢nished product, the concept of structuration emphasizes the mobility and the in¢nitely displaceable character of all signifying systems. It insists on the provisional status of all structures. Barthes famously associates structuration with an analytic strategy that frays the literary text in order to disentangle the multiple threads of which it is woven: `the frayed nature of the codes' by which these threads come to be sorted out `does not contradict structure . . . but on the contrary (this is the fundamental a¤rmation of textual analysis) is an integral part of structuration' (1981: 157). In light of Barthes's textile metaphor it is easy to understand why the ¢gure of Penelope must be regarded, at least for the purpose of this study, as more than just a favourite Joycean theme. It is an allegory of the process of structuration itself, an adamelegiac narrative by which the Wake dramatizes its own status as a textual artefact made in time, out of time.

Penelope The myth tells, famously, of an endangered woman who undertakes to produce texts as a means of buying time. But Penelope also undoes the texts she produces, and buys time by wasting it. In the Wake the two projects are not only shown to be interconnected; they are contemplated as a single gesture, as one and the same operation. Joyce's deployment of the Penelopean motif lends its authority to the hypothesis that waste ^ together with its correlate, excess ^ links the nature of time and the production of texts indissolubly. Time is approached by Joyce's readers through the mediation of an excessive semiosis; and text is understood as an impermanent, progressive, in¢nitely renewable

14

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

structure ^ the product of an ancient mnemic device that a¤rms both sameness and di¡erence, making the iteration of a truth, as well as its temporal disarticulation, possible. An exchange between Joyce and his patroness, Harriet Shaw Weaver, helps to spell out the full implications of this theme. Responding to a draft of the ¢nal chapter of Ulysses, Miss Weaver refers to the character of Molly as `prehuman'; Joyce agrees, but adds one important clari¢cation: Dear Miss Weaver: Many thanks for your kind telegram. . . . Thanks also for the prompt return of the Penelope episode (the name of which by another strange coincidence is your own). It did not arrive too late. Your description of it also coincides with my intention ^ if the epithet `posthuman' were added. I have rejected the usual interpretation of her as a human apparition ^ that aspect being better represented by Calypso, Nausikaa and Circe, to say nothing of the pseudo Homeric ¢gures. In conception and technique I tried to depict the earth which is prehuman and presumably posthuman. (1957: 180) Joyce's intention, though plainly stated in this case, remains somewhat di¤cult to interpret. How does Penelope avoid being construed as a human apparition? And what is it about this character that warrants an association with the earth? One plausible paraphrase is that as the allegory of a prehuman-and-posthuman force Penelope's story dramatizes not some principle of human creativity, not even an evolutionary pattern that students of history might wish to trace, but, rather, a planetary motion in which the very fabric of time is produced, woven and unwoven as it were, to in¢nity. In the forthcoming paragraphs I should like to test the hypothesis that it is possible to read the Wake's discourse on time as a full extension of this idea. Well before the last chapter of Ulysses one is able to discern a shift in Joyce's technique and compositional grammar, a shift that testi¢es to the author's fascination with the immarginable and marks his decision to confront, with an unprecedented rigour, all that will not be reduced to the order of human apparitions. As Jean-Michel Rabate¨ has suggested, Joyce designates Penelope as `not human' in order to inscribe a ¢gure of radical indi¡erence at the heart of his book. Such indi¡erence is, to be sure, impenetrable, but also supremely generative. It determines the production of di¡ering discourses in Ulysses; and, although it is an attribute of the book's main female character, it is in fact `closer to utter madness than to normal female psychology' (Rabate¨ 1991b: 52). Finnegans Wake resumes the project of emptying Penelope of all psychological content right at the point where Ulysses leaves o¡. Stripped of all human motives the Wake's Penelope is but a cipher. The generative power to which it lends its name ^ this mythical movement that can never be reduced to human action ^ situates the origin of time, of text, of di¡erence itself in the `whome of [our] eternal geomater' (FW 296^7). Comparing ALP to the Platonic khora, Tony Thwaites makes an extremely pertinent observation: `the mother of the book,' he writes,

Time's Nature

15

is not simply a source, a principle of continuity, or a primal unity. As plurability, she is a disjunction at the heart of things, and is the rhythm with which these disjunctions are incessantly articulated against each other and dissolved. She does not exist as being so much as insist as a proliferation before or behind being . . .' (2001: 160^1) The womb of mother earth, starkly depicted in Chapter X of the Wake, is thus a ¢gure of time's non-phenomenal beginnings. Joyce's allegory posits a correlation, an identity if you will, between the earth's creative energies and the act of weaving and unweaving for which Penelope herself has come to stand. The point deserves full critical attention, and will be dealt with more comprehensively in due course. At this early stage of my argument it must su¤ce to run through the basic outline ^ the essential passages, as it were ^ of the narrative that takes shape around Penelope's name. Penelope is Gaia Mater: the matrix that does not appear in itself, but that allows all worldly phenomena to be (re)produced in time as well as in space. Penelope is also the agent of an impossible economy in which buying time and wasting time are accomplished as a single gesture. It is a metonymic ¢gure for that primordial movement of weaving and unweaving that describes the common nature of time and text. It is one name in place of another, the site of a linguistic coincidence that traverses alphabets, cultures and histories, without relying on the teleological programme of concepts. Finally, as one who sponsors Joyce's `Work in Progress', who pays for it and promotes it, Penelope stands for a kind of modern secular Muse, an ideal reader or privileged addressee, already inscribed within the process of structuration. Each one of these narrative threads describes an aspect of the text that plays itself out in excess of the phenomenal world. The expression `in excess of . . .' includes, here, the connotation of a time more primordial than human time. Yet primordiality alone ^ understood as the distinctive property of what is historically more ancient or closer to the origin of an idea ^ fails to de¢ne the issue. Joyce's insistence that the prehuman and the posthuman be designated by the same ¢gure is, from this perspective, right on the mark. The prehuman does not refer to some earlier phase in a chronological continuum. One ought to think of it, rather, in terms of a receding horizon of thought ^ a barrier and a source, to recycle Deleuze's metaphors ^ which makes passing and perduring possible independently of human action or human understanding. In this context `prehuman' and `posthuman' are to be construed as complementary terms: the one implies and is in turn implied by the event of the other. More importantly, they are to be thought of as coextensive categories, the sequential order encoded in their respective pre¢xes notwithstanding. Once again it becomes necessary at this juncture to come to grips with a principle of contemporaneity that does not synchronize its terms in a self-identical now. The paradox calls for a suspension of epistemological givens. The investigative procedure by which the coextensiveness of prehumanity and posthumanity can be e¡ectively thought through inaugurates a certain relation to the past, a certain mode

16

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

of remembering whereby the past itself, the very truth of origins, is put at risk. Derrida speaks, to this e¡ect, of a memory oriented towards the future, a memory `turned towards the promise, towards what is coming, what is arriving, what is happening tomorrow' (1995: 383). In this particular context, the future signals the attraction of an absolute risk. It is a prospect that is incommensurate with calculation ^ always a gamble rather than an investment. The posthuman is such a future. It is not an outcome of human history; nor is it a sequel to some grand anthropological narrative. It is, rather, an opening in the fabric of time ^ time's inherent possibility produced in the unweaving of its image. Likewise, the prehuman does not refer to a bygone historical era, or to some early chapter in humanity's Bildungsroman. It designates the past as absolute force ^ a constant force of attrition that coincides with the possibility of time's passage. The association of Penelope with the ¢gure of mother earth may be seen, here, to repeat the principle of simultaneous creation-and-destruction set in motion in Joyce's etymological project. It also a¤rms a fairly selfevident truth of evolutionary discourse: the idea that the begetting of time (and thus its nature) and the passing of time (its projected end) are in fact one and the same event. Though well foregrounded throughout the text of Finnegans Wake, passing remains an under-analysed aspect of the book's temporal structure. The general consensus among readers of Joyce's work is that the narrative unfolds in a kind of instantaneous universe, a fullness of time that voids sequence and gathers the entire compass of past and future history within the frame of a totalizing `now'. The examples to be cited in support of this view are legion, but I will limit myself to three quotes from readers whose interpretations of the Wake are as authoritative as they are varied. Clive Hart: `All the complex time-schemes of Finnegans Wake are ultimately resolved in a mystical ``Eternal Now''. The Eternal Now, the nunc stans, is a very old idea involving the mysterious simultaneity, in the eyes of the Absolute, of all that in ordinary experience is called past, present and future' (1962: 75); Umberto Eco: `If history is a continuous alternation of cycles and recurrences, then it does not have the characteristic of irreversibility that we are accustomed to confer upon it today. Rather, each event is simultaneous; past, present and future coincide' (1989: 65); Richard Ellmann: `In all his books up to Finnegans Wake Joyce sought to reveal the coincidence of the present with the past. Only in Finnegans Wake was he to carry this conviction to its furthest reaches by implying that there is no present and no past, that there are no dates, that time . . . is a series of coincidences which are general all over humanity' (1982: 551). Each one of these accounts either relegates passing to the status of an incidental occurrence in time, or disregards its importance in the Wake's structural organization altogether. My reading, by contrast, will focus on passing as an integral feature of the Wake's temporal economies. Time will be examined, in this book, not as an abstract representation of movement, nor as the sequential order in which states of self-consciousness play themselves out, but as an in¢nite process of self-generation/self-e¡acement, a measureless force of structuration regulated by the pull of an irredeemable past.

Time's Nature

17

This, precisely, is the challenge posed by the singularity of Joyce's Penelopean technique: to think the phenomenon of passing other than abstractly ^ in other words, to articulate the disparity between time and the instant of its ¢gural reproduction without recourse to scienti¢c or phenomenological parameters.

Providence I: The Machinery of Narrative Production The idea of an instantaneous universe collected in an in¢nitely expanded present continues to make for a strong reading of the Wake's overall temporal structure. For one thing, it re£ects accurately enough the experience of pursuing a narrative design that appears to have no end-gaining drive. Furthermore, it tallies with the customary view of Finnegans Wake as a representation of dream-work. For a long period in the Wake's critical history it seemed that there was little left to say about Wakean time beyond testing various philosophical models that con¢rmed the atemporal paradigm established by Hart, Eco and others. In 1992, however, a workshop organized by the `Zurich James Joyce Foundation' o¡ered the occasion for a ¢rst signi¢cant departure from that paradigm, and two years later a collection of essays inspired by the workshop appeared under the title Teems of Times, covering a wide range of theoretical angles and aiming to provide localized readings of diverse treatments of time in the Wake.7 More recently Tony Thwaites has contributed to a revival of the discussion, devoting a chapter of his book, Joycean Temporalities, to an analysis of Finnegans Wake centred on a discourse on invocation and `plurability' (2001: 154). The work is informed, throughout, by post-structuralist insights on language and subjectivity. Taking his cue from Derrida's re£ections on the signature and the promise, Thwaites identi¢es, in the promissory structure of Joyce's writing, a movement of history and of sense always oriented by the unforeseeable. I am especially indebted to Thwaites's idea that the Wake places a certain `inability to read right at the heart of the very possibility of reading, not somewhere outside it as an accident ideally to be eliminated' (ibid.: 167). Like him, I believe that Joyce's strategy is to emplace, at the very centre of the text, and at the very centre of history, a resistance to meaning that is external to history, yet is the very thing that makes history possible. `Everywhere, the sheer content of whatever it is that does, after all, get said, is divided by this externality, which marks it with gaps, contradictions, hesitations, stammers' (ibid.: 150). Yet my approach to the notion of time di¡ers from Thwaites's on a number of counts: in addition to prioritizing the motif of passing, as mentioned earlier, I try to focus on the relation, staged in the Wake's adamelegiac mode, between the e¡ects of temporal passage and the activity of (self-)¢guration. This is to say that I concentrate on the text's attempt to think the nature of time in terms of the very aspect of time that, while making thought possible, eludes it. To this end, I should like to refer once again to Aristotle's aporetic analysis of the

18

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

nature of time, stressing its importance as a principle orienting the entire discussion, at once an impasse and a valuable starting point. My bid to overcome this impasse, or at least to come to terms with Joyce's manner of overcoming it, will require me to negotiate between two philosophical frameworks that have, as yet, only been considered separately in their connection with Joyce ^ namely, the Viconian and Bergsonian motifs announced above. Very brie£y: Joyce shares with Vico and Bergson a distrust of abstract intellectual knowledge and a sense that the original genius of language is displayed not in the powers of logical thought but in metaphorical expression. Famously, the author of Creative Evolution believes that it is impossible for even the most agile writing to duplicate the £ow of dure¨e in its in¢nitely divisible yet uninterrupted continuity.8 At the same time, however, Bergson observes that words are by their own nature mobile and transferable, and it is this mobility, this tendency of the word `to pass from one thing to another', that enables human intelligence to re£ect on its own productive operations (CE 175). Vico, for his part, regards metaphor as an indispensable resource in the philosophical project of going back to the ancient historical beginnings of an idea. His assumption is that just as the evolution of thought moves from ignorance and wonder to revelation and scienti¢c knowledge, so the evolution of linguistic expression progresses from the concreteness of metaphor to the abstraction of philosophical truths. By this principle, metaphors can be studied as records of the concrete, sensory genesis of modern-day abstractions: `All the metaphors conveyed by likenesses taken from bodies to signify the operations of the abstract minds must date from times when philosophies were taking shape. The proof of this is that in every language the terms needed for the re¢ned arts and recondite sciences are of rustic origin' (NS ½404). What Joyce elaborates from his reading of both thinkers is a sense that writing as we know it remains structurally incapable of rendering the truth of time's sheer passage, or the force of its more-thansimultaneous creation and destruction. In the end, as Bergson understood, syntax will always keep the intellect chained to a de¢nition of time in which time is reduced to an abstract ¢gure ^ be it numerical, geometric or representational ^ of the sum of its constituent parts. The only way out (and this is Vico's point) is to think by way of invention, by way of ¢ction, the as yet unthought. What is required, then, is a new organizational model, an inventive syntax that can ¢ctionally con¢gure the tension between the now and the totality of time as a strictly non-mathematical relation. Crucially, such an irruption of ¢ction into history, of invention into the discourse of reason, draws its chief philosophical justi¢cation from Vico's notion of divine providence. Indeed providence is more easily characterized as a key ¢gure of the Wake's discourse than is the Penelopean motif. Though it is not directly allegorized in the text, its thematic importance has been fully documented by the critical industry, starting with Samuel Beckett who sums up the impact of Vico's theory of history on Joyce's work in the following terms:

Time's Nature

19

History is neither to be considered as a formless structure, due exclusively to the achievements of individual agents, nor as possessing a reality apart from and independent of them, accomplished behind their backs in spite of them, the work of some superior force variously known as Fate, Chance, Fortune, God. Both these views, the materialistic and the transcendental, Vico rejects in favour of the rational. Individuality is the concretion of universality, and every individual action is at the same time superindividual. (1972: 6^7) The signi¢cance of providence for Vico is delineated by elimination in the space of this `neither . . . nor'. Put simply, Vico's argument is that history cannot be predetermined because that would deprive all human activity of motive, and, in the longer run, would exclude human responsibility from the very stage on which the story of man's salvation is supposed to be acted out. But it is equally untenable that history should be considered as an arbitrary stringing of unrelated events. A sequence of accidents occurring without rhyme or reason, without a sense of necessary correlation holding the plot together, would not, properly speaking, constitute a chain of cause and e¡ect. Here too, free will ^ `the property of human nature which not even God can take from man without destroying him' (NS ½388) ^ would be taken out of the existential equation at the price of an absolute loss of meaning. Viconian history, then, as Beckett concludes, is `not the result of Fate or Chance ^ in both cases the individual would be separated from his product ^ but the result of a Necessity that is not Fate, of a Liberty that is not Chance. . . . This force [Vico] called Divine Providence, with his tongue, one feels, very much in his cheek' (1972: 7). Shortly, we shall be able to observe that Vico's decision to employ the expression `divine providence' was anything but tongue in cheek. Beckett's main insight, however, remains valid: providence mediates between two types of historical futility, two di¡erent accounts of human action that, were they to be taken at face value, would make human existence void. What is implied in `a Necessity that is not Fate [and] a Liberty that is not Chance' is the emergence of a sense of structure ^ a coherence that is symptomatic of an immanent historical law. By `historical law' one understands, here, a regulating principle of history which allows meaning to prevail over meaninglessness and the universal to emerge from the aleatory. Such a law is said to be immanent in the sense that it is inherent to the realm of human action. It directs history's progress from a position that is itself historically determined, and therefore irreconcilable to any concept of divine intervention. Vittorio Mathieu seems to echo this point when he writes that `Vico's providence, though never explicitly opposed to the Biblical conception is much closer to . . . an automatic manifestation of divine unity which endows the sensible world with its admirable order . . .' (1976: 118). Mathieu's italics de-personalize the divine, and emphasize a certain unwillingness of providence to interfere with human a¡airs. Within this interpretive framework, the automatic and the immanent may be viewed as interchangeable terms, both gesturing towards an

20

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

uncompromisingly secular conception of history. Automatism and impersonality, however, add one important complication to our reading ^ a connotation that is not really contemplated in Beckett's argument. As an impersonal and automatic force, providence is not only secular but also utterly devoid of volition. It is unwilling in this more radical sense of the word. More than a balancing of chance and fate, then, the work of providence stands for the paradoxical notion of a programme that predetermines nothing. Such a programme is entrusted with the preservation of universal truths; it authorizes the abstraction of general laws from singular events, and the attainment of communal knowledge from individual experiences. The implication is that divine providence for Vico is not simply a middle way, or, say, a compromise, between the universal and the particular. Rather, it is a mechanism by which truth is inscribed in history ^ a non-intentional productivity that gives the study of history a scienti¢c basis and makes scienti¢c knowledge historically viable. A brief comment concerning Vico's understanding of such key notions as `truth', `science' and `knowledge' might help to make better sense of this paradox. In Book I of The New Science Vico quotes Aristotle's assertion that science deals necessarily with what is universal and eternal ^ `scientia debet esse de universalibus et aeternis' (½163). The axiom orients the interest of Vico's research decisively. Scienti¢c or philosophical thinking, as construed by the Neapolitan philosopher, takes its cue from human actions; yet it is fruitless if it does not yield universal laws. This explains Vico's insistence that the history of nations `has certainly been made by men' (½349) and that philosophers should direct their e¡orts towards the study of its principles. The sequential ordering of the investigative procedure is fundamental. Vico makes it very clear his purpose in The New Science is not to reconstruct accurate historical facts by applying a preconceived philosophical rule, but, rather, to determine the nature of historical truth, to understand, starting from an observation of documented historical details, the evolutionary principle ¢gured in the chain of causes and e¡ects we call history. This, he clari¢es, is also the course history takes as it works out its own constitutive principles in the manner of a `work in progress' continually evolving from a story of error and correction into an ideal, rationally organized, version of itself: Throughout this book it will be shown that as much as the poets had ¢rst sensed in the way of vulgar wisdom, the philosophers later understood in the way of esoteric wisdom; so that the former may be said to have been the sense and the latter the intellect of the human race. (½363) And in a di¡erent passage: Providence gave good guidance to human a¡airs when it aroused human minds ¢rst to topics rather than to criticism, for acquaintance with things must come before judgement of them . . . This story of human ideas clearly convicts of their common error all those who, under the in£uence of the

Time's Nature

21

mistaken popular belief in the superlative wisdom of the ancients, have held that Minos, the ¢rst lawgiver of the gentile nations, Theseus at Athens, Lycurgus at Sparta, and Romolus and other kings at Rome established universal laws. For the most ancient laws, we observe, were each conceived to command or forbid in but a single case; only later were they given general application. . . . (½498^500) It is on this methodological ground that the author of The New Science criticizes both the historians and the philosophers of his time. Vico's de¢nition of `scienza' comes to indicate a knowledge of timeless ideas, in opposition to `coscienza' which stands for mere certainty of facts. The one is the domain of philosophy, whereas the other, comprehending grammar, history and the study of languages, falls under the general de¢nition of philology: `Philosophy contemplates reason, whence comes knowledge (scienza) of the true; philology observes that of which human choice is author, whence comes consciousness (coscienza) of the certain' (½138). Vico claims that insofar as historians and philologists will concentrate exclusively on the analysis of facts they forgo the authority of scienti¢c knowledge which, by de¢nition, must generate universal conclusions. Yet, unless these conclusions are developed by way of what he calls `the unitive method' ^ a method consisting in `uniting particulars to obtain universals' ^ they are bound to lack historical purchase. The novelty of Vico's scienti¢c method, then, lies in the insight that while truth is the competence of scientists, scienti¢c knowledge can only be achieved in the movement from a singular case to its universal meaning. This is to say that truth, despite being universal and timeless, can only be produced historically. My insistence on the concept of production is motivated here by Joyce's own strategic use of the word. The Wake pits together various connotations of production. Foremost among these is the sense of bringing something into view, of putting an object on display or of presenting it as evidence. Thus for instance: `The Earwicker of that spurring instant . . . prodooced from his gunpocket his Jurgensen's shrapnel waterbury . . .' (FW 35). Co-implied in this semantic ¢eld is the idea of theatrical performance ^ production intended as a play or a dramatic presentation: `You have jest (a ham) beamed listening through . . . his haulted excerpt from John Whiston's ¢veaxled production, The Coach With The Six Insides . . .' (FW 359). Finally, production is also, quite simply, a synonym of making. At least twice in the Wake this last notion is paired with consumption to suggest, as with weaving and unweaving, the forced co-existence of opposing forces of generation and degeneration: `His producers are they not his consumers?' (FW 497); `he has the solitary from seeing Scotch snakes and has a lowsense for the production of consumption and dalickey cyphalos on his brach premises where he can purge his contempt and dejeunerate into a skillyton be thinking himself to death' (FW 422).9 Each one of these meanings comes to bear on the aforementioned principle that truth can only be produced historically. History, for whoever should practise Vico's science, is the stage on which all human knowledge is played out as

22

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

well as the process by which truth itself comes into being. This premise, marking the point of greatest divergence between Vico and Descartes, leads to a radical revaluation of the function of ¢ctional narrative in philosophical discourse (note, here, the semantic complicity between ¢ction and fabrication). After claiming that the purpose of his science is to demonstrate `what providence has wrought in history' (½342), Vico adds what is perhaps the most controversial remark concerning the nature of his enquiry: Our Science therefore comes to describe at the same time an ideal eternal history traversed in time by the history of every nation in its rise, development, maturity, decline and fall. Indeed we make bold to a¤rm that whoever meditates this Science narrates to himself this ideal eternal history so far as he himself makes it for himself by that proof `it had, has and will have to be'. For the ¢rst indubitable principle posited above is that this world of nations has certainly been made by men, and its guise must therefore be found within the modi¢cations of our own human mind. And history cannot be more certain than when he who creates the things also narrates them. (½349) It is Vico's ¢rm belief that men can only have true knowledge of things they themselves have made. As Karl LÎwith explains, `Vico . . . questioned the very criterion of Cartesian ``truth'', on the principle that real knowledge is a knowledge by causes' (1949: 118). This idea develops a theory Vico had already presented in the opening chapter of the treatise On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians: that the true and the made are convertible ^ verum et factum convertuntur. Vico understands that he can never presume to know divine providence as such. This is to say that he can never hope to comprehend its motives or the principles which make it work ^ in short, that he cannot grasp the truth about its divine nature. All he can do is repeat the history of human errors in which providence reveals itself. As he narrates this history his knowledge becomes that of a performer internalizing his own performance, a genuine maker who is able to know the truth of his own work by virtue of having produced it. This faith in the identity of knowing and making ought not to be mistaken for some naive form of relativism. Vico devises a new scienti¢c method for his New Science in direct response to a philosophical dispute of his time. His quarrel is with the authority of Descartes's physics ^ speci¢cally, with the possibility, ¢rst entertained in the Discourse on Method, of founding a science of the physical world upon the abstraction of an introspective cogito. In place of this cogito Vico posits a narrative performance that discovers truth in the modi¢cations of the human mind. The ability of the human individual to take action is thus recognized as a source of historical truth more primordial than the evolution of the same individual into a self-conscious being. The model serves Joyce's reader well: in the beginning, the Wake tells us, were `the gest' (FW 468) and `the woid' (FW 378), that is to say, the performative gesture and the empty, still inexpressive word ^ both, Joyce insists, unregulated by consciousness. In one of the few studies to have considered Joyce's indebtedness to Vico's discussion of method, Strother B. Purdy discusses the verum factum principle as a

Time's Nature

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theoretical master-key by which to make sense of the strange phenomenality that characterizes the Wake's ¢ctive world. The Wake, Purdy writes, `is universal history and sets this history within the ``modi¢cations'' of a mind whose identity is every bit as challenging as that of Vico's chi medita, whom I shall call meditatore, who is also narrator, and creator, of the ideal history' (1989: 368). Purdy's emphasis on mind and identity has the merit of drawing attention to a narratological quandary implied in Vico's methodological principle. The epistemology of The New Science and the eccentricity of Joyce's dream-work both deal with the `barely conceivable phenomenon' (ibid.: 375) of a creative mind that comprehends the world only as it makes it, and that makes the world by rehearsing the story of its own modi¢cations. Ordinarily the activities of such a mind ^ a simulation of the work of providence ^ would be said to occupy the narrative's extra-diegetic level. But in the Wake, the mind's identity (the verum) has no autonomy from the history it narrates (the factum). As the mind thinks itself to death it is as much productive of a universal history as produced by it.10 To think of providence as a productive mechanism is, therefore, to discern a structural division within the book's self-generating programme. It is also to recognize the impossibility of abstracting an extra-diegetic level of narration from the diegetic process. The distinction between a time of the immarginable and a novelistic time rests precisely on this recognition which contravenes all that we take for granted about narrative and syntactic form. Sam Slote and Jean-Michel Rabate¨ o¡er valuable accounts of the way in which both the Wake's narrative and its syntax transgress inherited codes and frustrate the reader's expectations. According to Slote the Wake stages a continuous displacement of subjectivity when it inscribes the subject in a hyperhypotactical structure that never recollects itself but remains suspended in a `futule preteriting unstant' (FW 143). A negative of the instant, the `unstant' names a complex temporal dimension, a ¢ctional tense by which the text seems to plot a subjectposition at the same time as it marks `the moment of the subject's ineluctable withdrawal' (Slote 1994: 75). Slote extends this argument to a discussion of narrative forms, commenting on the di¤culty of locating a proper narrative drive in Finnegans Wake and ultimately suggesting that the book is in fact not narrative at all (1999: 205). This thesis radicalizes an idea ¢rst developed by Rabate¨ who in turn speaks of the Wake's narrativity as something that `we, as readers, make up in order to escape from the impasses of self-cancelling or mutually excluding alternatives'. Accordingly, the book's narrative content `corresponds to our irrepressible e¡ort to bridge the gap between the smaller units which at ¢rst appear very promising but which generally frustrate our expectations, and the overall sense of structure' (1986: 140). It is tempting, in light of the foregoing analysis, to view providence as a kind of subject-substitute ^ the formal replacement, if you will, of a grammatical or narratological function that has completely re¢ned itself out of existence. I should like to pre-empt such an interpretation by insisting on the immanence of the narrative mechanism theorized by Vico in his discussion of method.

24

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

It bears repeating that such a mechanism constitutes the truth of human history only to the extent that it coincides with human history in the making. Providence, in this particular sense, is history in the act of producing itself. By this de¢nition it will also be seen to coincide with the Viconian ricorso, doubling history, shadowing its course and confronting it, as will be argued shortly, with an origin it cannot comprehend: a past that remains beyond human access and beyond subjective appropriation.

Providence II: A Science of Translation The last 25 to 30 years have seen no shortage of post-structuralist readings of Joyce's work. It might be argued that the wave had reached its peak as early as the mid-1980s with the publication of Derek Attridge's and Daniel Ferrer's volume Post-Structuralist Joyce or, equally well, with the contemporaneous participation of Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva as keynote speakers at the Ninth International Symposium held in Frankfurt in 1984. The following decades, however, were to bear out Richard Ellmann's famous phrase that `[w]e are still learning to be James Joyce's contemporaries' (1982: 3) ^ or indeed Derrida's, that `it is always too late with Joyce' (1984: 145) ^ reinforcing the canonization of the Wake as the most extreme example of avant-garde literary innovation. Perhaps despite itself Finnegans Wake has become a celebrated classic of literary intractability. Taken at face value the book's characteristic clash of styles requires us no less than to forgo our habitual interpretive strategies. As Margot Norris (1992) observes, post-structuralist commentaries have contributed decisively to establish its reputation as a self-re£exive text that invites a continuous rewriting of its own £uid structure and calls for a rede¢nition of the very practice of reading. To this e¡ect the Wake has been described as a machine that generates and regenerates in¢nite possibilities of meaning in its e¡ort to totalize all that can be contained in language. Rabate¨ stretches this analogy furthest, speaking of the work as a `performative utopia' or a `complex machination of meanings, probing and programming the seamy side of meaning' (1984: 79). Joyce's book is compared to a `perverse semic-machine' (ibid.: 79) or `an internal combustion engine which uses the decompositions and recombinations of elements of the past' (ibid.: 81). The metaphor of the machine pertains to a literary culture that privileges the productive aspect of reading: interpreting Finnegans Wake entails a process of domestication, like sharing a joke or trying to make sense of a dream (Freudian correspondences on this point are particularly apt). Once the joke is laughed o¡ or the dream is explained their subversive potential is, if not neutralized, at least mitigated. We shall see, in the course of this study, that the object of much poststructuralist Joyce criticism has been to shift the reader's attention away from exegetic practice (explaining or interpreting) towards an examination of the Wake's operative codes, thereby identifying the strategies by means of which the subversive potential of the textual machine is put into e¡ect in the

Time's Nature

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mechanics of writing or reading. To this e¡ect, Attridge and Ferrer introduce the purpose of their collection with a forewarning: the aim is not to produce a reading of this intractable text, to make it more familiar and exorcise its strangeness, but on the contrary to confront its unreadability; not to produce an inde¢nite accumulation of its meanings (or search for the one authentic meaning) but to look at the in¢nite mechanisms of its in¢nite productivity . . . (1984: 10) The injunction not to interpret ^ and thus, by not interpreting, to respect the text's performative potential ^ is repeated in Lorraine Weir's (1989) Writing Joyce, a book-length analysis of Joyce's oeuvre that relies on a combination of Viconian and contemporary-semiotic models of reading as textual performance. Weir's claim is that Joyce's texts operate as a pedagogical system; they engage the reader, indeed they inscribe the reader within a discursive process that guarantees no position of mastery, no sense of a previously established competence. `In writing Joyce,' Weir argues, `we encounter the system as a teaching machine whose purpose it is to teach us itself ' (1989: 2). More recently, Laurent Milesi has returned to the issue of the Wake's performative language in order to map out the impact of Joyce's work on the ideological and theoretical discourses that, we may assume, will always attempt to appropriate it. The focus of Milesi's argument is on Joyce's ability to write and empower his own readers by framing their (our) reading practices in a language charged with the constant awareness of its historical motivation. According to this model, the evolution of critical sensitivities leading to the post-structuralist privileging of the Wake's performative dimension can be read as a repetition, performative in its own right, of Joyce's own artistic trajectory, a narrative development foreseen, forewritten, provided for, as it were, by Joyce himself in a self-re£exive and anti-mimetic move characteristic of his entire ¢ction but especially salient in the later work. At stake, Milesi explains, is the latter-day realization that, within the inbuilt critical dimension of Joyce's texts, representation `itself ' . . . comes under scrutiny and is exposed, beyond its canonizable techniques and resources, to a re£exion on representability and representativity alike. Product (signi¢cation, oeuvre) therefore has given way to production or process (signi¢cance, `text' or e¨criture) ^ including in the sense of the fascination of Joyce's `embodied' language for the materiality of bodily productions; the mirror held up to nature has revealed the tain that enables its (self )-re£exions. (2003: 9) Here too, the insistence on the historical constitutedness of textual performances is indicative of a certain complicity between post-structuralist approaches to Finnegans Wake and Viconian theories of language and history. Though not acknowledged as often and as openly as one might expect, the pertinence of Vico's Science to post-structuralist readings of the Wake is in fact

26

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

incalculable and can be approached from a number of di¡erent angles. Derrida's Joyce is at bottom a Viconian Joyce, a writer who could fuse an encyclopaedic view of history ^ history intended as the secular unfolding of a divine principle of reason ^ with a belief in the primacy of rhetorical ¢gures, of myth and metaphor, over abstract truth. In this sense Vico provides an alternative not only to Descartes but also to Hegel. As we shall observe, his theory of the interpenetration of history and rhetoric, of the way in which the production and knowledge of one is intimately bound up with a performative understanding of the other, equipped Joyce with a discourse on memory (in the last analysis the interpenetration of history and rhetoric is nothing if not a mechanics of memory), but a memory that does not presume or even logically imply the ascendancy of a transcendental consciousness. Rabate¨ gestures towards this point when he observes that `Vico enables Joyce to go beyond the gap between an aesthetic theory and the ¢ction which stages it' (1988: 128). And elsewhere: Vico's historical philosophy allows Joyce to dispense with (not to overcome; his move is much more economical) the speculative system altogether and to advance towards the dialogism of interpretations. To shift from Hegel to Vico therefore means to abandon re£exive circularity, to do away with the incestuous and perverse tricks of the God as artist, who begets himself in his closed system, in order to found another circularity, hermeneutical in essence. (1991a: 179^80) One important (and by now foregone) consideration warranted by the superimposition of Weir's, Milesi's and Rabate¨'s work is that a full understanding of Viconian rhetoric and Viconian mnemotechnics must be regarded as crucial to a post-structuralist analysis of the Wake's mechanics of textual production. Yet Rabate¨'s words also bring to our attention a second, perhaps more notable issue: that it is necessary, in attempting to map out the Wake's temporal organization, to think the concept of textual productivity in relation to the ¢gure of the circle. The circle, in this case, is not simply the abstract delineation of a temporal-historical development: it is the name of an economy, a principle of speculation and exchange. Indeed, for Vico, as for Derrida, hermeneutic theory is inseparable from a certain discourse on the economic value of names and signs, that is to say, on the manner in which names and signs circulate and become available to tradition and translation. In the narratives of The New Science, hermeneutics comes to be associated with the origins of literacy. The word itself harks back to the times of the thricegreat Hermes, a mythical, larger-than-life character believed to have provided the Egyptians with their ¢rst agrarian laws. These laws, at ¢rst unspoken, yet publicly understood, are for Vico the earliest vestiges of civil co-existence; being primarily laws of property, they concern the correct deployment of ensigns and, in the longer run, the institution of proper names. Vico imagines the need to mark one's belongings ^ to establish ownership over land or stock ^ as the prime socio-historical condition leading to the invention of hieroglyphs.

Time's Nature

27

He also surmises that societies at war needed hieroglyphs, `inasmuch as wars are waged for the most part between nations di¡ering in speech and hence mute in relation to each other' (NS ½487). But in times of peace the use of hieroglyphs was to develop into a fully articulate symbolic language, and, by a parallel path, family coats of arms and military emblems came to be recycled as coins.11 Transposed into Greek mythology Hermes becomes Mercury, divine messenger and mediator between gods and mortals. As a rule, The New Science employs both names interchangeably, but in the references to Mercury the intersection of hermeneutic theory with a discourse on trade and translation is more clearly spelt out. Thus, for instance, when Vico reminds us of that episode in the Odyssey in which Mercury gives Odysseus a herb to ward o¡ Circe's incantations, his gloss draws attention to Mercury's role not as a lawgiver but speci¢cally as the bearer (and sharer) of a divine knowledge, a secret science hitherto unavailable to men (½437). Elsewhere, Mercury's name is directly connected to commerce, and via commerce, to a movement of appropriation and exchange made possible by an act of demarcation: The need for the certainty of ownership was a large part of the necessity for the invention of characters and names in the native sense of houses branching into many families, which, with perfect propriety, were called gentes. Thus Thrice-great Hermes or Mercury, a poetic character of the ¢rst founders of the Egyptians, was their inventor of laws and letters. From this Mercury, who was likewise held to be the god of commerce, the Italians ^ by a wonderful parallel in thought and expression lasting to our own time ^ took the verb mercare, to mark, in the sense of branding with letters or insignia the cattle or other merchandise they have for sale, to distinguish and identify the owners. (½483) The hermeneutic circularity to which Rabate¨ refers is here ideally exempli¢ed in the word-play that gathers, within the limits of a single name, the ideas of trade and tradition, of tradition as translation [It: traduzione], of translation as trade. All three terms entail a sense of handing over or of being handed over ^ of handing down or being handed down. The cycle comes to frame Vico's conception of history to such an extent that compiling `a mental vocabulary common to all the various languages, living and dead' becomes synonymous in the Science with the project of reconstructing history's ideal eternal course (½162). Yet, while the discursive ¢eld in which `Mercury', `commerce' and `the presymbolic mark' are gathered can indeed be said to tease out the complexity of Vico's entire hermeneutic project, it must be speci¢ed that the problematics of ¢guring time in Finnegans Wake cannot be reduced to a play of tradition, translation and symbolic exchange. At best, Vico's extrapolations allow us to intuit what it is about time that hermeneutics fails to encompass. In order to hold on to this intuition, to £esh it out, as it were, and give it substance, it will be necessary to resituate Vico's narrative in the context of his discussion of nature, intended as a synonym of birth or beginning, and therefore of poiesis as the

28

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

proper locus of scienti¢c truth; likewise (and concurrently), it will be necessary to return to the theme of providence, our working de¢nition of which, one might recall, is that of an immanent historical mechanism by which history comes to be known/produced from within the modi¢cations of the human mind. Providence, as Tony Thwaites has observed, is a concept that is `forever undoing itself ' (2001: 171). We have seen that most of Joyce's (and of Vico's) readers associate it with the redemption of chance. In its most secular determination it is but a name for what re-motivates, whether retrospectively or by design, all that seems coincidental and arbitrary in a text. In the production of Vico's universal history it functions as a force of narrative coherence, a structural centre that takes charge of any textual detail not already comprehended by the teleological programme of the whole. Beckett speaks, to this e¡ect, of a `social and historical classi¢cation . . . adapted by Mr. Joyce as a structural convenience ^ or inconvenience' (1972: 7); and LÎwith talks about `the orderly, lawful way by which the historical world takes its form and course' (1949: 122). Yet, if on the one hand the word is suggestive of the supremacy of reason, on the other its programme only manifests itself in the purely irrational and unforeseeable event. The Wake, Thwaites explains, juggles both `the at-hand and the guiding hand: not their synthesis, for they have none, but precisely their ``providential warring'' [FW 107], the gap and irresolvable tension between them . . .' (2001: 171). In `Two Words for Joyce' Derrida comments on a brief segment of the Wake ^ literally two words lifted from Chapter IX ^ which recasts the theme of `providential warring' in the context of a discourse on Babel. Joyce's text, as Derrida rereads it, repeats a divine act of war, a supremely performative utterance that commits human language to the law of equivocity: In the landscape immediately surrounding the `he war', we are, if such a present is possible, and this place, at Babel: at the moment when YAHWEH declares war, HE WAR . . . and punishes the Shem, those who, according to Genesis, declare their intention of building the tower in order to make a name for themselves. Now they bear the name `name' (Shem). And the Lord, the Most High, be he blessed (Lord, loud, laud . . .), declares war by interrupting the construction of the tower, he deconstructs by speaking the vocable of his choice, the name of confusion, which in the hearing, could be confused with a word indeed signifying `confusion'. (Derrida 1984: 153) In Derrida's writing, the theme of war is always associated with that of an impossible yet necessary act of translation. War, in the Derridean sense of the word, is the clash of two idioms, their violent collision. It is a di¡erence that calls for synthesis precisely where no synthesis is possible, where no common code or unifying ground has been made available: There is polemos when a ¢eld is determined as a ¢eld of battle because there is no metalanguage, no locus of truth outside the ¢eld, no absolute and ahistorical overhang; and this absence of overhang ^ in other words, the radical

Time's Nature

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historicity of the ¢eld ^ makes the ¢eld necessarily subject to multiplicity and heterogeneity. As a result, those who are inscribed in this ¢eld are necessarily inscribed in a polemos, even if they have no special taste for war. (Derrida 2001: 12) Joyce's Babel, then, is not just any act of war. It is an act of war that a¤rms the primary condition of all wars: the possibility of misunderstanding. The Wake may well be the only book ever to have been written in words that, for the most part, do not yet feature in any dictionary. And when they do, the multiplicity of translations they inspire simply invalidates any attempt at an authoritative de¢nition. In the speci¢c case Derrida chooses to illustrate, the intuitive gloss of the two words `he war' (`he declares war' or `he wages war') is interrupted by a series of alternative readings among which are the quasi-homophonous `hear' and the German `He War' (he was). Notably, these words do not merely withhold a ¢xed meaning. They are programmed ^ herein lies the paradox ^ to deny themselves to translation by refusing the mediation of a shared code as they pass from idiom to idiom. The temporal implications of this point come into better focus with Derrida's reference to a performative event: namely, `the moment', marked by the now that is Babel, `when YAHWEH declares war'. Such a moment, Derrida suggests, is already divided from itself. It is produced in plain self-contradiction: `He War' calls for translation, both orders and forbids transposition into the other language. Change me (into yourself ) and above all do not touch me, read and do not read, say and do not say otherwise what I have said and which will have been: in two words which was. For the `he war' also tells of the irreplaceability of the event that it is, which is that it is, and which is also unchangeable because it has already been, a past without appeal which, before being, was. So that's war declared: before being, that is being a present, it was; was he . . . (1984: 154) The aporia outlined in this paragraph harks back to the logical impasse identi¢ed by Aristotle in his discussion of the temporal status of the now. Here a common source of confusion may be dispelled: the `now' (in its Aristotelian and its post-structuralist acceptations) is not synonymous with the present. For Derrida, it hesitates between being and non-being: it joins them in a bond that has no metalinguistic anchorage. For Deleuze it exists but virtually (potentially), and in this sense, as we shall see, is more akin to the past than to any other temporal dimension. Indeed the untranslatability of the Babelian `He War' comes from what Derrida describes as `a past . . . before being'. It is this past that marks the now as an utterly singular instant. Let us recall that the now, for Aristotle, is not simply a constituent part of time but rather a connection between past and future: The `now' is the link of time, as has been said (for it connects past and future time), and it is a limit of time (for it is the beginning of the one and the end

30

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

of the other). But this is not obvious as it is with the point, which is ¢xed. It divides potentially, and in so far as it is dividing the `now' is always di¡erent, but in so far as it connects it is always the same, as it is with mathematical lines. For the intellect it is not always one and the same point, since it is other and other when one divides the line; but in so far as it is one, it is the same in every respect. (Aristotle 1941: ½222a) As both a link and a limit the now gives uniformity and substance to time's constant motion. But it cannot do so without being in turn a¡ected (the passive in£ection of this verb is of absolute importance) by a more primordial temporal horizon. In this sense the now is caught in the very same double bind Derrida associates with the event of Babel. More than an analogy or an elaborate metaphor, this double bind ^ the imperative of a necessary yet impossible translation ^ is the law of temporal movement and change. Endlessly deferred, irreducible to any rational determination of the present, a past before being insists in the performance (in the making and in the truth) of an event that, though in¢nitely iterable, must di¡er from itself each time. Herman Rapaport describes this event as a violent disruption of language whereupon language ceases to be construable as a symbolic structure in which the unity of time and being is maintained. Implied, here, is a Derridean rerouting of the Heideggerian notion of Ereignis. Fittingly, Ereignis is itself an impossible word to translate. Roughly interpreted as `appropriation' or `en-owning' it resonates with the senses of eignen (to be suitable) and Augenblick (the moment measured in the blink of an eye), and suggests the gathering or emplacement in a discursive ¢eld of that which is proper.12 As Rapaport explains, Derrida's reading of Finnegans Wake entails a radical babelization of the Ereignis of being. Derrida's argument is that in the orientation of Joyce's text, in the strategy of its address, the event in which being comes into its own is handed over to the violence of an in¢nitely disseminative verb: In this case, as is obvious, the sending of the message by God is anything but merely an establishment of presence, the revealing of Being. In the `he war' it is as if the presence of the present were being itself expropriated, retracted, demolished . . . the `war', then, consists in the disarticulation of temporal moments of di¡erence and in the assertion of being, time, and language, or what Heidegger would have called Ereignis, that manifold of appropriating and expropriating moments in which the relation of being and time is revealed as plural, open, and violently disruptive with respect to the metaphysical comprehension of meaning. (Rapaport 1991: 229) The Wake's `providential warring' designates just such a manifold of expropriating and appropriating moments; it characterizes history as a clash of discourses (a battle¢eld) having no de¢nitive context, no ¢xed metalinguistic ground. That which calls for translation at the same time as it forbids translation opens the ¢eld to the unforeseeable. It is/it was what disarticulates the now from presence ^ in other words, from a self-sameness that is not of time.

Time's Nature

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A certain indecision between tenses cannot be avoided here. If the `he war' is untranslatable this is because it names an element of time that will not give itself to presentation. At issue is the very pastness of the past: what Vico calls its `deplorable obscurity' (NS ½344). Vico states unequivocally that the obscurity of the past cannot be overcome by a simple mnemonic exercise. The study of the origins of gentile history requires a truly inspired act, perhaps one more akin to guesswork than to recollection. I use the term `guesswork' loosely, to suggest a leap into the unknown, or an epistemological gap that the new scientist is called upon at once to bridge and to acknowledge. As we have seen, Vico's own word for this leap is `divination', which he de¢nes as `the science of Jove's auspices' (NS ½398). The point of the Science is that there is no historical knowledge, no science conducted in time (and what science isn't?) that can a¡ord to ignore the past's enduring otherness. The insight is not lost on Joyce for whom the obscurity of the past is intimately linked to the (im)possibility of knowing the future. Joyce alludes, time and again, to the etymological proximity of providence and foresight. The connection is established most clearly in Chapter X when one word is employed in what seems to be, at least idiomatically, the intuitive place of the other. We come upon the evidence in a parenthetic clause concerned with the precise dating of several pivotal moments in Ireland's Ideal Eternal history ^ di¡erent events that are synchronized, even con£ated, but certainly not simultaneous: 4.32 M.P., old time, to be precise, according to all three doctors waterburies that was Mac Auli¡e and poor MacBeth and poor MacGhimley to the tickleticks, of the synchronisms, all lauschening, a time also con¢rmed seven sincuries later by the quatren medical johnny, poor old MacAdoo MacDollett, with notary, whose presence was required by law of Devine Foresygth . . . (FW 290) The sentence opens with an allusion to 432 A.D., the year of St. Patrick's arrival in Ireland, and proceeds to sum up a complex mythology shaped entirely by foreign rule, religious bigotry and political betrayal.13 Burdened as it is by centuries of deadly sins (the `seven sincuries'), Irish history is characterized as a moribund creature whose wretched plight (sincuries: without cure) has been certi¢ed by no fewer than four doctors. Vico's relevance to the passage can be detected in the four beats that punctuate the narrative ^ MacAleph, MacBeth, MacGimmel and MacDaleth. In line with Beckett's classic interpretation of the Wake's Viconian structure, the fourth beat, the age that brings history full circle, is also the one in which the identity of providence as Devine Foresygth is ¢nally revealed. As a quasi-synonym of foresight, providence opens onto an image of the future. It inscribes this image within a temporal economy that it would be far too reductive to call prescience or anticipation. Certainly, some measure of prescience is implied in the word: providence, by de¢nition, knows already; it sees and thinks ahead of time, thereby seeming to void any signi¢cant distinction between the future it foresees and the present in which, as foreknowing subject,

32

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

it is situated. Yet, crucially, providence also operates in time. It is itself projected future-ward, its progress plotted across an in¢nity of human errors and historical modi¢cations. In the articulation of both these meanings providence names a structural anachrony, a syncopated movement not unlike `thinking oneself to death'. While such a movement does not contradict the Wake's circular design, it demands a fundamental rethinking of the position time holds in relation to the circle. I speak of the position of time, here, as though it were possible to locate time, as though it made sense to identify an exact place where the text's temporal character might be properly featured. In point of fact, time in the Wake comes into focus in excess of what is posited ^ in other words, in excess of the thesis and the ¢gure. As I pointed out earlier in this chapter, the Wake ¢ctionalizes the impossible descent into a past beyond human measure, a past the memory of which is necessarily mediated by an imaginative leap into the unknown. Joyce's commitment to this past, to its enduring otherness, is re£ected in a mechanism of textual generation and `dejeunera[tion]' (FW 422), an in¢nite narrative programme that con¢gures what I am calling the book's non-novelistic temporality. In the forthcoming chapters I will show that the principal innovation entailed by the Wake's etymological narratives, the paradigmatic shift that renders the adamelegiac form irreducible to the genre of the novel, is de¢ned precisely by the question of time's eccentricity to the process of ¢gural or thetic presentation. Chapter 2 will address this issue by £eshing out its main economic implications. The Wake's time-imagery will be read against Bergson's analysis of dure¨e and Derrida's discussion of the phenomenality of the gift to yield a thesis in which time is characterized as a non-numerical multiplicity, a force of constant self-di¡erentiation that remains unavailable to any form of abstraction, calculation or objective measurement. Chapter 3 will analyse the Wake's syntax in an e¡ort to map out an open dialectic between the errancy of the single lexical fragment and the cumulative power of the work. The bulk of the analysis will attend to the manner in which the Wake's neologisms and paronomastic inventions (re)produce an image of time's self-di¡erential movement by staging a narrative performance that is unmoored from the synthesizing activity of a transcendental subject. Finally Chapters 4 and 5 will resume the discussion of a prehuman-and-posthuman past from the perspective of the Wake's discourse on memory and forgetfulness. The Wake will be approached as an encyclopaedic text governed throughout by a double imperative: on the one hand, the ambition to record and preserve the entire content of human experience; on the other, the endeavour to remain faithful to the deplorable obscurity in which the past is shrouded. In the pursuit of this project the Wake will be seen to engage a peculiar form of writing predicated on the paradox of an original forgetfulness, a repetition-technique that repeats and commemorates the event of its own erasure.

Chapter 2

Time in Figures

In the library scene of Ulysses IX Stephen Dedalus presents us with an image of time from which time is virtually absent. `In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by re£ection from that which then I shall be' (U 249). Notably the instant to which Stephen alludes captures the totality of Past-Present-Future, but only does so by subtracting from its focus time itself, which surely must have something to do with passage, with di¡erence and with change. Here, Past, Present and Future are in fact abstract concepts given over to space, and all that is left of the sense of time in Stephen's words is the fate of the fading coal. The parable of the coal illustrates an essential quality of time reproduced in the Wake's narrative and rhetorical strategies: time is grasped by the imagination as that which always eludes its own image. What we see when we look at this image (in place of time) is a ¢eld of objecti¢ed moments existing ideally and simultaneously. Held together by sight and preserved by re£ection, Past, Present and Future can only be imagined as a cluster of ¢xed points abstracted from a linear continuum. As I had occasion to observe in Chapter 1 the glaring incongruity between time and the instant of its ¢guration is one of the Wake's foremost concerns. In the course of this chapter I should like to examine the rhetoric employed by Joyce as he grapples with the paradoxes that motivate this incongruity. My intention is to demonstrate that a direct correlation exists between the Wake's extraordinary deployment of ¢gural language and an endeavour to engage more rigorously with a de¢nition of time that takes the production of di¡erence and the motif of passing (or fading) into account. Two passages from Bergson help give substance to this project. First, a metaphor from Time and Free Will (the liberty taken with the title in the English edition is, in our case, extremely fortunate): `externality [Bergson explains] is the distinguishing mark of things which occupy space, while states of consciousness are not essentially external to one another and become so only by being spread out in Time regarded as a homogeneous medium. . . . Time, conceived under the form of an unbounded and homogeneous medium, is nothing but the ghost of space, haunting the re£ective consciousness' (1910: 99). Second, from Creative Evolution, is a theory formulated in the course of a re£ection on the mind's tendency to work by abstraction:

34

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

the human intellect, inasmuch as it is fashioned for the needs of human action, is an intellect which proceeds at the same time by intention and by calculation, by adapting means to ends and by thinking out mechanisms of more and more geometrical forms. Whether nature be conceived as a mechanical means regulated by mathematical laws, or as the realization of a plan, these two ways of regarding it are only the consummation of two tendencies of the mind . . . In considering reality, mechanism regards only the aspect of similarity or repetition. It is therefore dominated by this law, that in nature there is only like reproducing like. The more the geometry in mechanism is emphasized, the less can mechanism admit that anything is ever created, even pure form. In so far as we are geometricians, then we reject the unforeseeable. (1944: 51^2) We know that for Bergson any equation of time with number (as in calculation and measurement) misses its object of reference altogether and amounts to a description of time as space. On the one hand Bergson's mention of `geometry' brings into play a science of ideal objects: a mathematical discipline in which nothing new is ever created, unless it be by some error of calculation. The concept of `the unforeseeable', on the other hand, refers to the possibility of a radical and unaccountable innovation of form. Presently this distinction will provide us with two mutually exclusive ways of perceiving (or rather, of not perceiving) time: as an ideal object measured out in space, or as an inde¢nite deferral of the same object out of sight or presence. To want to preserve geometry from the unforeseeable is to believe in a history of ideal self-reproducing objects ^ a history in which time makes itself visible only under the form of a homogeneous medium. Insofar as geometry and the unforeseeable are held apart, set in a binary opposition, then time's ability to create or invent new forms is withdrawn from this history altogether.1 Joyce allowed the contrast between the production of geometry's ideal truths and the event/invention of the unforeseeable to inform his allegorical characterization of space and time in the Wake. The book designates time as space's identical twin in a stereotypical, if not archetypal, sibling relationship dominated by jealousy and instincts of self-assertion. It is to be noted, here, that the story of the twins' rivalry unfolds in a complex interplay of suggestions of `sameness' and `di¡erence' during which both concepts have ceased to operate as mutually exclusive categories. The twins' mutual antipathies and the expression of their competing desires surface, time and again, as a principle of di¡erentiation; so that like reproduces like, sometimes unsuccessfully. If Shem and Shaun are at once same and opposite, their polarized identity is expressed nowhere more memorably than in the course of a protracted geometry lesson during which they are confronted with two related problems: the question of their common origin, and the enigma of the ¢gure of the opposite sex. Shem (featuring as Dolph) promises to provide his brother with a diagram representing his mother's vagina. His demonstration unfolds in a patchwork of registers and ¢elds of reference con£ating geometry, sexuality and a discourse

Time in Figures

35

suggestive of micturation (or, more broadly, of the production of bodily £uids). He describes two identical circles ^ `our twain of doubling bicirculars' (FW 295) ^ which intersect at `tew tricklesome poinds' (FW 295) to uncover an elliptical area where the circles overlap. A brief analysis of the diagram, reproduced on page 293 of the Wake, brings to evidence two items that are of speci¢c interest to my argument. The ¢rst detail to catch the eye is the perfect symmetry of the ¢gure, which is plotted around three pairs of letters composing the mother's name in Roman and Greek script (ALP and ). The symmetry is such that the diagram can be folded both on its vertical and on its horizontal axis without excess. The right side perfectly doubles the left; the upper part, the lower. Which leads directly to a second feature to which I would like to draw attention ^ the doubling of the letters P and  at the two points where the circles overlap (a detail also highlighted by the alliterative insistence on P in the brothers' analytic reconstruction of the diagram): `Now, as will pressantly be felt, there's tew tricklesome poinds where our twain of doubling bicirculars, mating approxemetely in their suite poi and poi, dunloop into eath the ocher . . . join alfa pea and pull loose by dotties and, to be more sparematically logoical, eelpie and paleale by trunkles' (FW 295^6). We return to the question of the twins' sameness and di¡erence by way of this insistence on P. It is not the ¢rst time in Joyce that pee is con£ated with sperm, or, at the very least, charged with a strong male-sexual connotation.2 At face value, such a strategy displays an obvious unwillingness to recognize di¡erence ^ to acknowledge the plain fact that P is not exactly  (and that pee, to be sure, is not sperm). And yet this blindness to di¡erence is precisely the stu¡ that the rhetoric of the Wake is made of: it is what we call metaphor. And what Joyce, sometimes misguidedly, calls a pun.3 Margaret Solomon has commented on the symmetry of the diagram, claiming that the ¢gure represents `more than the lower extremities of a woman. If the diamond-shaped rhombus, as a whole, is ``the no niggard spot of her safety vulve'' (297. 26^7), it is as well, in its two parts, the double nature of the woman: mother and temptress.' Solomon goes on to argue that `the diagram's double nature applies not only to the woman. . . . In the ¢rst place, the two circles are the twin ``pair of accomplasses'' working on the problem' (1969: 106). She concludes that `the ``mating'' of the circle suggests at least temporary uni¢cation of the twins ^ in male-to-male sexual activity but also in a comingtogether as one ¢gure' (ibid.: 107). My interest in the diagram, indeed in the rhetoric of the entire episode, lies less in an interpretation of the speci¢c sexual signi¢cance of the image itself than in an understanding of the relation between time and the ¢gure. It is a two-way relation that concerns both the manner in which processes of ¢guration and self-¢guration are constituted in time and the way in which the mind reproduces an idea of time by focusing, ¢guratively, on one or other of time's distinctive qualities. I subscribe to Solomon's opinion that the diagram is as much about the mother's sexuality as it is about the identity and di¡erence of the twins (two Ps, as it were, in a pod). It is also, and most importantly, about imagining the genealogy of time and space: about a

36

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

metaphysical automatism, or a habit of thought, that would have us trace the idea of the one back to the eternal science of the other. Dolph's investigation of eternal `geomatry' produces an anatomy of Penelope as prehuman-and-posthuman matrix. The exercise brings forth the image of a space that stands for our eternal mother earth, and of a temporal £ow that covers the history of `all meinkind' (FW 297) from birth to burial in a primordial and `constant . . . £uxion' (FW 297). To be sure, we are not merely dealing, here, with an abstract and un-individuated idea, but rather, with an allegory of the spatio-temporal dimension in which the history of ideal eternal spaces (to wit, the history of geometry) was ¢rst conceived. Such an expression ^ `the history of ideal eternal spaces' ^ begs the question of what happens to eternal forms when they are historicized: why, indeed, would any eternal object need a history? And how could a history of our eternal mother earth, the very ground from which any history is thought, be shown to unfold in time? Inasmuch as the history of geometry is originary of the principles of repetition and di¡erentiation it is also constitutive of identity, of sameness and of a vision of time captured and immortalized in the instant of imagination. As the twins work out their geometry problem step by step, a peculiar quality of time becomes apparent. (The Wake's insistent allusions to genetic and mechanical reproduction are to be construed in the light of such a quality which has to do with the presentation and the preservation of geometry's eternal truths, that is to say, with the ironies involved in the need to make present that which is eternal: `Now as will pressantly be felt . . . Now to compleat anglers . . . Now, aqua in buccat. I will . . .' [FW 295^6].) The geometry lesson foregrounds an internal split in the structure of the now, a `double nature' characteristic of the real-live `pressant' in which the exercise is conducted. An image of the future is inscribed, a priori, in this `pressant'. The future is seen as a constituent part of the `now' propelling the `now' beyond its limit. The interplay between the eternal existence of ideal forms and their actualization in the geometer's reiterated `now' is exemplary of a vaster temporal design in which the narrative of the Wake may be seen to unfold. At several junctures throughout the novel, history is characterized in terms of a constant process of self-reproduction whereby the ideal present produces images of itself and projects them onto the future. An ideal eternal movement of time engenders and accumulates these images, maintaining them in their virtual state, until the events of real history reduce one of them to actuality; and in the real instant of imagination the real present recognizes itself as past: `there is a future in every past that is present' (FW 496). Imagination holds past, present and future in a continuous and contemporaneous grasp. And, concurrently, the events of history register a conversion from the actual present to the actual past by way of a `PROBAPOSSIBLE' future (FW 262). Presence is thus given to ideal eternal history in `¢ckers [¢gures] which are returnally reprodictive of themselves' (FW 298). If a science of eternal mother earth ^ gaia mater ^ is the origin of all abstract thought, including the thought of that `constant . . . £uxion' (FW 297)

Time in Figures

37

we associate with time, it is on account of this `returnally reprodictive' movement that is proper to the ¢gure of the circle. The idea of returnally self-reprodictive ¢guration extends easily to the very early image of time presented in the Wake ^ an image that famously situates the Wake's medias res in the present tense of a `riverrun past'; and that announces the novel's grand-narrative design as the completion of an ideal historical recourse. Much has been written about the novel's opening gesture and the significance of the ¢rst paragraph for Joyce's investment in circular or re-circular structures.4 Clive Hart's observation that `Joyce decided quite early that Finnegans Wake was to be cyclic as a whole ^ the last sentence running into the ¢rst' (1962: 46) expresses a critical commonplace that has long been canonized by hearsay. Appropriately enough, the view that the Wake's ¢rst sentence joins with the very last to complete a full circle seems to have been always in circulation, and though it has been challenged on occasion it continues to be approached as standard opinion. I do not wish to question this opinion here. Nor even to rehearse it. My intention, in bringing up this point, is to take note of the correspondences that obtain between the idea of `¢ckers which are returnally reprodictive of themselves' and the image of time produced in the Wake's incipit. From its opening word the Wake would have us construe Time's unity ^ which is to say, Time's continued existence in the present ^ in terms of a mechanics of eternal self-reproduction. As in the case of Stephen's `instant of imagination', the riverrun covers an inter-subjective history that holds Past, Present and Future within the reach of a homogeneous and homogenizing self-presence. Once again there would seem to be no trace of change or of selfdi¡erentiation in this history. The mind generates an image of inter-subjective movement in which time £ows, runs and `recirculates' but doesn't quite pass. `Which is unpassible' (FW 298). A time that £ows without passing £ows, to be sure, but inconceivably. And it is truly an `unpassible' thought that the Wake contemplates, that it imposes on the reader, from that ¢rst `riverrun past . . .'. We say of time that it £ows and also that it passes. Yet passing is precisely the predicate of time with which the imagination (and indeed the entire business of reproducing ideal geometric ¢gures) is unable to cope. There is in fact a slight but extremely consequential di¡erence between £owing and passing to which we are alerted by the Wake's strategic con£ation of £uvial imagery with the rhetoric of passing water. Passing is ¢rst and foremost a movement that traces change; it quali¢es the changes wrought by time as essentially eschatological. What this means, quite simply, is that passage is an essential element mediating the production of the future and the advancement of history future-ward. Now, before proceeding to a more detailed examination of this claim it will be useful to make a distinction between two orders of the future emerging in our readings so far. In the ¢rst place, we may understand the future as a projected term of the present: a foreseen or pre¢gured consequence of history, subordinated to its constant linear expansion. Alternatively, we may consider the

38

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

future as a multiplicity of virtual states coexisting in the instant of imagination: a series of virtual self-images by means of which the `pressant' endlessly renegotiates its end and renews its lease of life. In the former case we view the £ow of time as a homogeneous movement that is synchronized with the `now' of an ideal self-presence.5 The present has already caught up with the future; it holds it in its grasp e¡acing its potential for change. Such a future is actual (it is produced) only insofar as it is overtaken by the now: but to the extent that it has come to pass it is really not futural at all. By contrast, the future as `virtuality' yields its image to the present as an in¢nity of projected `probapossibilities'. While it is also generated by the present, it can be said to obey a different logic of production and circulation. Which is to say that it belongs to a di¡erent economy. In the opening section of Time and Free Will, Bergson promotes a similar distinction when he observes that `the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible. Even if the most coveted of these becomes realized, it will be necessary to give up the others, and we shall have lost a great deal. The idea of the future, pregnant with an in¢nity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we ¢nd more charm in hope than in possession' (1910: 9^10). Once again what is at stake here is a distinction between two ways of renegotiating the boundaries of self-presence. It is signi¢cant that Bergson should formulate the comparison by way of a discourse concerned with production ¢gures and reproductive e¤ciency. As long as the future remains `unrealized' (in other words, as long as it continues to be shaped by hope) time will be seen to generate an in¢nity of virtual images. Notably, insofar as these images are said to `appear to us' they are already understood as a modi¢cation of the present. In this speci¢c sense, there can be little di¡erence between the production of a series of possible futures in the imagination and the actual occurrence of one of these futures in history. So long as the future is foreseeable it can always be reduced to a variable of the now: it has already been ¢gured. The advantage of keeping the real future at bay, by deferring its possession, amounts to not having to choose between one or other possibility of actualization, thereby giving up `a great deal'. It is not, therefore, that the future we hope for does not exist. But rather, that the `multitude of forms' under which it comes to be held in consciousness is numerically inde¢nite or at the very least unquanti¢able: it exists at any given time umpteen times over and remains irreducible to an `either^or' logic of selection and forfeiture. This is an economy in which nothing is given up and nothing is lost: in which the intense instant of imagination, the `now' (or rather, the `I-now' intended as the minimal unit of ideal history), though pressured future-ward by desire, is held back by an unwillingness to act. We come, by this route, to a third conception of the word `future': one that Bergson does not expressly mention here, but that is of the utmost importance in the organization of his philosophical system. It is, of course, the future as

Time in Figures

39

unforeseeable event, a future considered not from the perspective of the advancing present, or of the instant of imagination, but from a place outside the present ^ let us say, if that is at all possible, from the future itself. Like the future we hope for, this is an image of time predicated on a ¢ctional movement of thought. It has no standing in actual fact; much less in personal expectation. Yet unlike hope (which, since it forgoes nothing of itself, is already a selfcontented state), it bears a relation with the present that is purely interruptive. We may assume that as an object of desire the future a¡ects the present confronting the £ow of time with an impulse for change. But change is only possible if there is passing ^ in other words, if something of the identity of the present is given up or lost. Loss of identity is of the essence if we are to make anything of time's operations beyond what we see in an abstract representation of successive moments arranged side by side. The future is a sister of the past in this sense: that it confronts the present with the imperative of passing. We might conclude, then, that the value of the past in the Wake's intersubjective economies ^ what we might term its currency, as it were ^ is precisely that of making the now perishable.

Stolentelling and the Modernity of Finnegans Wake The principle extends to the Wake's discourse on literary history, a discourse in which the perishable nature of the now is singled out as the very ground on which the work's historical and canonical placement can be predicated. In fact, for all its fascination with anachronism and unpassible time-frames, it will be observed that the Wake displays a remarkable degree of historical selfawareness. At every moment in the narrative it contrives to theorize its own status as a modernist document in a self-re£exive movement intended to guarantee its prospects of historical survival and, at the same time, to problematize them. From a stylistic point of view Joyce's writing is calculated to set the most demanding standards of modern literary innovation. Thematically, it foregrounds the di¤culty of seeking to invent the future by recycling the past. In many ways the entire project of Finnegans Wake can be seen to epitomize a complex anti-historicism characteristic of the modernist avant-garde, where the passing away of the present is given such weight and consequence that it acquires traditional value. This irony comes to inform, as we shall see, the very meaning of modernism as a historical category. Paul de Man has de¢ned the `genuine spirit of modernism' as a `desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure' (1983: 148). The modern artist's illusion of breaking with the past altogether brings into play an impossible relation of the subject with its history: a relation that is examined by Joyce both with regard to individual character and to national identity. De Man explains that `[a]s soon as modernism becomes conscious of its own strategies ^ and it cannot fail to do so if it is justi¢ed . . . in the name

40

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

of a concern for the future ^ it discovers it to be a generative power that not only engenders history, but is part of a generative scheme that extends far back into the past' (ibid.: 150). The modernist avant-garde would like to identify with the purely generative forces of time: with a temporal event that is directed only future-ward. It views itself as a project of radical innovation. Its de¢ning concern is the very possibility of an aperture in the homogeneous fabric of history, one that would entail the risk of history's undoing at the same time as it spelt out a characteristically self-conscious investment in the emancipatory thrust of `new' ^ that is, `contemporary' ^ art. In this context artistic innovation stands for the opportunity of a true break with tradition, but a break that is in fact impossible since, as de Man points out, `modernity cannot assert itself without being at once swallowed up and reintegrated into a regressive historical process' (ibid.: 151). Joyce's own sense of appurtenance to this picture of modernity is complex and far from given. His reading of writers and theorists who were instrumental in shaping the intellectual geography of modern avant-garde Europe (one thinks of Pound on the Anglo-American scene or, for instance, Marinetti in Italy) was not a decisive factor in the formation of basic aesthetic principles. Nor were these contemporaries ever acknowledged as a major source of inspiration for the Wake in the manner that Giambattista Vico is understood to have been. Joyce never missed an opportunity to remind his admirers, as well as his detractors, of his scholastic education and his debt to Aristotle and Aquinas. He maintained that Vico had anticipated Freud and confessed to preferring Aquinas when asked about Nietzsche and Schopenhauer (Ellmann 1982: 340, 342). To a friend who declared proudly `Noi futuristi italiani siamo senza passato' [We Italian futurists are without a past], he is known to have replied `e senza avvenire' [and without a future] (Budgen 1972: 198) ^ a response that tallies with another comment made upon receiving a copy of Ezra Pound's poetry: `I am looking forward to reading your poem. I am sure it will be scintillante di giovinezza [sparkling with the freshness of youth] and I hope you put in one or two sweet lines for my old-fashioned ear' (Ellmann 1982: 161). We read these anecdotes for what they are worth: as genuine claims dictated by the need to root an extravagantly innovative text in a solid cultural tradition. They are also an indication that while Joyce may have been interested in the scienti¢c and philosophical revolutions of modernity he seldom adopted a modern philosophical system wholesale. If one hears echoes of, say, Einstein or Freud, it is on account of the Wake's encyclopaedic resources rather than of a coherent engagement with psychoanalysis or subatomic physics.6 The text collects names and borrows current ideas for the most part indiscriminately. We recognize in its intricate design a strategy of citation which typically merges past and present, which engages with the past anachronistically, and juxtaposes old concepts with current issues often to iron out the di¡erence. John Rickard, citing Michael Patrick Gillespie, notes that Joyce's library numbered two books by Bergson and an additional work on the French philosopher written by Joseph Solomon (Rickard 1998: 29). The widely-held view is

Time in Figures

41

that Joyce was interested in Bergson as a philosopher of entelechy; which is to say that Bergson provided Joyce with a theory of the human soul adjourned to a modernist philosophical vocabulary. Rickard explains that the `Bergsonian sense of the interrelatedness of past, present, and future depends upon the existence of an unconscious force within the psyche or self ' (ibid.: 33). Such an unconscious force is responsible for the creation and the preservation of life in all living organisms; it is what `provides each individual thing with its ``nature'' and [what] drives it to ful¢l that nature' (ibid.: 33). Plainly enough there is something profoundly impersonal in this drive, despite the fact that it takes the individual psyche as its chief philosophical antecedent. More than a soul or a personal life-history, the e¨lan vital is an instinct of creation; it is the motivating principle by which nature itself creates. It may be termed evolutionary in the sense that it produces the continuous advancement of life in time. In this capacity it also serves as a basis for thinking the unity of the present and the nature of self-identity. Note that `life' and `time' become interchangeable in this context, where time unfolds as a constant creation of life-forms that are radically new and unprecedented. It is necessary to keep coming back to this idea. If for the modern artist `the new' was an imperative,7 virtually synonymous with the concept of a work of art, for Joyce it served, on occasion, to justify the di¤culty of the work itself: `I might easily have written this story in the traditional manner. Every novelist knows the recipe. It is not very di¤cult to follow a simple, chronological scheme which the critics will understand. But I, after all, am trying to tell the story of this Chapelizod family in a new way' (Ellmann 1982: 554). What this new way amounts to is, to a large extent, a rejection of accepted protocols of citation. Notoriously, Joyce cites without restraint or inhibition. He cites too much and inaccurately, distorting what he repeats while taking stock of the idea that every word in the text, every thinkable notion, is always already employed second-hand. The Wake, in this respect, seems to take to an extreme conclusion an intuition already voiced by Bloom in Chapter VIII of Ulysses: `Never know whose thoughts you're chewing' (U 217). There is a very concrete sense in which nothing new is ever to be found in the Wake, a sense in which `the new' has in fact been excluded from the labour of writing.8 Everything in the book is recycling and repetition: nothing could be further removed from the desire to start afresh, from the will to leave the past behind that describes, in de Man's words, the true character of modernism. And yet the point of Joyce's 17-year project is precisely that absolute novelty can only appear in the guise of the outrageous and the outlawed. The new is a scandal that no science, no principle of reason can re-appropriate. The Wake a¤rms its own modernity (its canonically sanctioned inventiveness) according to this principle. Uncannily, unlawfully it gives shape to a discourse that originates from outside the law ^ a discourse that is always spoken in the voice of another. Much is made throughout the novel of the signi¢cance of forged documents, of the technique of ventriloquism and of the practice of borrowing or stealing words. As Thwaites has observed, approaching the issue from a

42

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

Lacanian standpoint, `a radical impersonality of writing works itself out everywhere in Joyce. Joycean language speaks in tongues other than the user's, whatever the user, even if one of them should sign itself ``Joyce'' ' (2001: xv). My immediate interest is in the value which these motifs acquire in the modernist manifesto that is Finnegans Wake: impersonation, travesty and ventriloquism, like the practice of borrowing or stealing words, inform the text's engagement with its own self-image. The Wake recognizes itself, so to speak, as the patient work of an epical forger, and on such a premise it claims its status as a twentieth-century classic. Joyce's insistence on motifs of plagiarism, ventriloquism and forgery suggests that `making it new' in Finnegans Wake is always a matter of appropriating the discourse of others ^ words, styles and voices are integrated into the writer's complex of identities by means of an act of repetition that is either perverse or unlawful. The parables of `the Mookse and the Gripes' and `the Ondt and the Gracehoper' demonstrate the challenge that such perversion poses to readers trying to determine the book's ¢nal position on time. In both episodes, narration is attributed to a recognizable voice which houses a host of cumulative and sometimes contradictory identities.9 I have already characterized this voice as Shaun's. But Shaun `the spatialist' (FW 149), already an embedded narrator, also features as one of the rivalling ¢gures allegorized in his own fables: as Professor Jones (in Chapter VI) or as `Shaun the Post' (Chapter XIII) he is a narrator of two tales; whereas in the guise of the Mookse or the Ondt he appears within those tales standing for Space (and everything that the text associates with Space) against Time. Thus we observe the recurrence of the same binary set (Time against Space; Shem-type against Shaun-type) not only at di¡erent moments of the plot, but also within the same episode at di¡erent diegetic and discursive levels where an ingenuous game of parodic identi¢cations is at work seeking to discredit Shaun's side by exposing his craving for `temporal power' and by manipulating the reader's sympathies clearly in favour of the Gracehoper or the Gripes. Bergson's name enters the world of the Wake as a paratextual element following a provocation from Wyndham Lewis who claimed that `without all the uniform pervasive growth of the time philosophy started from the little seed planted by Bergson, discredited, and now spreading more vigorously than ever, there would be no Ulysses, or there would be no A la Recherche du Temps Perdu' (Lewis 1957: 89). It is no accident that, while being commonly dismissed as a grotesque misreading of Joyce's work, Lewis's suggestion continues to be an inescapable term of reference in many discussions of the Wake's temporality. Joyce himself has contributed to its importance by alluding to Lewis's work and proper name at several junctures in the novel and by making a parody of his adversary's rhetoric in the parable of `The Mookse and the Gripes'. Indeed most readers dealing with the episode have become used to characterizing it, quite simply, as `Joyce's response to Lewis',10 identifying the voice of its narrator with that of Lewis himself. It is quite understandable that Joyce should have been anxious to refute Lewis's charge that his work (undistinguished here from

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43

that of other writers like Proust, or even Gertrude Stein) is merely the symptom of a modernist obsession initiated by Bergson. Yet one cannot help observing that by taking up Lewis's challenge and working Lewis's thesis into his own repertoire of borrowed voices Joyce was also willing to impersonate ^ or, shall we say, to ventriloquize ^ his adversary's (mis)representation of him as a Bergsonian novelist.11 The notions of `ventriloquism' and `impersonation' express, then, Joyce's manner of adopting a discourse not his own, of performing the Wake's narratives in the voice of another. For the time being I shall use these terms innocently, without entering into the problem of whether a discourse can be borrowed or owned in the ¢rst place, and whether the categories of voice and person can be employed with impunity in any analysis of rhetorical and syntactic operations. Bearing in mind the paradoxes of impersonation and impersonality with which all acts of narrative in the Wake tend to acquaint us, I shall continue to speak of the Bergsonism of the Wake as the performance of a consummate ventriloquist. The Bergsonian context that is fed into the time-parables of Chapters VI and XIII provides a recognizable philosophical stance with which the Wake will engage as a historically self-conscious novel. The uncanny, impersonal nature of the performance ^ an utterance without apparent source ^ bears evidence to a violent interruption in the homogeneous fabric of the present and reinforces the idea that the discourses which command our sympathy in the Wake's timeparables are constituted, and can therefore only be construed, as the ironic counterpart to a highly inauthentic voice ^ a voice that has always already been reproduced, discredited and parodied. Thus, for instance, when George Otte argues that the sense of Joyce's implied critique of Lewis is best determined in a careful assessment of the ¢gure of the Gracehoper, it is evident that his analysis, presupposing an identi¢cation of the Gracehoper with Joyce, does not take into account that the Gracehoper is already a character represented within Shaun's tale. And that the Joyce who is supposedly advocating a synthesis of Time with Space could well be, likewise, already pre¢gured in Lewis's attack on the `new philosophies' inspired by Bergson. Ironically enough, Otte seems to touch on this point when he writes that ` ``The Mookse and the Gripes'' presents things as Joyce sees them, through Lewis's eyes; insofar as it bears on space and time, it is a revelation, not of Joyce's, but of Lewis's position and its consequences' (Otte 1985: 300). It transpires, here, that what is being focused upon in many of the readings dedicated to the time-parables is but a Joycean parody of Lewis's misreading of Joyce's treatment of time: an interesting issue in its own right, but one that distracts from a thetic understanding of the Wake's temporal dynamics rather than contributing to it. In the end one walks away with the impression that one has not been reading about time in Finnegans Wake at all. By embedding Shaun's allegorical narratives within the context of the Joyce^ Lewis polemic the Wake seems to anticipate its own readers' di¤culties in getting to the heart of this matter. (Even the use of the term `embedding', here, is deceptive, since there is no conclusive manner of deciding to what extent

44

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

Shaun's narratives are logically subordinated to the polemic, and to what extent they in fact inaugurate the polemic itself. All we have to go by is a ventriloquist's act, a dramatic performance in which the identity of voice and speaking subject is always provisional ^ that is to say, always an accident revealed and concealed by the passage of time.) The relay of paratextual discourses in which the interpretation of the time-fables continues to be deferred ^ Joyce is speaking for Lewis who is speaking for Joyce ^ reproduces, performatively, the unavailability of time to abstract scienti¢c analysis; time is cast, by Joyce-and-Lewis, as a disruptive inter-subjective movement that never congeals into an ideal image without being transformed in its essence, without beginning to di¡er from itself.

Two Types of Multiplicity Like the geometry lesson of Chapter X the parable of `the Mookse and the Gripes' employs the pretext of a scienti¢c discussion to engage with modern theories of time and space. The focus of the episode is once again on the bickering of the identical twins, and their endeavours to assert their individuality. Professor Jones, renowned `spatialist' (FW 149), is busy expounding an abstruse philosophical concept involving from the outset a critique of `the sophology of Bitchson' followed by a scathing reference to the `theorics of Winestain' (FW 149). The lecture produces an absurd hybrid of expressions that mimics Lewis's undiscriminating attack on modernist time-philosophy, and repeats, in a plethora of self-contradiction, his unwillingness to distinguish Einstein from Bergson.12 Jones is eager to discredit both the alleged multiplicity of internal conscious states (which comprise the identity of the subject in time) and the four-dimensional unity of space-time (which only serves, in Lewis's view, to subordinate the traditional three dimensions to the fourth).13 His apparent intention is to dissociate time from space by means of a dissection of the concepts of talis and qualis, for which purpose he has promised to deliver an ad hoc quantum theory. The theory soon develops into an incoherent harangue principally concerned with an aggressive promotion of the speaker's perspective. Jones ¢rst tries to intimidate his audience with a string of pseudo-technical terms borrowed from his antagonist and alter ego Loewy-Brueller [Lewis/Le¨vy-Bruehl]. The space/ time dichotomy is subtly worked into this speech, with references to geometry and television (far sight) balancing an allusion to the activity of providence (foresight) in the Ideal Eternal descent of man: `the inception and the descent and the endswell of Man is temporarily wrapped in obscenity, looking through at these accidents with the faroscope of television . . . I can easily believe heartily in my own most spacious immensity' (FW 150). Having argued his worth and taken his rivals to task the Professor decides to tone down the rhetoric: `As my explanations here are probably above your understandings, lattlebrattons . . . I shall revert to a more expletive method' (FW 152). The fable of `the Mookse

Time in Figures

45

and the Gripes' is thus presented as an illustration of a scienti¢c thesis for the bene¢t of the non-specialized reader. The thesis takes the twin concepts of `quality and tality' (FW 149), paralleled by the pairing of `quantum' and `tantum', as its main mathematical-philosophical referent ^ both sets of terms focusing our attention on the categories of genus and number and on the production of like by like (`tale e quale' in Italian means one and the same whereas `tanto quanto' indicates an exact balance between two equal amounts). On more than one occasion Chapter VI suggests that the twins are in fact identical, that they form a single unit, divided yet inseparable. This notion is conveyed most notably in the closing words of the chapter, `Semus sumus' (FW 168), but also in the play on the word mukke which is Danish for `to gripe' (Tindall 1969: 121). The parable of `the Mookse and the Gripes' assigns to each of the twins contrasting character traits so that it should always be possible to tell them apart. The Gripes (a Shem-type) is associated with good hearing, with a preference for time over space and with a mobility suggestive of religious and political restlessness. The Mookse on the other hand is singled out by the motifs of sight, by a thirst for his rival's blood, and by an identi¢cation with centralized Papal-Imperial authority. The Shem/Shaun opposition repeats itself consistently throughout the Wake, yet the de¢ning character traits are taken to such levels of abstraction that the di¡erences are sometimes ironed out and the very mechanisms of bisection or duplication which establish the twins' individuality give way to fusion (and confusion). In the abstractions yielded by the book's pseudo-scienti¢c discourses Shem and Shaun become as interchangeable as the two points `P' and `' at which `our twain of doubling bicirculars' intersect. Bisection and duplication ensure that sameness and di¡erence are produced according to a principle of good measure. The outline separating same and other is blurred, yet the mathematical equation that organizes the interchange of both terms, e¡ectively balancing them out, remains fundamentally unchallenged. In their last appearance, as Muta and Juva, the twins themselves make this point very clearly: Muta: So that when we shall have acquired uni¢cation we shall pass on to diversity and when we shall have passed on to diversity we shall have acquired the instinct to combat and when we shall have acquired the instinct combat we shall pass back to the spirit of appeasement? Juva: By the light of the bright reason which daysends to us from the high. (FW 610) Such a narrative pattern may be seen to express the unvarying nature of the Wake's universe, describing an ultimately stable foundation on which all of Joyce's semiotic extravagances are grounded. The text's volatility would appear to be, here, but a surface e¡ect, an impression of anarchy regulated by an underlying solidity of structure. This is a view held by several readers of Joyce's last novel. Terry Eagleton, for one, has observed that `[t]he Wake's anarchic di¡erencing is possible only on the basis of a secret homogenizing of reality, a prior

46

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

equalizing of all items that then enables them to enter into the most shocking idiosyncratic permutations. There comes a point, as Hegel was well aware, at which ``pure'' di¡erence merely collapses back into ``pure'' identity, united as they are in their utter indeterminacy' (1990: 36). Robert Klawitter seems to share Eagleton's assumptions when he speaks of the Wake as `a formal, mechanical, determinate, uncreative world' (1966: 433) that corresponds to `a parodic representation of unreality as Bergson describes it' (ibid.: 435). For these and other critics, the Wake is at heart (`secretly') an a¤rmation of the common nature of all things in the world: it posits reality as a solid and unchanging structure onto which change and diversity are layered. In the following paragraphs I should like to focus on a signi¢cantly di¡erent view of the notion of di¡erence than the one expressed by Eagleton (via Hegel) or by Klawitter (via Bergson). I believe such a view will account more fully for the extravagance of the Wake's treatment of time and for its £uid representation of reality. Time in the Wake is stranger, more inexplicably unique than the periodic fusions and ¢ssions of Shem and Shaun might suggest. It is true that Joyce insists on the reversibility of the changes wrought by time, subordinating the antagonism of Shem and Shaun to the overriding fact of a common genetic identity. As the history of the twins' rivalry progresses it produces diversity from sameness, and sameness from diversity without altering the nature of the one or the other. This plot is viewed `[b]y the light of the bright reason which daysends to us from the high' as a self-ful¢lling and self-perpetuating exchange. Time in the Wake is indeed reversible; the twins are genetically and conceptually identical; and their constant bickering ^ their `coming together as one ¢gure' and coming apart in two halves ^ provides a dramatic representation of the interplay of coinciding contraries. Such a representation, however, fails to take into account the Wake's rhetorical and syntactic idiosyncrasies, speci¢cally, the fact that the performance of the Wake's narrative must be approached by way of a particularly intractable grammar: a grammar of the night the interpretation of which invites a rigorous rethinking of the concept of di¡erence and the movement of self-di¡erentiation. This grammar, as Rabate¨ has shown, re£ects an unstable and highly sexualized world in which identities shift and interpenetrate within the framework of an undi¡erentiated totality. By virtue of the grammar's transformative charge, the question of bisection and duplication, with its attendant geometrical issues, becomes inseparable from the motif of bisexuality developed throughout Joyce's novel. The bisexual paradigm, as Rabate¨ describes it, stands for a creative and self-regenerating impulse that hovers hesitantly, undecidably, between di¡erentiated states. Conducted within the wider context of a discourse on relativity Rabate¨'s analysis of the Wake's `bisectualism' (FW 524) comes to constitute an obligatory passage in any discussion of the production of textual di¡erence in Joyce. Rabate¨ explains that Joyce's interest in the concept of relativity originates in a reading of Bruno's cosmological theories. In the Wake, Bruno's philosophy of coinciding contraries is paired with a modernist awareness of the indeterminate nature of the physical world, and translated

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47

into a textual practice that admits of identity ^ of the unity of the one ^ only as a violent and sexually charged collision of contradictory forces: whereas Ulysses continually reasserts the positivity of repetition, Finnegans Wake asymptotically verges on the neutralisation of sexual di¡erence, comes as near as possible to the self-cancellation of sexual roles in the Babel of a barred origin, only to exhibit the very machinery of this tension which it dismantles. Bisexuality, a coincidence of contraries in words, is . . . the warping process or progress of the text itself. The narrative scheme of the Wake relies on opposites articulated within a kind of totality of pre-given meanings. (Rabate¨ 1991b: 156) Despite this inauspicious reference to a totality of pre-given meanings, Rabate¨'s thesis does not neglect to do justice to the £uidity of Joyce's style and to the mutable nature of identities in his last novel. Joyce, we read, `wishes in a second movement to blur the neat dichotomies that would tend towards ¢xity. His next move is therefore to uncouple his pairs; to unleash his couples of opposites' (ibid.: 157). The status of this `second movement' is crucial, though from a narratological or semiological perspective di¤cult to pinpoint. To be sure, it cannot be said to materialize at any one particular turn in the narrative. Presumably, it concerns a phase in Joyce's method of composition, which would imply that the principles of bisection and duplication structuring the narrative of Finnegans Wake only serve to establish a provisional state of a¡airs ^ one that the act of writing will proceed to undo, over and over. The process reveals a gap: a measured interval that intervenes between a hypothetical ¢rst moment of writing (in which the narrative structure is manifested) and a second moment (in which a change is registered); such an interval is experienced by Joyce's reader as the repetition of a di¡erence that is always already annulled. As we grapple with the di¤culties of the Wake's nocturnal grammar two orders of di¡erence must be discerned. The ¢rst is a di¡erence between self and other: a di¡erence we might term conceptual or categorical, since it distinguishes self and other a priori and classi¢es them as two units on the opposite side of a mathematical relation. This type of di¡erence is the negative counterpart of sameness in a syllogistic progression. It contradicts sameness conceptually but it leaves the concept of sameness intact. It must not be confused with a di¡erence that we perceive between self and self-same: a di¡erence that cannot be objectively determined and that acts upon the integrity of the conceptual/mathematical unit, so that any given quantity turns out in fact to be unequal to itself. Although Joyce does exploit the theme of doubles and coinciding contraries to an extreme degree ^ though he insists on `the mating of opposites' and the splitting of the same to balance di¡erence and self-identity ^ it will be established that the burden of producing self-di¡erence in the Wake is not on a mathematical procedure of bisection and duplication but on a rhetoric of excess that invalidates all good measure. As was noted earlier, this type of rhetoric

48

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

features most prominently in association with the character of Shem, `pelagiarist' (FW 182) and epical forger, whose attempt at self-portraiture results in the creation of a monstrous double reminiscent of Dorian Gray's: [he] wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history . . . but with each word that would not pass away the squidself which he had squirtscreened from the crystalline world waned chagreenold and doriangrayer in its dudhud. (FW 185^6) In the Wake, the paradox of an identity that di¡ers from itself stands unresolved and un-synthesized not because the book has exempted itself from the obligations of a coherent thesis, but because the idea of time with which it engages exceeds ¢gural or thetic representation. Joyce is aware that the £ow of time can only be reduced to meaning, to intelligibility, when the tension between the delimitation of the now and its in¢nite preservation in internal consciousness is mastered in a successfully synthesized dialectic. Intelligibility insists on a mode of representation that separates identity from di¡erence, on a logic that decides between conjunction and disjunction. Joyce's narrative performances, on the other hand, demonstrate the possibility of a writing that refuses to iron out these contradictions. (To revert, once again, to a rhetoric of simple origins it would be useful to think of these contradictions as being in advance of history and its cunning, as being also in advance of consciousness and its ¢ctive manifestations.) In this respect the Wake's temporal economies are best measured out in acts of self-writing which either submit the self to syntactic displacement and metaphorical transformation or augment the temporal gap between I and I to lay bare its disjunctive/conjunctive operations. The intractable syntax of Finnegans Wake gives us to understand that the processes of identi¢cation and self-di¡erentiation which we call autobiography are in fact more primordial, more originary than the consciousness to which these same processes are ascribed. The interruption of self-presence, consequent upon a loss of pure interiority that de-synchronizes the now from its double, shakes the logical ground which guarantees time's formal unity so that it becomes necessary to think of an autobiographical practice prior to any autobiographical subjectivity, that is, of a writing in excess of the ideal eternal present in which the remembered past and the foreseeable future are held. Shem's `doriangrayer' experience, like all other Wakean attempts at self-representation, insists on the re of the representing object ^ the mirror, the portrait or the autobiographical text ^ as a mark of originary di¡erence. In other words, it exempli¢es a passing that belongs enduringly to the other, and, as such, will not be recuperated to the order of the same. Taken as a pair Shem and Shaun are a genetic unit, but taken individually they are unequal to themselves. Their unity is wrought in a movement of self-di¡erentiation which cannot be accounted for either geometrically or chronographically.

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In Chapter 2 of Time and Free Will Bergson observes that throughout the history of metaphysics failure to distinguish correctly between two types of multiplicity a¡ected the meaning of the word `time', giving rise to no end of philosophical inconsistency. Di¡erent meanings of the word `time' (time as the production of pure heterogeneity and time perceived under the form of a homogeneous medium) correspond to di¡erent ways of organizing the relation between things that change in essence and things that preserve their identity. Bergson explains: we must admit two kinds of multiplicity, two possible senses of the word `distinguish', two conceptions, the one qualitative and the other quantitative, of the di¡erence between the same and the other. Sometimes this multiplicity, this distinctness, this heterogeneity, contains number only potentially, as Aristotle would have said. Consciousness, then, makes a qualitative discrimination without any further thought of counting the qualities or even of distinguishing them as several. In such a case we have a multiplicity without quantity. (TFW 121^2) The reason pure time (duration) cannot be counted or measured is that it unfolds in a complex unity of multiple states of consciousness which change in essence as they unfold. These states cannot be numbered because they are part of a continuous process of self-di¡erentiation; and if the parts change with every temporal transaction there is no way of adding them up to a whole. As a multiplicity that `contains number only potentially' this whole ^ this continuous process ^ is undecidably singular and unquanti¢able. The illusion of measuring or counting time derives from a second type of multiplicity, which arranges abstract units side by side, and enables us to reckon with reality in numbers. We count time as a succession of moments, a dotted line in which one `now' follows another. This is `time' only in the conventionally correct (but philosophically deceptive) sense of the word: it is a question of a multiplicity of terms which are counted or which are conceived as being capable of being counted; but we think then of the possibility of externalizing them in relation to one another, we set them out in space. Unfortunately, we are so accustomed to illustrate one of these two meanings of the same word by the other, and even to perceive the one in the other, that we ¢nd it extraordinarily di¤cult to distinguish between them or at least to express this distinction in words. (TFW 122) Clearly, it is not just a matter of being aware of the confusion in order to avoid it. Bergson warns us that the extension of the category of pure time into space is an inescapable product of conceptual thought, determined by habit and modes of expression, but also by the very manner in which human intelligence operates, creating meaning (fashioning the intelligible world) in a process of abstraction. Abstraction entails a reduction of the temporal £ux to the order of sameness and repetition: `what is repeated is some aspect that our senses, and especially

50

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

our intellect, have singled out from reality, just because our action, upon which all the e¡ort of our intellect is directed, can move only among repetitions. Thus, concentrated on that which repeats, solely preoccupied in welding the same to the same, intellect turns away from the vision of time' (CE 52). As an abstract image time can only be conceived (and conceptualized) in terms of quantitative rather than qualitative di¡erentiations. This means that in the conceptual world time divides only to reproduce itself as the same. The image of the present extends into the future with no loss of identity, no essential or typological di¡erentiation involved. This is what Bergson means when he claims that `of the future only that is foreseen which is like the past or can be made up again with elements like those of the past' (CE 33). Immobilized and subjected to the purpose of a homogeneous view of reality, time is deprived of any potential for novelty or change. The blindness of foresight is, in this sense, identical to the blindness of geometry in that it loses sight of time in the act of objectifying it. Bergson examines the work of human intelligence and discovers a natural attraction of the intellect to the discontinuous, to the immobile, to the inorganic. These observations lead to the conclusion that `Of the discontinuous alone does the intellect form a clear idea' ^ a statement echoed scarcely a page later by the following: `Of immobility alone does the intellect form a clear idea' (CE 170^1). We learn that the intellect's principal tool for making sense of reality is to break it down into component parts and to rearrange these parts into pre-determined, universally meaningful structures. There is a sense, in Bergson's words, in which `a clear idea' of reality entails a suppression of everything that is vital and organic. Like a still life or a dissection it may have great truth value but is essentially lifeless: `we may expect to ¢nd that whatever is £uid in the real will escape [the intellect] in part, and whatever is life in the living will escape it altogether' (CE 169). The world of concepts becomes intelligible (and is therefore apprehended by the intellect) because it resembles the world of stable and solid objects: `Concepts . . . are outside each other like objects in space; and they have the same stability as such objects, on which they have been modeled' (CE 177). Insofar as it is an instrument of objective knowledge and intellectual understanding, inasmuch as it relies on abstraction and the setting up of recognizable (repeatable) signs, conceptual language remains a derivative of logic and geometry: that is to say, it provides an appropriate medium for the description of reality in terms of its constituent parts, dissected, immobilized and laid out in space. The bottom line, here, is that the world created by conceptual thought and geometric construction may indeed be eternal and all encompassing; but it is also incomplete. Something escapes this world that is variously de¢ned as `£uid', `mobile', `continuous' and productive of `change'. As we have seen, Bergsonian rhetoric would encourage us to identify this `something' with a lifeforce that animates being ^ a spirit of creation breathing through life: in Joyce it is an unholy ghost that inspires the writer's mock-Eucharistic transubstantiations; or, more pertinently in a reading of the geometry lesson of Finnegans Wake,

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the passing of water as a metaphor for the continuous self-consuming movement of time which escapes geometry's returnally self-reproductive ¢gurations. This movement dictates its own mode of presentation in excess of the present and motivates Joyce's repeated references to an artistic practice set to obliterate the objects of its own creation. The ageing self-portrait of Shem (FW 185^6) produced out of the artist's bodily excretions is a case in point; but several other examples come to mind. The forged and unsigned letter examined in the course of HCE's trial ^ a document that in many ways stands for the Wake itself ^ is compared to the `partly obliterated . . . negative' of a badly developed photo, yielding `a positively grotesquely distorted macromass' (FW 111) of illegible features. To the same e¡ect, one might also mention Joyce's invention of the `fadograph' (FW 6) which records scenes from the past in a kind of negative image, as if placing photographic memory under erasure. All of these instances testify to a peculiar Joycean conception of writing as a technique of archivization that serves, at one and the same time, both memory and forgetting.14 They also a¤rm a clear-cut epistemological distinction between the discourses of art and science ^ a distinction whereby the transient reality experienced and represented by the artist is viewed in diametrical opposition to the stable and solid world generated by the geometer. Once again, the ¢gure of Penelope provides an invaluable interpretive key. The artist conceives of an image that erases itself as it comes into focus: weaving is paired with unweaving, composition with decomposition, writing with unwriting, in a pattern that follows the ebb and £ow of time and invites a radical rethinking of the processes of ¢guration and self-¢guration: `As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image' (U 249). Weaving and unweaving, or writing and unwriting, do not merely stand for two antithetical passages in Joyce's creative process. I have just referred to a compositional pattern that simulates the ebb and £ow of time, but it is perhaps more accurate to speak of two simultaneous currents running counter to each other, or of a single temporal £ux that accommodates two contradictory drives. Consider, once again, Dolph's illustration of the `geomatric' ¢gure in Chapter X: Now, aqua in buccat. I'll make you to see ¢guratleavely the whome of your eternal geomater. And if you £ung her headdress on her from under her highlows you'd wheeze whyse Salmonson set his seel on a hexengown. (FW 296^7) The reference to `Salmonson' picks up a recurrent motif in the book wherein the ¢gure of the salmon is repeatedly associated with the sexual identity of the father. In the case of Dolph's geometry exercise this analogy is reinforced by the phonetic proximity of `salmon' and `semen', to suggest the following narrative concept: like semen, a salmon travels upstream to reproduce but also to meet its end. Its instinct ¢nds no contradiction in a venture that spells death and life, suicide and self-preservation at one and the same time. In order to understand the signi¢cance of this paradox for an account of the Wake's

52

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

temporal structure we shall have to imagine time's dual activity in terms of a multiple yet undivided £ow that comprehends both passing and advancing.15 Once again it will be necessary to think of past, present and future not as distinct points within a linear sequence but as states of being or becoming in which the history of the Self unfolds ^ passing away and pressing forward are here parallel functions of time that give time its direction, and regulate the production of selfsameness and self-di¡erence. Deleuze provides the following pertinent description of the dual nature of time, and the manner in which it is brought to relief in the modern cinematic image: since the past is constituted not after the present that it was but at the same time, time has to split in two at each moment as present and past, which di¡er from each other in nature, or, what amounts to the same thing, it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past. Time has to split at the same time as it sets itself out or unrolls itself: it splits in two dissymmetrical jets, one of which makes all the present pass on, while the other preserves all the past. (TI 81) Deleuze's interpretation of this complex dynamic is based on a reading of Bergson's notion of multiplicity, and seeks to open philosophy to the thought of a `whole' and `integral' order of time in which the past exists preserved within itself and ontologically independent of the present. The idea that past and present co-exist means that their inter-relation cannot be grasped either numerically or psychologically. We are not to think of the past as an earlier point in time (yesterday, one hour ago), nor of memory as a degraded presentation of the present (a sort of perception at one remove). For Deleuze the image of the past is to the image of the present as the virtual image is to its actual correlate; and their correct distinction depends on a movement of essential (genetic) differentiation. In other words the self-identical past is a past that has no foundation in any subjective act of memorization. It belongs to no single or speci¢c human present: We are too accustomed to thinking in terms of the `present'. We believe that a present is only past when it is replaced by another present. Nevertheless, let us stop and re£ect for a moment: How would a new present come about if the old present did not pass at the same time that it is present? How would any present whatsoever pass, if it were not past at the same time as present? The past could never be constituted if it had not been constituted ¢rst of all, at the same time that it was present. (B 58) We learn, here, that passing is not an event that befalls the now after it has come into being. That would make passing a mere subsequence of being. Nor is it a case of the simultaneity of two individual instants juggled together in consciousness, but rather of a double temporal index that constitutes the nature of time as simultaneously passive and active: `Useless and inactive, impassive, [the

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past] IS, in the full sense of the word: It is identical with being in itself. It should not be said that it ``was'', since it is the in-itself of being, and the form under which being is preserved in itself (in opposition to the present, the form under which being is consummated and places itself outside of itself )' (B 55). When we say that the past `is', while the present `passes' in a continuity of change, we employ the notion of passing as a synonym of fading and of becoming. Such a con£uence of terms alerts us, once again, to a structural ambivalence at play in the notion of passage: an ambivalence in which we recognize time's most characteristic operation. To pass is to become past (to become extinct): yet a passage is also a crossing over or a stepping past. Time in the Wake `brings us . . . back' (FW 3), and obliterates `us'. We rearrive in the present yet past the limit of the present: beyond the mark of the moment's ¢nitude. This surpassing of the limit is re£ected in a logic of waste and unmasterable semiotic excess that describes what is perhaps the Wake's most recognizable stylistic feature. Among other things excess names an economic principle. It determines the book's inter-subjective transactions, organizes the production of selfhood and otherness, and complicates our conception of the `now' as a chronological unit. We have discerned in the Wake's parodies of geometry a concern with the genesis of time, that is to say, with a reconstruction of the unitary instant that inaugurates the history of sameness and di¡erence. What comes undone in Joyce's writing, when the unit of measure exceeds itself, is precisely the integrity of such an instant ^ the solidity of the ground from which narratives ordinarily negotiate change and bring all modi¢cations of the Self into view (so that `in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by re£ection from that which then I shall be'). By overloading the `now' with metaphors of passing the Wake compels us to think time from a position that is not grounded in eternal self-presence. It replaces this ground with a singular movement of £ow and counter-£ow ^ a peculiar currency in which no unit of time is equal to itself, much less computable: in which, therefore, the passing of time can only be ¢gured as waste or excess.

The Economies of Desire and Waste Such an economy is the subject of the last and best-known of the Tales Told of Shem and Shaun. Joyce's ostensible design in this tale is, once again, to compare two types of multiplicity ^ two di¡erent orders of di¡erence, one of which is irreducible to measurement or quanti¢cation. The parable of `the Ondt and the Gracehoper' dramatizes this comparison in the clash of two diametrically opposed lifestyles. The stereotype of the pro£igate bohemian artist (with his reckless expenditure and self-destructive passion) is pitted against a respectable bourgeois ethic of hard work and honest saving. The moral of the story is that a multiplicity so radically heterogeneous as to di¡er even from itself cannot be part of a healthy economy, or, indeed, of any type of functional symbolic system.

54

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The Gracehoper's adventures repeat those of the Grasshopper in the famous fable by Ósop. From the start it is clear that we are dealing with a onedimensional ¢gure whose actions are motivated by sheer desire, that is, by an instinct that constitutes its own goal and has no object save self-perpetuation. In a sense, the Gracehoper is nothing but an allegory of this desire. Having spent the warm summer months indulging his pleasures ^ `making ungraceful overtures to Floh and Luse and Bienie and Vespatilla' (FW 414) ^ he is surprised by the winter chill, and with nothing left to spend and nothing to consume, his instinct manifests itself ¢rst as hunger, then as lust, and ¢nally as a sort of irrepressible restlessness: He had eaten all the whilepaper, swallowed the lustres, devoured forty £ights of styearcases, chewed up all the mensas and seccles, ronged the records, made mundballs of the ephemerids and vorasioused most glutinously with the very timeplace in the ternitary. (FW 416) The scene establishes a certain complicity between the passing of time and the workings of desire. In a very concrete sense, time is the Gracehoper's diet ^ a measure of time is implied in such words as whilepaper, lustres, styearcases, mensas, seccles, etc. But more signi¢cantly, time is invoked in the description of a powerful vitality, a force of life that sustains itself as it advances. As pure energy, or joie de vivre, desire is what feeds life and powers its evolutionary thrust. And yet there is more to this instinct than a life-promoting and life-sustaining joy. The ¢rst thing we learn about the Gracehoper is that he was `hoppy on akkant of his joyicity . . .' (FW 414). At the same time, we are told that he was `always striking up funny funereels with Besterfarther Zeuts, the Aged One, with all his wigeared corollas, albedinous and oldbuoyant, inscythe [McHugh: `Father Time's scythe'] his elytrical wormcasket . . .' (FW 414^15). It is important to remark, once again, that there would be no passage of time and no desire without this taste for death which accompanies the celebration of life and doubles it. If we are to grasp the allegory of the Gracehoper we must take stock of this contradiction, alluded to consistently throughout the tale: in the image of a funeral that is also a joke ^ of an orgy that is in fact a danse macabre. Metaphors of life and death play a crucial role in phenomenological and post-structuralist discourses on time. Let us recall that in both Hegel and Husserl the possibility of historical progress (and, by extension, the guarantee of an unwavering maintenance of reason that is synonymous with the institution of philosophy itself ) hinges on a dialectical pairing of these two notions ^ on the primacy of what Husserl calls `the living present', and the logical necessity that everything associated with `non-presence' and `non-life' be always accounted for within the order of self-presentation. In Phenomenology of Spirit the very truth of self-consciousness is established by means of what Hegel describes as a `life and death struggle'. Such a struggle plays itself out in the dialectic of the master and the slave as a drama of competing desires in which the possibility of death ^ and the dread which that possibility provokes ^ is seen to delimit life

Time in Figures

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and at the same time to empower it (see Hegel 1977: ½186^9). Derrida, for his part, develops a complex rhetoric of spectrality, what he calls a `hauntology', precisely in an e¡ort to think this binary opposition other than dialectically. He elaborates this rhetoric in the course of a suggestive reading of Hamlet, a reading focused on the ¢gure of the spectre as marker of a time that has fallen out of joint: What is the time and what is the history of the specter? Is there a present of the specter? Are its comings and goings ordered according to the linear succession of a before and an after, between a present-past, a present-present, and a present-future, between a `real time' and a `deferred time'? If there is something like spectrality, there are reasons to doubt this reassuring order of presents and, especially, the border between the present, the actual or present reality of the present, and everything that can be opposed to it. (1994: 39^40) The spectre inhabits a grey area. It complicates the boundary between life and death, between presence and non-presence, disabling the rule of reason, and putting at risk the very unity of the living present. Here we come upon the most striking disjuncture performed by the logic of spectrality upon time. In the spectral moment, the present in which past and future are dialectically resolved breaks with consciousness, and no longer serves as the homogeneous form in which the totality of time (present and not-present) unfolds. The present falls out of step with itself. And past and future cease to be subordinated to its £ow. This is where Derrida's re£ections on time take a decidedly ethical turn:16 it is only after the totalizing (and if you will totalitarian) power of the living present has been unsettled that di¡erence, as Derrida intends it, can begin to be thought on its own ground. By taking di¡erence seriously, we begin to take otherness seriously; and we begin to acknowledge the absolute otherness that is implied in what is unforeseeable or irrecoverably lost. Yet such knowledge, if we can still call it by that name, can only occur beyond conceptual, scienti¢c or ¢gural presentation. Like Derrida's spectres, the Gracehoper's instinct exempli¢es the unthinkable phenomenon of a disjoined temporality ^ a temporality that is excessive in its orientation towards life, as well as in its focus on death. In both respects the Gracehoper is proverbially wasteful.17 He lives in order to spend. But what he spends is life itself; his present is the present in which time burns itself out. By contrast, the Ondt's story bears testimony to a lifetime of prudence and careful budgeting ^ a lifetime that is equal to the sum of its accumulated moments. Come the winter season, the Ondt's successful seduction of the `four cigals' reads as a fair reward for his judicious lifestyle, and a prima facie endorsement of the bourgeois values of capital accumulation.18 Once we are tuned in to the terms of this debate a more precise picture of the temporal-economic import of such notions as `desire', `waste' and `the unforeseeable' begins to emerge. In the Gracehoper's lucid de¢nition, the Ondt's

56

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

foresight stands for an economy of the `Wastenot ' (FW 418), where nothing is lost and every investment guarantees a return. Such an economy re£ects the popular post-industrial belief that time (`dime' in Professor Jones's lecture) is money. It conditions us to regard time only as chronology, that is to say, as an abstract unit of measure that is always part of a circular, self-perpetuating exchange. The time of the Gracehoper, on the other hand, is precisely what cannot be counted or hoarded for later use. For to count or accumulate time, the Gracehoper insists, is tantamount to spatializing it.

The Costs of Narcissism, or a Portrait of the Artist as Another Man One aspect pertaining to the Gracehoper's character remains to be accounted for in our analysis of the Wake's ¢gurations of time. It is his identity as an artist ^ and, more speci¢cally, his status as one of Joyce's ¢ctive alter egos. The parable of the Gracehoper continues in the tradition of Joycean self-portraits, crediting the discourse of the artist with a privileged insight into the excesses and eccentricities of time. Such eccentricities are not only thematized in the economic moral of the tale but also encoded in the cliche¨s informing the Gracehoper's personality. The Gracehoper is a paradigm of Joycean narcissism, as well as an allegory of the artist's hunger. Bearing the terms of the allegory in mind ^ to wit, the non-dialectical interplay of self-preservation and extinction ^ it will be useful to rehearse the parable's autobiographical content (where by `autobiography' I mean, quite literally, a literature that deals with the rhetoric of life and self-identity). Kimberly Devlin has written compellingly about the pre-eminence of processes of self-¢guration in the Wake. Her reading describes `an epic of dispersal . . . e¡ecting most consistently the construction of identity itself, the attempt to formulate the self as a coherent whole' (1991: 67). In its quest for identity, the dreaming self constructed in the textual fabric of the dream-work recognizes itself as a textual construct, open to the in¢nite play of repetitions and substitutions. The Wake radicalizes this play giving rise to `the most systematic deconstruction of . . . all the means by which the conscious subject constitutes and de¢nes itself: name, self-image, vocation, age, role, memory, nationality, parentage' (ibid.: 92). Art and self-¢guration are, in this context, largely interchangeable terms. Both are de¢ned by a scene of self-recognition. Both are engaged in thinking what Deleuze would call `the outside' of this scene ^ an extremity of thought that interrupts all thought, undermining the cognitive ground on which any identity might be established. Once again time's most characteristic operation, its function in the construction of the narcissistic scene (precisely as the scene's radical outside), can be glimpsed only in the tension between an autobiographical a¤rmation such as `that which I was is that which I am . . .' on one hand, and the intensity of an object fading from consciousness on the other. That this object is an external correlate of the narcissistic I, a material support for the work of

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self-representation, is already well in evidence in Joyce's earlier works. A pivotal scene from Chapter 2 of A Portrait of the Artist anticipates Joyce's later take on this theme and functions as a perfect, if somewhat fortuitous, commentary on the Wakean concern with narcissism and its costs. While testing the consistency of his name and place in the world (`I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland . . .'), Stephen turns to an image of his younger self and intuits, for the ¢rst time, something of the logical relation obtaining between the phenomena of continuity and change: `The memory of his childhood suddenly grew dim. He tried to call forth some of its vivid moments but could not. He recalled only names. Dante, Parnell, Clane, Clongowes. A little boy had been taught geography by an old woman who kept two brushes in her wardrobe. Then he had been sent away from home to a college . . . . He had not died but he had faded out like a ¢lm in the sun' (P 98^9). It is of course signi¢cant that the insight should be expressed through the medium of free indirect discourse. In line with Stephen's later characterization of memory as entelechic force, as a work of self-maintenance designed to cancel the e¡ects of time, the expression `he had not died' functions here not as a simple statement of fact but, precisely, as a moment of self-recognition. Yet, sustaining the hero's autobiographical gesture is the sense that something of his identity has been irredeemably lost. His recollection is murky and his identi¢cation with the Stephen of his childhood di¤cult. All he can recover is a name and an impersonal image, the face of an inde¢nite other replacing the `I' (`A little boy had been taught geography . . .'). Crucially, Stephen's sense of fading out coincides with his attempt at self-representation in memory, even though the two clauses are in contradiction. Surviving is thought simultaneously with fading out, with wandering out of existence. In Ulysses we encounter a slightly older Stephen facing a similar quandary. His re£ections lead him to interrogate the institutions of parentage and nationality, the mechanics of memory and economic debt, the nature of his artistic vocation, and the processes by which an artist is trans¢gured in his art. It is in the course of Chapter IX that a bad conscience ¢rst discloses to the young writer the nature of identity as debt: How now, sirrah, that pound he lent you when you were hungry? . . . You owe it. Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got pound. Buzz. Buzz. But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms. I that sinned and prayed and fasted. A child Conmee saved from pandies. I, I and I. I. A.E.I.O.U. (U 242^3)

58

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

Like the Gracehoper, Stephen experiences something akin to remorse; and in a moment of heightened self-consciousness (`agenbite of inwit') he seems willing, if only for a brief instant, to subordinate all his excesses to the rule of an integrated and homogenizing self-presence. At the same time, a switch from interior to dramatic monologue presents us with a duplicated Stephen engaging in conversation with himself: Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's daughter. Agenbite of inwit. Do you intend to pay it back? O, yes. When? Now? Well . . . no. (U 242) The fact that Stephen's awareness of his own self-identity should coincide with such a switch is both ironic and signi¢cant, as is the multiple iteration of that apparently unmanageable pronoun `I . . .'. It is no coincidence that the scene should take place in the immediate context of a discussion on Hamlet, in the course of which Stephen explains his theory of artistic self-(trans)¢guration. We may recall that for Hamlet the fantasy of a melting of the £esh correlates with a need to forget the solemn promise made to the father. Similarly, for Stephen, the idea of molecular transformation holds, if only for a few seconds, the illusion of freedom from debts incurred in the past (`Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got pound'). The illusion is soon superseded, however, by an acknowledgement of the power of memory. Art is assigned, here, a fundamental role: that of negotiating memory (remembrance) and redismemberment, the maintenance of history and its total subversion. Stephen describes the process in terms of an uncanny haunting of the present by two ghosts. His choice of metaphors reveals his belief in the status of art as nature's double, and establishes a ¢rm analogy between the concept of time and the notion of textual productivity. The passage is worth quoting again: As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stu¡ time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. (U 249) Because it is better equipped to think the movement of self-di¡erence, the work of art is burdened with the responsibility of bringing about a renewal of the possibilities of self-¢guration ^ and, contingent upon such a renewal, also a total opening of the self to the unforeseeable. But such a privilege comes at a price. In Finnegans Wake Joyce fashions his portrait of the artist after the stereotype of the blind and ailing writer, a self-image he was forced to impersonate

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throughout most of his life, and a literary cliche¨ inherited from the very tradition that his book claims to record and counterfeit. The Gracehoper's blindness is emblematic of his inability to plan ahead, that is, to see into the future and make adequate provisions. But it also indicates a certain restlessness with the present, an existential malaise characteristic of the self-obsessed heroes of so much modernist ¢ction. The connection between the Gracehoper's condition and the idea of time as pure waste is far from incidental. On the contrary, it is integral to a modernist mythology that subordinates the contemplation of time's paradoxes to the investigation of the mysteries of personality, and associates the discovery that time unfolds as pure expenditure with the realization ^ time-costly in itself ^ that the modern subject is indeed in very poor health. Unconcerned with the past, and unable to take the future into consideration, `Joyce the Gracehoper' is also ill at ease in the present. The present ought to provide an ideal and undamaged space in which healthy people dwell reassured by an unquestioning faith in the moment's eternity. But this faith is irreconcilable with modernity. In Svevo's classic novel, La Coscienza di Zeno (1987), the protagonist associates the image of health that he perceives in his wife with the comfort of a uni¢ed temporal continuum in which she is able to feel at home: It was always astonishing to ¢nd, in every word, in every act of hers, that she believed in eternal life. She never openly admitted as much; indeed she was surprised once when I, having been long accustomed to hate inaccuracy before learning to love her mistakes, felt the need to remind her of the brevity of life. Oh, but what did it matter? She knew very well that we all must die; but now we were married, and it followed that we were going to stay together, together, together. . . . I ¢nally grasped the meaning of perfect health in a human being when I guessed that for her the present was a tangible reality in which one could ¢nd cosy and secluded shelter. (my translation)19 Interestingly enough, it is not only the far-sighted and the economically wise who bene¢t from good health, but also the self-contented, who are capable of replacing epistemological doubt with faith in the permanence of the present. A `cosy and healthy present', in the peculiar de¢nition warranted by Zeno's analysis, is a present undivided by extreme introspection, autobiography or sheer desire. It is a present untroubled by the anxiety of life's ¢nitude, of which, on the other hand, we are constantly reminded throughout the Gracehoper's story. To Zeno it becomes ¢nally clear that self-analysis is the root cause of the very illness he has been trying to analyse and cure all his life. For the Gracehoper, the plight of the modern artist is a self-consuming desire that impedes the acclimatization of the I in an idealized now. In either case a temporal model suggests itself de¢ning of the translations which the modern subject must undergo in autobiography: the internal partitioning of the subject in self-analysis, on the one hand, and the dislocation of self from self-presence, constitutive of desire, on the other. Both descriptions of the writer's existential malaise can be reduced

60

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

to a recoiling upon itself of the I, which, rather than establishing the truth and stability of self-consciousness highlights the distance that must be travelled by the ego in order to return to itself, e¡ectively augmenting the gap that separates the ego from its narcissistic double. A full demonstration of the pertinence of this motif to twentieth-century concerns would require, at this stage, an inordinate amount of citation and dispersive analysis. I will limit my comments, therefore, to a single reference lifted from Specters of Marx in which Derrida re£ects on the concept of modernity and on the sense experienced by modern mankind of inhabiting a disjointed time: There is the temptation to add here an aporetic postscript to Freud's remark that linked in a same comparative history three of the traumas in£icted on human narcissism when it is thus de-centered: the psychological trauma (the power of the unconscious over the conscious ego, discovered by psychoanalysis), after the biological trauma (the animal descent of man discovered by Darwin ^ to whom, moreover, Engels alludes in the Preface to the 1888 Manifesto), after the cosmological trauma . . . The century of `Marxism' will have been that of the techno-scienti¢c and e¡ective de-centering of the earth, of geopolitics, of the anthropos in its onto-theological identity or its genetic properties, of the ego cogito ^ and of the very concept of narcissism whose aporias are, let us say in order to go too quickly and save ourselves a lot of references, the explicit theme of deconstruction. (1994: 97) If, as these sources suggest, narcissism is at the heart of a peculiarly modernist understanding of time, it is as a myth capable of combining the story of a death-driven desire with a powerful metaphor about the quest for self-identity. Taken at face value the myth warns us that the unity and completeness of the self can only be achieved in the instant of death. But Derrida, following Blanchot, speaks of a decentred narcissism ^ of a narcissism disrupted by trauma, in which one (mis)recognizes oneself in another, or (mis)recognizes another in oneself.20 Here the relation of the ego to its own image has been troubled by an excess of death. Such excess, it bears repeating, must be understood as that very element in the image which escapes imagination, as the unaccountable factor in Narcissus's relation with himself which remains external to self-identity. It is death as instinct, death as waste, at once intimately bound up with life and absolutely other. The paradoxical intimacy of life and death is a topic to which Derrida will return again and again. As might be expected, his most explicit treatment of the theme occurs in conjunction with deconstructive readings of psychoanalytic texts, texts in which the aporias intrinsic to the narcissistic scene are systematically developed.21 But with respect to the motifs of time and expenditure ^ and of a speci¢cally Joycean treatment of time as expenditure ^ the paradox comes into focus most clearly in a discourse concerning the gift. In Given Time Derrida gestures towards the idea of an impossible economy; or more precisely, towards the thought of an economy that is aneconomic: `If the ¢gure of the circle is

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essential to economics, the gift [he explains] must remain aneconomic. Not that it remains foreign to the circle, but it must keep a relation of foreignness to the circle, a relation without relation of familiar foreignness. It is perhaps in this sense that the gift is the impossible' (1992: 7). The gift stands for something akin to pure expenditure. It names a transaction without return; without the completed circular narrative of investment and re-appropriation. In this regard its foreignness to the `¢gure of the circle' is easily explained. Yet we are told, aphoristically, that the foreignness is a familiar one ^ that it marks a relation of sorts (even though it embarrasses reason). The gift is therefore not entirely detached from economics, not altogether irrelevant to the economic register. It is also not simply the opposite of a commercial transaction, if by opposite we intend the dialectical negative of a given concept. It is to all intents and purposes impossible, and even more scandalously, the impossible. The terms of the quandary recur in Derrida's essay on the Wake. `Two Words for Joyce' announces the issue of the text's translatability as its primary concern, only to launch into a discursive inquiry of whether Joyce is liked, whether he can in fact be liked ^ and why: `I'm not sure I like Joyce. Or more exactly: I'm not sure he's liked. Except when he laughs ^ and you'll tell me that he's always laughing. . . . Knowing whether one likes Joyce, is that the right question?' (1984: 146). Thus, at the end of a digressive paragraph in which Derrida casually examines his likes and dislikes, we are invited to pause and take note. We are told that the matter may be of primary importance; but we are left wondering as to how it might be so. This is where the motif of the gift is introduced: Let us simplify outrageously. There is ¢rst of all the greatness of s/he who writes in order to give, in giving, and therefore in order to give to forget the gift and the given, what is given in the act of giving, which is the only way of giving, the only possible ^ and impossible ^ way. Even before any restitution, symbolic or real, before any gratitude, the simple memory, in truth, merely the awareness of the gift, on the part of giver or receiver, annuls the very essence of the gift. (1984: 146) Such giving, Derrida promptly speci¢es, is not the mark of Joyce's greatness, not the paradigm of great writing for which Joyce stands. Joyce's project is one in which an awareness of debt is unavoidable, in which the investment in an ideal eternal history is sure to pay o¡. Ultimately we learn this guarantee is nothing but a formidable foresight. It is the calculation of the future and its containment: and, by extension, the absolute limitation and containment of the other. There is no time and no space for the other in Finnegans Wake. This is why, perhaps, Joyce cannot be liked `except when he laughs . . .' but then, `he's always laughing'.22 In the moment of laughter a space is opened for the appearance of the other. It is an event that has all the makings of a narcissistic scene: a scene of self-recognition and misrecognition, of impossible relations, of a likeness that is foreign yet ever so strangely familiar. Here the discourses of the gift, of laughter,

62

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

of a certain construal of death all coincide with the logic of radical di¡erentiation that characterizes, as we have seen, themes of self-portraiture and selfreproduction throughout the Wake. Like the moment of misrecognition that both establishes and ruptures Narcissus's relation with himself, the gift remains irreducible to the order of (internal or lived) experience and yet central to it: One can desire, name, think in the proper sense of these words, if there is one, only to the immeasuring extent [dans la mesure de¨mesurante] that one desires, names, thinks still or already, that one still lets announce itself what nevertheless cannot present itself as such to experience, to knowing: in short, here a gift that cannot make itself (a) present [un don qui ne peut pas se faire pre¨sent]. This gap between, on the one hand, thought, language and desire and, on the other hand, knowledge, philosophy, science and the order of presence is also a gap between gift and economy. (Derrida 1992: 29) If thought, language and desire are ¢gures for that which `cannot present itself as such to experience', it is because they resist any conceptualization as unitary objects of consciousness. Projected, thrown beyond themselves, they fall in excess of their own de¢ning unity. Desire is always at once multiple and internally divided (one desires . . . still or already), which is why the reduction of desire to `the order of presence', to the shelter of a unitary and homogeneous `now', occurs at the cost of withdrawing desire itself from the instant of imagination ^ desire `as such'. Derrida's formulations, here, convey the idea of an epistemological gap that invites us to think desire (on) the outside of knowledge, philosophy and science. And this gap ultimately reiterates the distinction between time understood as a movement of self-displacement ^ an uncanny disarticulation of identity from its own ground ^ and chronology, which designates the medium in which change and di¡erence occur, always within the boundaries of the concept. We return, by way of this distinction, to the main di¤culty facing the author of Finnegans Wake: that of devising a language by which to articulate time's self-di¡erential character. There ought to be no misunderstanding as to the fact that while the story of `the Ondt and the Gracehoper' makes this di¤culty its theme, the parable itself contemplates no e¡ective or practicable solution. The disjuncture that haunts the Gracehoper's self-presence `fade[s] into impalpability' (U 240) in the very instant of imagination: its event can only be brought to the attention of reason if it is signi¢ed as loss of meaning or, as we have seen, as an absolute expenditure of life. Which means that, as an idea, it is impracticable and ine¡ective: it cannot be made to work. The Gracehoper's commitment to waste and excess is to be understood, before anything else, as an allegory of the artist's refusal to work ^ with all that the term implies in the history and economics of meaning. Work (or, in a di¡erent but not too di¡erent sense, working through) names a logic of reappropriation or re-absorption of that which is lost. For Hegel, it is the means whereby the slave realizes his own selfhood, and brings his own mortality

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to fruition. It annuls the absolute unproductivity that marks our relation to death, making death useful rather than wasteful, redeeming the meaningless from meaninglessness (and the present from passage).23 In phenomenology, as in any philosophical discipline that aspires to the status of a science, to think is to negate waste, and thus to ensure the maintenance of meaning and presence, even, and especially, when a crisis of meaning and presence is at hand. Wastefulness, absolute and unproductive as I intend it here, is abhorrent to science because, for one thing, it invalidates the logic of cause and e¡ect. Or rather, it undermines that logic by discrediting motive, investing in a course of action that is unmotivated and unrewarding. The fact that time cannot be put to work ^ that it is, in essence, wasteful ^ calls for a careful reconsideration of its relation to memory and to productive thought. Time can be neither recycled, nor included within the order of syntax and plot. It is, by de¢nition, uncontrollable, like that sudden burst of laughter which Derrida, taking his cue from Georges Bataille, identi¢es as the very undoing of Hegelian philosophy: Laughter alone exceeds dialectics and the dialectician: it bursts out only on the basis of an absolute renunciation of meaning, an absolute risking of death, what Hegel calls abstract negativity. A negativity that never takes place, that never presents itself, because in doing so it would start to work again. A laughter that literally never appears, because it exceeds phenomenality in general, the absolute possibility of meaning. (Derrida 1978: 256) It is within the folds of this discourse of excess that the idea of time receding from presence becomes thinkable to Joyce's readers. As we have seen, Joyce's allegory of time is comprised of a collage of incongruous elements, a patchwork that £aunts its seams, instead of covering them. Unsynthesized, the life and death struggle which shapes the Gracehoper's desire remains alien to sense. It is funny and funereal at the same time. Like laughter, or pure (irredeemable) waste, it exceeds dialectics. Time, here, does not appear, does not make itself present, but withdraws into the unimaginable as soon as it is made a subject of meaningful discourse. It is given to the imagination as fading, and to consciousness as radical exteriority, falling outside, radically outside, the horizon of ideal history or living presence. Such an outside, as we have learnt from both Deleuze and Derrida, continues to haunt the discourse that excludes it, to determine its boundaries and inhabit its centre. Presently, a detailed look at the Wake's rhetorical eccentricities will enable us to trace the disjunctures enforced upon ordinary syntax by its uncanny inclusion in Joyce's text, and thus to mark out, in the play of metaphors and shifting discourses, an unaccountable production of time as the work's unproductive excess.

Chapter 3

Making Time

If the Wake presents itself as a book of pawned words and counterfeit signatures it is because it purports to sum up (and synecdochically stand for) the institution of literature at large. All literature is made up of words that have already been used: of ideas and meanings that are only intelligible because already current. The burden of novelty and invention in the stolentales of Joyce's last novel is therefore squarely placed on the workings of its eccentric syntax ^ that is to say, on the word-connections generated by the extravagant logic of puns and the rhetorical ¢gure of paronomasia. Joyce's puns and paronomastic inventions are often singled out as key features in the Wake's structuration; but what, speci¢cally, do the mechanics of punning contribute to our understanding of Joyce's adamelegiac project? And in what sense can these mechanics be said to (re)produce or to (re)con¢gure the work's temporal makeup? My main concern in this chapter is to illustrate the manner in which Joyce's word-games can be seen to institute, as privileged elements of the Wake's structure in progress, a non-mathematical and non-dialectical relation with the structure as a whole. First, it will be useful to lay out some terminological groundwork. There is, to begin with, no critical consensus as to what exactly is meant by a Joycean pun. Umberto Eco, one of the ¢rst scholars to appreciate the signi¢cance of the pun for the Wake's poetics, has suggested that the practice of punning in Joyce correlates with a vision of the work of art as an open semiotic process. Eco de¢nes the pun as `a sort of pseudo-paronomasia which constitutes a forced embedding of two or more similar words' (1989: 65). Words are added together in what looks like a mathematical procedure, the result of which is an aggregate of hitherto unrelated meanings, a `forced' cohabitation of signi¢eds in a single signi¢er: `Sang ‡ sans ‡ glorians ‡ sanglot ‡ riant give ``sansglorians'' ' (ibid.: 65).1 Presently we shall see that such a forcing together of signi¢eds does not constitute a pun in the classic sense of the term. It achieves some of the same rhetorical e¡ects that the pun normally brings into play, but compounds these e¡ects with an added sense of arbitrariness and extreme verbal innovation. In order to appreciate the peculiarities of the Wake's rhetorical strategies it will be useful ¢rst to compare `sansglorians' with a more traditional example of punning from Ulysses, and then to look at Derek Attridge's discussion of the pre-eminence of portmanteau words (rather than puns) in Joyce's last novel. The example from Ulysses is one with which many readers will be familiar. It is taken from the oft-quoted exchange between Mr Deasy and Stephen Dedalus,

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in which the latter announces his dread of history, his fear of high-sounding concepts ^ `those big words . . . which make us so unhappy' (U 38) ^ and his allergy to goal-oriented plots: ^ History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. From the play¢eld the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if the nightmare gave you a back kick? ^ The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God. Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window saying: ^ That is God. (U 42) It is signi¢cant that Stephen's rejection of Deasy's teleological view of history should be carried out by means of a quibble on the word `goal'. The pun serves, ¢rst of all, to trivialize Deasy's statement. But it also contrives to bring about the conjunction of two otherwise unrelated contexts: the interview in Deasy's o¤ce, and the sound of schoolboys playing in the street. By fortuitously pressing these two contexts together the word `goal' presents Stephen with an opportunity to hijack Deasy's intended meaning ^ to derail, as it were, his line of argument. Such a strategy is illustrative of the rhetorical function of the pun. It tells us that unlike the concept, which is geared towards direct communication, the pun exists to frustrate the linear conveyance of thought. The main point of comparison between Stephen's pun on `goal' and the portmanteau word `sansglorians' can be formulated on this ground: both cases indicate a resistance to translation or a defect in the communicability of thought and meaning;2 both bear witness to Joyce's ingenuity in manipulating vocabulary so as to challenge the solidity of the conceptual world. Yet, if the example from Ulysses can be said to exploit ambiguities that are inherent in the correct use of the English language the same is not true of a word like `sansglorians' which promotes equivocation gratuitously and in £agrant transgression of grammatical constraints. The typically ungrammatical quality of the Wake's vocabulary ^ comprised to a large extent of portmanteau words like `sansglorians' ^ makes the performance of the Wake's narrative signi¢cantly unlike that of any other work. What I mean by `signi¢cantly unlike' is not merely that the Wake is more demanding or more di¤cult than other narratives; but rather, that the demands it makes on the reader are di¡erent in kind precisely on account of the transgressive character of Joyce's word-games. Joyce's transgressions are designed to exceed the limits of word selection set by any dictionary of the English language, and to modify by sheer disobedience those models of correctness and intelligibility prescribed by grammar. By changing the rules that regulate writer^reader relations the Wake mines our con¢dence in grammar, reminding us that there are texts we still need to learn how to read. Joyce's style stages a breakdown of signi¢cation which, in the words of Jean Paris, `makes us un¢t to recognize and to locate the components of discourse. Through its modi¢cations, the signi¢er

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comes to refer to unfamiliar and even incompatible meanings; if we concede that ``only those elements which contribute information are relevant to linguistics'', we must then conclude that, here, signi¢cation is undone by its own excess' (my translation).3 Building on Paris's argument, Derek Attridge has observed that portmanteau words operate on meaning in a far more destabilizing manner than puns. The pun, Attridge claims, `carries a powerful charge of satisfaction: the spectre of a potentially unruly and ultimately in¢nite language is raised only to be exorcized' (1988a: 148). Language is cleverly manipulated so as to cause two di¡erent intentions to coincide in a single utterance; and the elegance with which this operation is pulled o¡ has the merit of restoring our con¢dence in the orderliness of the language-system itself. By comparison, we ¢nd the portmanteau disturbing because it `has the e¡ect of a failed pun' (ibid.: 148). In the portmanteau, the clever manipulation of language succeeds only in part. The e¡ect is rather like an imperfect synchronization or an incomplete rhyme, the purpose of which is to generate not harmony but dissonance. In other words, though it shares with the pun the ability to combine multiple words and meanings, the portmanteau resists the impression of a carefully arranged context or of a successfully engineered verbal coincidence. One might say, then, that it is more of an arbitrary con£ation of meanings than the pun. It operates more violently, often disrupting the integrity of received grammatical and morphological patterns. There is to it a sense of unwieldiness, of seemingly gratuitous excess corresponding, rhetorically, to what I described earlier as a principle of self-di¡erentiation that `invalidates all good measure'. An important implication of Attridge's discussion is that the punning technique which is often said to characterize Finnegans Wake is not a punning technique at all, but rather an extreme, if systematic, use of di¡erent rhetorical devices each intended to frustrate translation. The use of the umbrella term `pun' to indicate the sum of all these devices does not help our understanding of them, the pun being only one device ^ and a minor one, for that matter ^ employed in Joyce's ¢nal work. Yet Joyce himself contributes to the confusion when he o¡ers the following motivation for writing the Wake as he did: Now does not every word we use represent a Trinity: it has a sense, a sound, a power to evoke pictures. One does not feel it as rule [sic] unless `something goes wrong', i.e. either the sense is stupid, or the picture obsolete, or the sound false. Would it not be possible to write a book where all these three elements of literature are segregated and dissociated? A device can be used, a most commonplace banal device to prove it: a pun. (Deming 1970: 532^3) It would seem, here, that what Joyce actually means by `a pun' is in fact a strategy more akin to parapraxis, or to an original technique of composition which we might describe, provisionally, as paronomastic montage. This type of strategy creates and organizes ¢elds of colliding sounds and images in which the book's syntactic makeup appears (re)produced in miniature form. The Wake

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provides us with a name by which to refer to it, a name that is itself a portmanteau: `collideorscape' (FW 143). Henceforth this word will designate, in place of the umbrella-concept `pun', any device, technique, or even chance event in which a collision of sounds and images occurs to create a new textual con¢guration. Each collideorscape performs a multiplicity of miniature narratives and discloses a series of syntagmatic relations that are unaccounted for by ordinary syntax. At every reading it produces temporal connections or disconnections in excess of pre-determined grammatical models.

Productivity of the Portmanteau Productivity: the temporal-economic implications of this notion have been broached in the course of Chapters 1 and 2. But to what extent can we really speak of a temporal connection (a fragment or even a totality of time) that is `produced' by a rhetorical device? Speaking of the literary work as a semiotic machine, Deleuze writes that the de¢ning issue of modernism is not interpretation but production. Simply put, his claim is that the proper question to ask of a modern text is `How does this function?' rather than `What does this mean?' Deleuze's test case, famously, is the Recherche which he insists should be read as the narrative of a writer's apprenticeship in the production of signs: `To the logos, organ and organon whose meaning must be discovered in the whole to which it belongs, is opposed the antilogos, machine and machinery whose meaning (anything you like) depends solely on its functioning, which, in turn, depends on its separate parts. The modern work of art has no problem of meaning, it has only a problem of use' (2000: 146). Of course, the suggestion that the modern text can mean anything is itself highly contentious and, if the reader will pardon the irony, needs to be rigorously glossed. The machine's in¢nite semantic range is to be understood here as a matter of performative power. Yet it bears repeating that Deleuze's `anything you like' is not an endorsement of relativism; rather, it is a way of situating truth in the realm of an as yet undetermined potential. To speak of the productivity of the portmanteau, in this context, is to view the rhetorical ¢gure as part of a whole that does not totalize, of a unity that does not unify. Such a whole is for Deleuze the realm of the virtual ^ or, what is the same thing, memory understood as an open totality of past and future time. It goes without saying that the productivity of the rhetorical ¢gure in Finnegans Wake remains unthinkable if not as an upshot of a certain work of interpretation. One operates the machine by drawing out meanings from the state of impracticable density in which they are held. But one does not simply discover these meanings; one must write them in, so to speak, producing their truth in the hermeneutic process. I have suggested that every instance of word-play in the Wake signals a certain type of textual event ^ an event in which language £aunts its powers of equivocation and celebrates the risk, inherent in every utterance, of a deviation

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from intended meaning. At the same time, however, it could also be argued that the ambiguities brought into e¡ect by Joyce's puns and portmanteau-word formations re£ect the variable nature of a universe in which, to quote Eco, `everything moves in a primordial and disordered £ow' (1989: 65). Eco's thesis is that the project of Finnegans Wake provides `a representation of the chaos and the multiplicity within which the author seeks the most congenial models of order' (ibid.: 63). From this point of view, Joyce's word-games will be seen to function mimetically rather than productively. To be sure, mimesis and production are two highly charged terms in the history of twentieth-century critical discourse. They bring into play assumptions about the relation between word and world which are normally considered to be mutually exclusive.4 Yet for Joyce, the idea of a literature that produces while it imitates is no contradiction. The notion of mimesis, as he understands it, derives from a peculiar interpretation of Aristotle's tenet, `e tekhne mimetai physin' ^ a phrase which, he contends, has been `falsely rendered as ``Art is an imitation of nature'' '. Aristotle, however, does not really de¢ne art: `he says only ``Art imitates Nature'' and means that the artistic process is like the natural process' (Gorman 1939: 98). In this context to imitate nature means not so much to duplicate its likeness as to parallel its laws of self-generation. In Joyce's project the two processes come to stand for two orders of creativity ideally existing side by side.5 The claim that `the artistic process is like the natural process' implies, not that art represents nature, nor that it is inspired by it, but that the mechanics of production and self-reproduction by which art and nature come into being are identical. There are no portmanteau words in nature. But there are patterns of evolutionary progress and di¡erentiation with which the mechanics of writing can be said to correlate. The portmanteau must be regarded as a privileged element within the parallel creative order established by the Wake. Indeed, as simultaneously mimetic and productive elements of the Wake's structure, Joyce's word-games may be seen to institute a supplemental relation with the work as a whole. In this sense, the performative challenge they pose is that of partial objects that refuse to be contained within the Wake's structural design at the same time as they constitute a fundamental part of it. The extreme, almost implosive condensation that characterizes even a single Wakean word shows us precisely how this logic works. Each portmanteau stands for a fragment of the universe ^ but a fragment in which the entire universe (the totality of space and time) can be surveyed. As both Eco and Battistini have noted, this synecdochic containment of the whole within the part is a central feature of the Wake's organization: like a genetic code it determines a sense of organic completeness, of structural unity. Yet it also illustrates the work's tendency to exceed its own structure, to unmake itself with every performance. We touch, here, on a ¢ne lexical distinction that is crucial to the argument of this chapter. Susan Shaw Sailer has observed that the Wake is to be approached as a fragmentary work only insofar as it is composed of combinatory elements, `basic irreducible parts of which larger components are built, as molecules are composed of atoms' (1993: 160). In Sailer's

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account, these atoms are always in the act of fusing or joining with other atoms to produce the Wake as `a whole'. As such they point towards an as yet unful¢lled, but already encoded semantic and structural completeness: `As I write fragment, then, I keep in mind the notion of active element, but I also remember that fragment connotes the possibility of incoherence through unrelatedness, where active element does not. The reader has no trouble with active elements that fuse. Incoherence arises for readers from fragments that do not become active elements and thus do no fusing' (ibid.: 160^1). Sailer's thesis, like Eco's, proceeds from the assumption that the fragments of which the Wake is composed are of the `active' variety, and this view goes to corroborate her description of the novel as a `¢nished' work in which `no part is isolated or detached from the rest of itself ' (ibid.: 160). Seen in this light the productivity of the portmanteau appears to be entirely regulated by the work's self-ful¢lling drive. This is to say that as a synecdochic fragment the portmanteau always functions in service of the Wake's ability to frame and thematize itself, to create its own image and establish, by means of that image, its own totality. At the same time, however, the fragment also names a performative principle that stands at some remove from the requirements of successful communication. As Rabate¨ has argued, in Finnegans Wake the `whole' of the completed structure is always already interrupted by an internal gap (a hole), so that Joyce's reader is always caught `between the hole of reading, between two references which disperse meanings and times (before, after, not yet, and already), and the whole of the book taken as a closed system' (1984: 93). This is an aspect of the portmanteau that semiotic theory typically overlooks; it is the truth of a performance that disrupts the dynamic by which the Wake repeatedly and e¤ciently pro¡ers an image of itself as a ¢nished artefact, calling attention instead to an in¢nitely divisible component of the work devoted to the work's e¡acement. A semiotic analysis of the productivity of the portmanteau yields a fairly recognizable account of the challenges the Wake poses to its reader. Every pun or portmanteau in the book is embedded within a wider context, and the context, which in turn serves to stabilize the portmanteau word, is made up of every item of text useful for its decipherment, starting from the meanings suggested by proximate sentences, to include, through the sum of themes and motifs which we equate with the text's internal coherence, the entire `underlying network of cultural associations' (Eco 1989: 69), without which, one assumes, punning would be impossible. In this manner Joyce's word-games keep reminding us that the relocation of a word from one context to another can be as arbitrary and as productive an operation as any in writing or reading ^ arbitrary and productive, inasmuch as it is the single word that determines its own syntagmatic collocation. It attracts numerous equally possible contexts to its orbit, accumulates these possibilities and brings them simultaneously to the reader's attention, while allowing them to delimit its semiotic potential. Should we agree to construe the workings of the collideorscape after this classic hermeneutic model, we would then have to concur with Attridge that the

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Wake's rhetorical strategies operate in essentially the same way as those of any other literary text: Every item in a text functions simultaneously as a sign whose meaning is limited ^ but not wholly limited ^ by its context, and as a context limiting ^ but not wholly limiting ^ the meaning of other signs; there is no escape from this circle, no privileged item that yields its meaning apart from the system in which it is perceived, and which can act as contextless anchor to the whole text. The di¡erence between Finnegans Wake and other literary texts is a difference in degree, not in kind. (1988a: 149^50) I ¢nd this observation to be correct only to a certain extent: speci¢cally, the extent to which the Wake must rely on pre-established reading habits in order to frustrate and surpass them, and on conventions of readability in order to sell itself o¡ as a relatively unreadable text. A work `sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times' (FW 120) presupposes both the existence and the inadequacy of such conventions. As does the image of a team of critic-detectives `all there scraping along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life's robulous rebus' (FW 12). The Wake foresees and parodies its readers' e¡orts in what is ultimately a pedagogical undertaking. The lesson being that we must learn to read syntax otherwise; to place words and sentences in hitherto unimagined con¢gurations; and to recognize the possibility of what we might term `narrative performances' or `narrative productions' whose temporalities unfold singularly, ine¤ciently ^ £aunting, in relation to the kind of narrative structures instituted by the work as a whole, a sense of manifest waste, of frank impracticality that is, in fact, counter-productive. Let us consider Attridge's own example of a typical Joycean portmanteau ^ `shuit' ^ in the light of this project. `Shuit' carries no dictionary de¢nition. It denotes nothing by itself, and has no agreed-upon abstract or de-contextualizable meaning. Yet the fact that it is meaningless does not make it inconsequential. In point of fact it is all the more powerful, all the more semiotically productive, for being unde¢ned. As Attridge points out, its usage in a sartorial context will encourage most readers of the Wake to approach it as a substitute for `suit' while its proximity with the adjective `buckly' suggests `shoes' as a valid gloss: `I want to see you looking ¢ne for me. With your brandnew big green belt and all . . . When you're in the buckly shuit Rosensharonals near did for you' (FW 620). Once we agree that `shuit' is a noun and an item of clothing, we automatically determine that `buckly' is an adjective, and Rosensharonals, plausibly enough, the name of a Jewish tailor or shoemaker. This makes for a satisfactory reading and a manageable ambiguity; until we realize that the context which allowed us to circumscribe `shuit' ^ to decide, in the ¢rst place, that it refers to an item of clothing ^ is itself almost entirely made of puns and portmanteaux. For instance: in the phrase `[w]hen you're in the buckly shuit Rosensharonals . . .' it is not di¤cult to hear an echo of `how Buckley shot the Russian General', a tragi-comical tale of war broadcast on

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HCE's television-set in the course of Chapter XI. Buckley's adventure contributes its own network of contexts and collideorscapes to the semantic potential of `sh' and `uit'. Buckley is an Irish soldier in the Crimean war. On the fringes of battle he comes in sight of a Russian general and prepares to ¢re; but just as he is about to take the shot the general crouches down to defecate. Shit and shoot are thus immediately added to shoe and suit as possible interpretations of the signi¢er `shuit'. And in turn these words undergo several transformations throughout Chapter XI, to include such variables as shote (FW 342); shouts (FW 352); shuck [shucks, shook and struck] (FW 338); shocked (FW 346) and shunned (FW 337) among others. The series is not unlimited, but it intersects at several junctures with other series. For instance, the scene's Crimean setting calls to mind the story of HCE's crime in Phoenix Park, along with the notions of `shame' and `guilt' [shuilt?] thematized in that episode. `Crime' and `Crimea' are also worked anagrammatically into `excramation' (FW 342) which is both a synonym of shout and, more obviously, of shit. The accumulation of meaning registered here is consistent with the serial and digressive nature of narrative form throughout the Wake. It also denotes an excess of motivation that calls upon the reader to rethink the boundaries of every single word over and over: an excess that `forces the reader' ^ as Attridge would say ^ `to read productively' (1998a: 148). Reading `shuit' productively will establish the value of `sh' and `uit' (or, equally well, of `shu' and `it') as minimal syntactic components in Joyce's peculiar grammar.6 The fact that `sh' and `uit' can be not only combined to form a new word but also disconnected and, as it were, redeployed tells us that `shuit' is already a multiplicity (a composite form) distributed in syntagmatic space. There are at least two consequences to be drawn from this: the ¢rst is that in Finnegans Wake a single word contains the germ of an entire narrative series ^ each collideorscape is a conjunction of multiple contexts and each interpretation of that collideorscape a singular act of narration; the second, that the excess of narrative potential discovered in every fragment has the e¡ect of severing the fragment from its immediate context ^ we are tempted to read the Wake placing every part under a microscope, hoping, as it were, to ¢nd a universe in a grain of sand. The procedure accentuates the connectable nature of all textual elements; it rewrites words into sheer centres of connection at the same time as it detaches them from discourse. In this sense one may think of Joyce's portmanteaux as temporal junctures holding together a variety of destinies, of plots, of virtual time-frames. By a virtual time-frame I mean here a vision (even a memory) of time that, as Deleuze observes, is both `only' potential and absolutely complete within itself, like an impulse of desire that lacks nothing. This de¢nition is no mere paradox; it is a logical extension of Bergson's idea that time (like life) is a constant invention of itself, a creative-evolutionary movement that proceeds pastward via the future. The allegorical application is simple: if reading is to be understood as a truly productive practice it must do more than hope to solve some textual rebus approaching words with a magnifying glass ^ sneezing out nothing but likelihoods. It must create new procedural rules

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making invention the medium of memory. In this context `virtuality', the time of an impersonal desire that Bergson associates with evolution itself, comes to designate an open commerce between the future and the past ^ a temporal unity that, to borrow once again from Deleuze, co-exists with the present in the sense that it is a condition of its coming into being. Deleuze's de¢nition of virtuality requires us to think the virtual as both a precondition of the actual and a reality that is contemporaneous to it. In this sense virtuality and actuality are analogous to the past and the present in Bergson's scheme. Both dimensions exist at the same time, and though they function independently it makes no sense to think of one without the other. Virtuality is always in the act of being actualized while every actualized object opens ^ pastward and futureward ^ onto a virtual dimension. The principal di¤culty Deleuze faces when re¢ning this notion is that of distinguishing between the virtual and the possible. This is because, contrary to what Deleuze himself writes in Di¡erence and Repetition, the concepts of virtuality and of possibility overlap in many respects: yet an important di¡erence between the two must be a¤rmed. There is a concrete danger, Deleuze explains, that the virtual could be confused with the possible. The possible is opposed to the real; the process undergone by the possible is therefore a `realisation'. By contrast the virtual is not opposed to the real. It possesses a full reality by itself. (1994: 211) At stake in this distinction is an understanding of how an event emerges in its uniqueness from the order that preconditions it and that constitutes its past. Within Deleuze's scheme, the concept of `realisation' designates the selection of a single possibility from among a vast series, something of a decision made at a crossroads, with actual reality corresponding to a predetermined route travelled at the expense of many others. According to this view one might as well construe reality as an unchanging system of relations, each accounted for (at least potentially) from the very ¢rst moment. The implication is that there can be nothing new under the sun; the world is a theatre of simulacra derived by duplication from an original and imperfectible idea. Thus, as long as it is merely the £eshing out of one from a previously given set of possibilities, realization will constitute no more than an illusion of progress. Deleuze's entire philosophical project hinges on the belief that such a view of productivity is to be rejected in favour of an evolutionary logic: Actualisation breaks with resemblance [i.e. duplication R.B] as a process no less than it does with identity as a principle. Actual terms never resemble the singularities they incarnate. In this sense, actualisation or di¡erenciation is always a genuine creation. It does not result from any limitation of preexisting possibility. . . . For a potential or virtual object, to be actualised is to create divergent lines which correspond to ^ without resembling ^ a virtual multiplicity. (1994: 212)

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Virtuality, then, is an order of totality, an open whole from which something emerges, not by way of limitation, selection or reduction (as the real emerges from the possible) but by way of divergence. The movement does lead from a state of undetermined potentiality to the actual, but the actual is not simply a duplicate of what it could always have been. Actualization is a genuinely creative process only insofar as it brings forth a possibility that was not there in the ¢rst place. Even as it opens onto the future, the virtual is of the order of the un-produced: it is a non-signifying passivity that accompanies all work of semiotic production. This is the collideorscape as an injunction to interpret, and by interpreting, to produce a ¢nite number from the fund of in¢nite possibilities that we call time as a whole. But the collideorscape is also programmed to resist interpretation. Thus, at the very moment in which it realizes the Wake's performative vocation, it also encodes within it an uncanny movement of time in excess of the teleological patterns on which the production of narrative meaning is ordinarily based. At this point a potential objection needs to be registered that requires us to readdress one of our stated Bergsonian assumptions. We do well to recall, here, that Bergson's distinction between duration and spatialized time implies a parallel division between the order of organic life-forms and what the author describes as `isolable systems'. The latter may be thought of as cross-sections of material reality ^ closed and composite units arti¢cially cut out of the totality of the objective world. The more meticulously they are dissected, Bergson explains, the more their complexity can be appreciated. Indeed it will be possible to know them better by dividing them into smaller and smaller parts, descending from the material objects to the fragments of which they are comprised, `to the molecules of which the fragments are made, to the atoms that make up the molecules, to the corpuscles that generate the atoms, to the ``imponderable'' within which the corpuscle is perhaps a mere vortex' (CE 10). In principle there is no limit to the progression. Bergson's point, once again, is that physics may teach us a great deal about processes of mathematical di¡erentiation, about the manner in which objects change when the internal equations by which they are constituted are altered. Yet our grasp of such processes adds nothing to our understanding of the passage of time. A composite object, Bergson observes, `changes by the displacement of its parts' (CE 11); but the parts themselves do not change. This means that the movement is always reversible. It is not the change proper to concrete duration which Bergson associates either with the realm of spiritual interiority, or, in the case of material objects, with an evolutionary process that is capable of being reintegrated into the evolution of the universe as a whole.7 Here the objection comes into proper focus: how can a composite form such as the portmanteau ^ which, being inorganic, easily divides into what Bergson would term discrete units ^ be said to coincide with a memory of pure time's properly generative-and-destructive movement? Bergson is clear on this score:

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if some bold novelist, tearing aside the cleverly woven curtain of our conventional ego, shows us . . . under this juxtaposition of simple states an in¢nite permeation of a thousand di¡erent impressions which have already ceased to exist the instant they are named, we commend him for having known us better than we knew ourselves. This is not the case, however, and the very fact that he spreads out our feeling in a homogeneous time, and expresses its elements by words, shows that he in his turn is only o¡ering us its shadow but he has arranged this shadow in such a way as to make us suspect the extraordinary and illogical nature of the object which projects it. (TFW 133^4) Language, no matter how condensed or inventive, is a system of symbolic (i.e. spatially extended) relations. As such it can do no more than intimate ^ `make us suspect' ^ the heterogeneous yet unbroken £ux that is pure time. This means that, from a Bergsonian perspective, there can be no question of a performative staging, let alone a production, of time's proper movement in the rhetorical folds of a text. Where does the point leave us with regards to our reading of Joycean word-play? How are we to reconcile our view of Wakean time as waste, as unquanti¢able multiplicity in the Bergsonian sense, with a thesis on the portmanteau as productive textual fragment? There is no hard and fast answer, but it will su¤ce, at this stage, to note that Joyce is already preparing a revision of Bergson's model from the moment he contrives to undermine the distinction between mimesis and artistic productivity, and, with it, the opposition of nature and techne. Several examples of the Wake's strategic con£ation of these categories come to mind, among which the scene of Shem's excremental self-portrait (FW 185^6) is easily the most striking. We have already touched on the implications of this scene within the Wake's thematics of forgery and decentred narcissism: the idea of an artistic process that uses the artist's own £esh as canvas and his own waste as ink tempts us with the illusion of a perfect identi¢cation between creative agent and created double. The miracle of divine transubstantiation becomes the aesthetic model where mimetic authenticity and absolute creative power meet. Yet far from attaining the ideal immediacy of the Maker's relation with himself, what Shem achieves is a self-image that is all medium, all materiality. The `squidself ' that emerges `squirtscreened from the crystalline world' (FW 186) is, in short, another allegory of that extreme narcissism that Blanchot understands as being interrupted by its own excess. By collapsing the realm of spiritual interiority into that of material excess, the Wake comes to associate time's passage not with the reintegration of the partial into the universal, or of the fragment into the whole, but rather, with the murkiness of the screen, with the uncanny senescence of the `doriangrayer' portrait or the corrosive ink that resists all work of translation. This brings us back to the problem at hand: the need to think the productivity of the portmanteau (i.e. the power of a privileged syntactic element that condenses the potential memory of the book's innumerable time-frames) together with the opacity of the material object in which the same rhetorical ¢gure is instantiated.

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In its immediate consideration, the issue will continue to revolve around the possibility of devising a syntactic model in which the relation between part and whole is con¢gured non-mathematically. The Wake sets up the fragment against the completed work, the productive element against the ¢nal product in a relation that is always partial, incongruous and impracticable. Our toughest challenge, then, will be to imagine this impracticable productivity ^ a productivity that has nothing to show for its industry. It will be necessary to observe that as a textual segment the portmanteau both belongs and does not belong to the economy of the work. It activates a syntagmatic connection that is also a plausible narrative; yet it does not derive any semantic stability from the narrative itself, to the completion of which, in the ¢nal analysis, it may be seen to contribute nothing. The idea that narrative form imposes meaning upon the passage of time, thereby e¡ectively humanizing it, continues to be one of the most widely circulated orthodoxies of twentieth-century criticism. Its currency, which pertains to the discourse of meaning at large, indeed to the question of the meaning of meaning, brings together sciences as diverse as psychoanalysis, existential phenomenology and hermeneutics, and informs everything that has been said about teleological models of history. It is typically assumed, in the framework of scienti¢c-philosophical thought about language, that meaningful discourse must of necessity have a sense of closure written into its genetic makeup if only in the guise of an implied address ^ that is, of a prospected destination that de¢nes and directs its sense. To the extent that it is coextensive with direction and destination, sense cannot be considered apart from the phenomenality of ends.8 As Merleau-Ponty observes, `[i]n all the uses of the word sense, we ¢nd the same fundamental notion of a being orientated or polarized in the direction of what he is not, and thus we are always brought back to a conception of the subject as ek-stase, and to a relationship of active transcendence between subject and world' (1962: 430). Division II of Heidegger's Being and Time develops what is certainly the most in£uential elaboration of the ideas at issue here. Central to Heidegger's argument, at this early stage of his career, is the suggestion that Da-sein, the excessively temporal being that we are, comes to discover itself within the framework of a peculiarly futural interpretation of time. Da-sein is ek-static in the sense that it is always thrown ahead of itself ^ oriented towards a future that hands it over to uncertainty. By resolutely confronting its end, Da-sein takes charge of its mortality, in which it ¢nds its innermost potential and the condition of its individuation. It is thus able, paradoxically, to will its own destiny, to choose its most authentic fate (i.e. the fate it has inherited as a historical and individuated being) and to attain a structural ¢nitude whereupon it can understand itself completely. As John Sallis explains, what such self-understanding entails is in fact a narrative of self-projection and self-return, `a movement of selfrecovery' (1995: 94) that determines existence as being already ^ that is to say, from the beginning ^ marked by the end. Heidegger insists on a formal equation between the death-oriented temporality of authentic existence and the

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possibility of human self-understanding: Da-sein, he argues, `is not just objectively present, but has always already understood itself ' (1996: 289). To think the phenomenality of ends from this perspective is to invoke a trajectory of selfunderstanding as virtual self-completion. At the same time, it is to examine that trajectory in relation to a structural anachrony, a being-always-ahead-of-oneself which, from the outset, is what makes the hermeneutic project possible. Bearing in mind the paradigms of sense and intelligibility invested in a phenomenological or existential-hermeneutic treatment of narrative time, it should be noted that the Wake exceeds teleology and fails to come o¡ as a purposeful plot not on account of its circularity (which speaks closure in itself ) or of its deliberately incomplete concluding sentence, but, rather, because its syntax cheats the economy of investment and self-return on which narrative form relies for its sense of purpose. Investment, here, requires a commitment to meaning, a de¢ning choice; and with this choice, the inevitable exclusion of countless possibilities of re-negotiation. Joyce's poetics of the pun comes into being precisely as a refusal to give in to ¢nality ^ to the pressures of a decision that, by its exclusionary vocation, cannot but narrow down time's in¢nite potential. To illustrate this point it may be useful to refer to a work of ¢ction that is also a parable about time, and speci¢cally about the making of time in ¢ction. The idea of an in¢nite variety of virtual time-scapes coexisting in a single narrative brings to mind Borges's famous image of a labyrinth of forking paths.9 Borges imagines the existence of a literary work composed by a Chinese intellectual whose ambition it was to capture in writing the in¢nite and in¢nitely variable unfolding of human destinies: `in all ¢ctional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the ¢ction of Ts'ui Peªn, he chooses ^ simultaneously ^ all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork . . . In the ¢ction of Ts'ui Peªn, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings' (1970: 51). Two details from this parable strike me as particularly relevant to a reading of Finnegans Wake: the description (rather cliche¨d, by now) of a text as cosmic labyrinth; and, more interestingly, the explicit connection made between the temporal con¢guration of the literary work and that work's resistance to intelligibility. For Ts'ui Peªn's readers, as for Joyce's, the correct functioning of intelligible plots has to do with the selection of one possible destiny among others, and, inevitably, with giving up possible alternative outcomes. No wonder then that just like the Wake, Ts'ui Peªn's Garden of Forking Paths turns out to be an indecipherable and widely misunderstood work: a work that appears random and chaotic but is in fact as orderly, as perfectly organized, as a well-constructed labyrinth: The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts'ui Peªn conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an in¢nite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent

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and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke o¡, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist and not I; in others I and not you; in others, both of us. (ibid.: 53) The paragraph gives Borges's initial and rather straightforward premise a paradoxical twist. While this is not the place to engage in an analysis of the many ways in which the narrative keeps manipulating and subverting readers' expectations (what interests us, here, is strictly speaking the image of the universe as textual labyrinth), it is important to grasp the full import of that one ¢ction on which everything (in the conduct of our argument, at any rate) hangs. What sense can we make of a phrase that posits the existence of an image embracing `all possibilities of time'? None whatsoever, unless we complement it with another phrase that is only apparently in contradiction with it: Ts'ui Peªn's Garden, we are informed, `is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe' (emphasis mine). There is, then, such a thing as a vision of total time, but it is by de¢nition an incomplete vision ^ always provisional and always a ¢ction, yet, crucially, not false. Many of the labyrinthine qualities of time detailed in Borges's short story will be familiar to readers of the Wake. We have already seen that Joyce's unwillingness (or inability) to choose between alternative time-scapes a¡ects the text's intelligibility by frustrating the narrative's sense of purpose. The juggling of parallel times in the book is expressed not so much on the level of narrative sequences and plot outcomes as on the level of sentence structure: that is to say, in the authorial practice of word selection and word combination. The complexity of the universe ^ its in¢nite and all-embracing multiplicity ^ is reproduced in the processes of decomposition and rearrangement to which wordroots and consonant clusters are subjected, as well as in the slippage of meaning generated by the progressive expansion of contexts and the interweaving of semantic ¢elds. All these processes have the e¡ect of challenging the totality of the sentence, thereby disabling the constraints that sentence structure normally brings to the mobility of the word. In the Wake the sentence is one volatile context among many. One is denied even the comfort of a relative stability as every single morpheme in the text, every lexical fragment, takes on, potentially, the function of a syntactic component.

Logic of the Sentence The question of sentence structure brings into play assumptions about time which we commonly take for granted. It will be useful to examine some of these assumptions before attending to the speci¢cities of the Wake's syntax, all the better to appreciate the temporal implications of Joyce's experiments with syntactic order. The OED de¢nes the sentence as `a series of words in connected

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speech or writing, forming the grammatically complete expression of a single thought'. I take grammatical completeness here to indicate the sense of closure and unity that correct sentence-construction brings to our thoughts. Completeness and correctness are, in this speci¢c context, interchangeable. Both are guaranteed by a principle of coordination that binds together all parts of a proposition. Both are founded on a relation of mutual complementarity obtaining between the grammatical Subject and its Predicate. As Aristotle has shown, such a relation is inherently temporal, concerning as it does the constitution and tradition of meaning. No sentence is grammatically complete until it has posited the existence of a subject and a predicate. We abide by this elementary rule of grammar automatically, for without it our thoughts would lack purpose and form. We would be unable to think intelligibly. By thinking in complete grammatical sentences we reproduce a structure of meaning that determines our understanding of the world a priori. In other words, every sentence is an ideal plot that con¢gures the relation between mind and world ^ a plot that breaks the movement of thought into measured units and charts the circular course of the subject back towards itself. For Husserl the study of correct grammatical forms is the ¢rst step towards formalizing the basic a priori structures that regulate the expression of meaning. Within this order of ideas, the basic syntactic paradigm `Subject is Predicate' (S is P) is understood as a re£ection of the fact that subjectivity is always oriented outside itself, which is to say that it is necessarily directed towards an object. Phenomenology emphasizes this `directedness' when positing the intentional activity of consciousness vis-a©-vis the world as the ground of all human experience. Husserl's notion of `intentionality' refers to the manner in which consciousness acts upon objects, constituting them, appropriating them, and allowing them to come to light in their ideal (i.e. universally recognizable) meaningfulness. The analysis of a pure logical grammar is meant to codify the structures into which this activity is cast. It goes without saying that such structures necessarily precede any consideration of the truth content of a given statement.10 Inasmuch as he pursues the ideal of absolute scienti¢c objectivity, Husserl strives characteristically after the economy and the universal applicability of algebraic formulae: The theory of the pure forms of judgments is the intrinsically ¢rst discipline of formal logic, implanted as a germ in the old analytics but not yet developed. According to our explanations, it concerns the mere possibility of judgments, as judgments, without enquiry whether they are true or false, or even whether, merely as judgments, they are compatible or contradictory. . . . [T]he form of the determining judgment, `S is p' (where p designates a determination, and S its substrate), is a primitive form, from which one can derive particularizations and modi¢cations. (1969: 51^2) This faith in the universality of the Subject^Predicate paradigm has come under attack for di¡erent reasons, not least the fact that it ignores the evidence of languages foreign to the Indo-European stock. Jan Patoc­ka advances an

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extremely compelling argument to this e¡ect, citing speci¢cally `the schema of subject-predicate' as an example of Husserl's `overestimation of the universality of certain forms central to Indo-European languages as fundamental to logic in general' (1996: 52). The empirical veri¢ability of Husserl's theory is, however, a secondary matter, compared to what his logically impeccable argument will tell us about the very concepts of pure logic and scienti¢c evidence. Indeed the entire project of transcendental phenomenology is symptomatic of the absolute authority carried by these concepts within the institution of contemporary Western philosophy. Philosophy, as Husserl understands it, is so committed to the structures of pure transcendental logic that it will automatically disqualify any thought which fails to conform. Once again Patoc­ka's commentary is very much to the point: The Indo-European propositional structure has a logical foundation elaborated in great part by Aristotle on the basis of linguistic metaphoric schemata (subject as agent or as object of action) up to the skeletal meaning (S is p). This structure, however, itself presupposes aspects of a particular world view, chief among them being the assumption that meaning is constructed gradually out of basic elements as out of bricks. This synthetic view of meaning is logically £awless, though not necessarily the only one possible or even fundamental. (1996: 53) Yet Husserl's point is that within the paradigms of Western logic and scienti¢c enquiry, the structure is (note the in¢nitely recursive movement of this claim) fundamental. The standard judgement-proposition `S is p' provides Husserl's method of enquiry with the most basic grammatical model by which to articulate the correlation between subject and world ^ a model that is synonymous with the idea of scienti¢c/philosophical evidence itself.11 In the words of Jacques Derrida: `we know that for Husserl ``S is p'' is the fundamental and primitive form, the primordial apophantic operation from which every logical proposition must be derivable by simple construction. If we posit the identity of expression and logical Bedeutung (Ideas I, ½214), we then have to recognize that the third ``person'' present indicative of the verb to be is the irreducible core of expression' (1973: 73). The equation between meaningful thought and logical proposition is systematically undermined throughout the text of Finnegans Wake. Yet one ought to make a distinction between techniques that strain the order for which that equation stands, that erode its authority as it were, and techniques that dispense with it altogether. Sometimes a sentence will run on for pages on end. Descriptions of an interior (FW 182^4) or of a character's physical appearance (FW 169) will develop into interminable catalogues, often amassing the most diverse objects, stalling the narrative and making a caricature of the Wake's encyclopaedic tendencies. The catalogue is, in fact, one of the most distinctive syntactic features of the work ^ and also one of the most thoroughly studied. Bernard Benstock has provided a detailed analysis of the formal properties of lists in Joyce's last novel, commenting on their largely unpredictable nature

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and on their tendency to defy classi¢cation and closure. The rule, he notes, is a frustrating, self-defeating progression. `A patterned development in . . . enlarged catalogues seems to mature towards a ¢nite number, but a tendency towards disintegration near the end becomes the operative technique instead, a splaying out of possibilities rather than a ful¢llment of a cohesive assemblage' (1992: 264). In a slightly di¡erent vein, Tony Thwaites speaks of `the signi¢cance of the list in Joyce, as the ¢gure which comes increasingly to implement [the text's] juggling between coherence and incoherence' (2001: 50). By and large a catalogue is considered to be an ordering device; it plays on the reader's anticipation of order in number, on the sense that what can be counted can also be organized in a self-contained sequence. But in Joyce the sequence becomes a symptom of the subject's instability. Its variety and exaggerated length re£ect an appetite for indiscriminate accumulation that ultimately shows the subject to be empty of intrinsic content. Thus, for instance, the description of Shem's `persianly literatured' lair (FW 183) unfolds in a crescendo of ill-sorted objects varying from `burst loveletters, telltale stories, stickyback snaps', to `twisted quills, painful digests, magnifying wineglasses . . .'. The series goes on and on. Not to in¢nity ^ in the end the sentence does come to a correct grammatical stop ^ but certainly to a point of impracticality. The lapse into syntactic impracticality, then, is another device by which the Wake e¡ects a deliberate rejection of any principle of good measure. In this sense, the catalogue's exaggerated expansion ^ coinciding with what Benstock would call its formal disintegration ^ is of a kind with the monstrosity of Shem's self-portrait in Finnegans Wake VII. One expects a catalogue to be able to perform a synthesis of all items included in it. The subject can only be identical to itself on condition that such a synthesis be brought to completion ^ in other words, on condition that the variety of objects assembled on the page be integrated into a cohesive grammatical unit. But what the unity of this unit depends on is precisely what the Wake will refuse to provide: some evidence of the pertinence of all accumulated objects to the whole, and the sense that the collection of epithets, nouns, cliche¨d expressions is not utterly random and unmotivated. Thwaites has observed that `sometimes the only way to follow the structure of a Wake sentence is to keep one's ¢nger ¢rmly on the grammatical subject until the verb arrives' (2001: 168). This remark alerts us to a type of syntactic transgression in many ways similar to the catalogue-e¡ect and of equal interest to us here: `subsidiary clauses [Thwaites explains] balloon within subsidiary clauses, and then within those' (ibid.: 168). Like the catalogue this syntactic paradigm unfolds as a sprawling digressive sequence that disables communication by overturning the commonly accepted sense of proportion between what is considered `central' and what is `digressive' in the development of propositional thought.12 Such disproportion is meant, ¢rst of all, to re£ect the text's hypercumulative compulsion. It makes a caricature of the relational structures of subjectivity and thus discredits the grammatical sentence (understood both as an expression of the unity of thought and as an ideal plot that reproduces the

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correlation between the subject and the world). On occasions when an extended digression wedges itself between the grammatical subject and the predicate the reader is made acutely aware of the threat that the Wake's convoluted syntax poses to grammatical correctness. The Subject^Predicate nucleus is fractured. A string of ungrammatical words prises the gap wide open to reveal a lapse in communication. In order to make sense of the sentence we must ignore this lapse; we must wait until the movement of thought is completed and the intentional structure of subjective expression con¢rmed. Only, the lapse, resistant as it is to grammatical recuperation, is impossible to ignore. We know this lapse to be the elapsing of time itself. We know it implicates the subject in a movement of self-di¡erentiation that does not guarantee a return. Repeatedly, the serial nature of Joyce's digressions confronts us with the prospect of an in¢nite deferral of sense and even when the threat is not followed through the e¡ect is enough to put the authority of grammar in doubt. My reading, up to this point, has been less concerned with the temporal implications of Joyce's strategies of deferral,13 than with the Wake's radical suspicion of grammatical givens, and consequently, with the unprecedented possibilities of con¢guring time that follow upon that suspicion. It should be clear, nonetheless, that the two issues are closely interrelated. The reader's ¢nger held ¢rmly on the subject holds ¢rmly onto a promise of meaning. Waiting `until the verb arrives', it indicates a need for and a tendency towards signi¢cation which correct sentence structure would normally guarantee. Each form of syntactic disruption ^ the rambling catalogue, the non-sequitur, the incomplete parenthetic clause ^ exposes this same tendency to the risk of being frustrated. The promise of meaning collides with the meaninglessness of the utterly new as word and sentence come into con£ict. In turn, the con£ict is what makes it so di¤cult to sift through the multiple senses of a given portmanteau, to rule out some of the plausible glosses, on the basis of the word's syntactic collocation. The Wake's break with grammatical form determines, in this manner, a syntactic eccentricity that renders its narrative organization incommensurable to that of other texts. Sam Slote bears out this claim when he analyses one of Joyce's most convoluted sentences to discover `the syntax of a present without a decidable subject' (1994: 80). Indeed sometimes there is no obvious grammatical subject on which to hold one's ¢nger. And sometimes, what is thought to be a subject turns out, in retrospect, to be just as plausibly a subjectless predicate. As, for example, in the following segment: `Redismembers invalids of old guard ¢nd poussepousse pousseypram to sate the sort of their butt' (FW 8). This is, by the Wake's standards, a fairly straightforward utterance. Yet if we were to analyse it as we would a sentence its construction would become highly problematic. Morphologically, the word `Redismembers' could function as a verb (an amalgam of remembers and dismembers) or as a noun (a variation on members); its syntactic collocation, however, implies that it might be an adjective modifying `invalids' (to suggest, at the same time, remembered and dismembered). All readings are encouraged by the word's immediate context and all contexts are compelled to a forced coexistence in the word, generating

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the idea of a war museum in which the tragic dismemberment of invalids is remembered, and which invalid members are invited to visit comfortably (on duly provided wheelchairs). The break with grammar, here, is radical and no amount of hermeneutic £exibility can make up for it. It is not a matter of proportion any more, not merely a decentrement caused by an exaggerated digression. Rather than being carnivalized or caricatured, the S is P model is disabled, while the already impossible demands made by a single word on the reader's attention set the stage for a genuinely inventive recon¢guration of logical operators. By dismantling the foundations of grammatical correctness the Wake gives rise to what might be termed a para-grammatical syntax ^ a syntax that is always reinventing its rules of word combination, unsaying itself as it plays back. This syntax, it is important to note, does not supplant sentence structure but competes with it. It gives shape to a network of verbal relations in excess of the subject's homogenizing activity and reproduces in the disjointed relation between word and sentence, between letter and word, between any non-signifying fragment and its de¢ning context the movement of making and unmaking, of weaving and unweaving, that constitutes, as we observed in Chapter 2, time's most characteristic operation.

Paronomasia Towards the end of his life Joyce confessed to Samuel Beckett his fear that he had perhaps `over-systematized' Ulysses (Ellmann 1982: 702). The critical industry has long debated the extent to which the composition of Joyce's masterpiece derives its structural completeness from a pre-conceived and very carefully planned system of Homeric parallels ¢rst circulated among a close circle of friends, then made public (with the author's permission and to his ultimate regret) in Stuart Gilbert's 1930 study. Each chapter of Ulysses is shown by Gilbert to be organized according to a speci¢c art, colour, symbol, stylistic technique and matching Homeric episode. The epic subtext gives the reader access to the novel's system of values and enables one to make stable enough sense of Joyce's parody of styles. The wealth of information assembled by Joyce is saved from meaninglessness by direct association with the universal structures of myth, so that, for all the stylistic virtuosity, and the coincidences which permeate the narrative, nothing in this monumental novel appears to have been left to chance. Joyce's mock-epic masterpiece strikes its author and some of its readers as being `over-systematized' precisely to the extent that its coincidences are felt to be subordinated to matters of structural importance. The impression yielded by Gilbert's book is that every detail of Bloom's and Stephen's experience, down to the last seemingly super£uous gesture, can be deciphered with the help of an interpretive key imposed upon the ¢ctive material. Even where the speci¢c Homeric analogies are disregarded, or found to be unhelpful, the sense that a

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mythic or symbolic signi¢cance necessarily underlies each and every action performed on Bloomsday remains a de¢ning feature of the novel and, as T. S. Eliot would observe, guarantees its status as a modern classic.14 The novel's mythic structure always makes it possible to rearrange coincidences, and thus to recuperate the singular from meaninglessness by way of a retrospective application of a ¢xed concept or code. It is the grimness of Bloom's situation that the most trivial of gestures, or the most quotidian of thoughts, cannot help having to signify something ^ something timeless and communal other than itself. There is, by contrast, no interpretive key, no preconceived plan by which to redeem the excesses of Finnegans Wake. The work realizes its own organizing principles as a structure in constant progress. This is the only sense in which we can take seriously Joyce's claim that he was `making it out of nothing'. As a perpetual work in progress the Wake has no origin; rather, it invents its own origin as it unfolds. Like the universe, whose laws of self-regeneration it repeats, it discovers itself endlessly in the future. An oft-quoted statement by Joyce on the spirit of modern literature a¡ords an idea of what the contrivance of such a paradox must have entailed for him. In writing, Joyce explains, `one must create an endlessly changing surface, dictated by the mood and current impulse in contrast to the ¢xed mood of the classical style. This is Work in Progress . . . we must write dangerously: everything is inclined to £ux and change nowadays and modern literature, to be valid, must express that £ux' (Power 1974: 75). I have already touched on the temporal signi¢cance of the discourses of £ux and change in Joyce's later work. The Wake generates, as we recall, a series of images which illustrate a split in the identity of time ^ a split or a self-contradictory impulse whereby the present is delivered simultaneously to the past and to posterity. Joyce's words to Arthur Power, while attesting to the modernity of the Wake's concerns, add to the novel's elaboration of time's dual nature an intriguing reference to danger. But what, exactly, does writing dangerously mean in this context? And what could be the danger of writing a quintessentially modernist text? Presumably, there is more to it than the risk of being widely misunderstood. To write dangerously is, for Joyce, to write without a fall-back position; it is to write in excess of concepts, and therefore without the bene¢t of a ¢xed code or an ordering device exempt from the interplay of shifting moods and registers. It is to confront, as writer of the text and eventually as its reader, the possibility of being radically a¡ected by this interplay. One writes dangerously, in other words, with the certainty of putting oneself (one's name but also one's sanity) at stake. Such writing, Blanchot reminds us, will produce nothing if not an absenting of the subject. It is a work of e¡acement of the work.15 One should be able to distinguish, then, between two substantially di¡erent ways of thinking the productivity of Joyce's syntax: ¢rst, as a work of selfregeneration that radicalizes possibilities already inherent in language; and second, as an opening up of grammar, of the economic movement on which the e¤ciency of the work depends, to the invention of a secret practice the e¡ects of which continue to be unforeseen. Ever since the publication of Campbell and

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Robinson's Skeleton Key (1944) there have been numerous attempts to stabilize the Wake by insisting on structural patterns and recurrent motifs. In the best of cases these critical works have succeeded in producing a faithful description of what is already in the book, centring the material on recognizable kernels of meaning. They have managed to arrest the collideorscape, or at the very least to slow down its rate of production, thus making the text more amenable to interpretation and more recognizable from reading to reading. Margot Norris shrewdly observes that the need to domesticate the text by centring it stems from an impulse that is ingrained in the strategies and expectations with which we habitually approach works of ¢ction: `To make something of what we have looked at, we irresistibly turn to familiar concepts of structure for a key to the ``chaosmos'' of Finnegans Wake. Intuitively the reader may sense that these familiar notions of structure do not apply to this work, yet our entire epistemology has taught us to think of structure in terms of ``anchors'' or points of reference that constitute a center of the work' (1976: 23). Norris's argument here leads to two related considerations. First: that the idea of a structural key represents not an element intrinsic to the practice of writing as much as a ful¢lment of the reader's need for intelligibility. Second: that we are fated to read Joyce's last novel against its own nature, and sometimes even against our own better judgement. In particular, the adverb `irresistibly' suggests a drama of competing desires ^ a dialectic of intents played out between the reader and the text. My inclination, given the ineluctability of this dialectic, is to regard what Norris calls `familiar notions of structure' in the same light as those received rules of grammatical and syntactic correctness which the Wake systematically undermines. The Wake remains unthinkable without these notions. Which is to say that it can only be inscribed in tradition ^ construed as a literary masterpiece or as a quintessential modernist work ^ on grounds of grammatical and structural intelligibility. And yet resistance to intelligibility is precisely one of the e¡ects that determine the Wake's inclusion in the modern canon. Scholarly research and annotation (the compulsion of an industry su¡ering from an ideal insomnia) provide the Wake with some kind of gravitational centre. By default, however, they also draw attention to the structure's evident want of economy. They cannot help doing so, despite ^ or indeed precisely because of ^ their successes in dealing with the Wake as a whole. In contrast to the gravitational pull of grammar the Wake's aneconomy brings to relief a work of constant de-systematization. Joyce sets up an insistent process of weaving and unweaving that exposes both narrative and sentence structure to the operations of chance. Slote reads this work of desystematisation after Blanchot's notion of `de¨soeuvrement' (un-working), describing a strategy of `linguistic miscegenation' to which English is continually subjected in the Wake.16 In turn this strategy results in what Slote calls `a desistance of narrative' ^ that is to say, a silencing or absenting of narrative form that deprives the work of any kind of structural ful¢lment (1999: 210). Slote explains that:

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Wakean deviation does not operate upon a single happy structure of de¢nitude. Indeed as with Dante and Mallarme¨, the languages upon which Finnegans Wake is predicated are already languages of loss. Perhaps the Wake never achieves a closure by which one could establish a teleologics of articulation; instead it might be read as a suspension or interval of articulation, an interruption of teleologics which proceeds without reference to a de¢ning and de¢nitive transcendent closure. (ibid.: 210^11) Paronomasia is the rhetorical ¢gure in which such a process of un-working is most notably brought into e¡ect. We may discern in the Wake's paronomastic technique the same genius ascribed to Penelope's needlecraft: an in¢nite productivity by which to measure an in¢nite passage of time. In this respect it is perhaps more accurate to speak of a surplus of narratives rather than a desistance: plenty of narratives but, as I explain in Chapter 1, no actual narration. Paronomasia weaves and unweaves the text of Finnegans Wake by gathering words in seemingly arbitrary series, that is, by dissolving the pre-determined syntactic relations obtaining between these words and establishing new connections. In this gathering, which is at once conjunctive and disjunctive, an unthinkable movement of time is produced, a time unmoored from the live presence of an implied narrating subject or transcendental consciousness. We have already seen this mechanism at work in a string of associations leading (or, should I say, forking) from shout to shit and shoot, and from Crimea to crime, excrement and exclamation. It bears repeating that the principal characteristic of this type of narrative production is that it assembles multiple fragments of text and holds them together without the bene¢t of preconceived logical or grammatical paradigms. In other words, there is narrative but no constituting subjectivity ^ nothing we can recognize as an act of narration. Paronomasia too is often confused with punning. Indeed, this pair is possibly even more di¤cult to distinguish than are pun and portmanteau. Like the pun, paronomasia often plays on the homophony of two or more words. But instead of encompassing di¡erent meanings or di¡erent contexts in a single signi¢er, as the pun does, it arranges words side by side, as if parcelling out the pun in order to distribute it across the horizontal space of the text. In this sense paronomasia is already con¢gured as a syntagmatic unit. Any given syntagm of the Wake can bring to light hitherto unforeseen connections between words that share a common phonetic feature or that derive from the same etymological root. The e¡ect extends to the juxtaposition of minimal verbal elements (such as syllables or consonant clusters), as well as of larger phrasal units, always on the basis of rhyme, homophony or morphological resemblance. As, for instance, in the following fragment from the book's opening page: The great fall of the o¡wall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes . . . (FW 3)

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Somewhat like an overture this passage announces a number of interconnected motifs which will be picked up and developed at several points in the course of the narrative. It also sets up a system of rhymes and alliterations which in part enforce these interconnections and in part serve as a distractive musical e¡ect. Among the motifs foregrounded the easiest to recognize is that of the fall ^ not only the subject of both sentences, but also a recurrent feature in the fund of mythical and folkloristic material from which the Wake takes its cue (the ballad of Tim Finnegan; the story of Adam and Eve; the character of Humpty Dumpty . . .). A reading focused on discourses of the fall comes as close as any to a successful illustration of the Wake's thematic core. The rise and fall of civilizations is, after all, what the history of improvident error and providential correction is ostensibly about: `Gricks may rise and Troysirs fall (there being two sights for ever a picture) for in the byways of high improvidence that's what makes lifework leaving and the world's a cell for citters to cit in' (FW 11^12). In more than one respect `the great fall of the o¡wall' signals the mythical origin of human existence and represents the plausible nerve-centre of the Wake's dizzying network of plots. Even `shuit' and `shoot' can be re-motivated as variants of `pftjschute' (Attridge, 1988a: 152). The rhyme of fall and wall is of course borrowed from Humpty Dumpty, but it is also highly pertinent to the unfolding of Tim Finnegan's tale. If the fall is the decisive event in the Wake's ideareal history, the wall is the ideareal place where it all happens. It is a monument whose ruin comes to stand for every imaginable misfortune in the history of man, of patriarchy, of the Irish people; and before long it is also a metaphor for that over-analysed catastrophe that is the shame of a phallic fall: `Phall if you but will, rise you must . . . There was a wall of course in erection' (FW 4^5). We do well to keep in mind that much of this hangs on the tenuous logic of a rhyme. The more the rhyme is insisted upon ^ and possibly counter-pointed by other paronomastic e¡ects ^ the more arbitrary the narrative feels. We are thus consistently reminded of the primacy of writing in Finnegans Wake ^ of the fact that the Wake's ¢ctive universe is made of self-regulating word-games and word-associations. The histories and translations of the word wall (and, by direct consequence, the transformations of the ideareal place for which the word stands) develop separately from the plot which takes `fall' or `phall' as its centre. Separately and, to a large extent, digressively. At its most topographically concrete the wall is repeatedly identi¢ed with the Magazine Fort in Phoenix Park, a historic building dating from the ¢rst half of the eighteenth century. For a long time the building served as an arsenal of the British army, a role that gave it some degree of symbolic and even strategic signi¢cance in the history of Irish struggles for independence.17 Indeed this very signi¢cance may have tempted Joyce to con£ate it with another historical site, also to be found in Phoenix Park: the more obviously phallic Wellington memorial. The synthesis of both monuments gives rise, in Chapter I, to the `Wallinstone national museum' ^ or `Willingdone Museyroom' ^ of which the reader is given a full guided tour on pages 8 to10.

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Etymologically, `wall' derives from the Latin `vallum', meaning a defensive rampart. In old Anglo-Frisian the word was also used to designate a hillock or a mound of earth. Joyce brings this history to bear on his description of the Phoenix Park monuments, insisting on a contextual juxtaposition of the notions of `mound', `hill', `earth' and `stone'. The Wake's ¢rst direct reference to the wall of the Magazine Fort provides the most compelling instance in which these motifs are pitched together, and once again a technique of paronomastic associations is visibly at work: His clay feet, swarded in verdigrass, stick up starck where he last fellonem, by the mund of the magazine wall, where our maggy seen all, with her sisterin shawl. (FW 7) The near-homophony of `magazine wall' and `maggy seen all' feeds on a previously established identi¢cation of Finn with Christ to generate a parallel between the buildings in Phoenix Park and the wall of the Holy Sepulchre. In this context Maggy is a diminutive of Mary Magdalene who discovers, on the third day of Jesus's death, that the stone sealing Christ's grave has been moved and that the chamber stands vacant. The meaning of `Wallinstone' is thus enhanced by the notion of grave or tombstone; whereupon the Wallinstone museum becomes a `mausolime wall' (FW 13), that is, the fac°ade of an empty mausoleum. The same passage also arranges `mund', (FW 7), `mounding' (FW 8) and `museomound' (FW 8) in an additional paronomastic series, causing such meanings as `heap', `hill' and `world' [Fr: monde; It: mondo; Sp: mundo] to collide within one interpretive ¢eld. Each of these meanings signals a possible turn in the narrative, another digressive path which we may fall upon and follow at the same time as several others. The interpretation of mound as hill echoes the earlier description of a `knock . . . where oranges have been laid to rust' (FW 3), and is reinforced by a none too veiled reference to Hill 60 (where thousands of Allied soldiers were laid to rest during the Great War). The image is taken up a few pages later, along with a similar set of interconnected motifs: we may take our review of the two mounds to see nothing of the himples here as at elsewhere, by sixes and sevens, like so many heegills and collines, sitton aroont, scentbreeched ant somepotreek, in their swishawish satins and their ta¡eta¡e tights, playing Wharton's Folly . . . (FW 12) This time, our re-view of the scenery is supplemented by details that are suggestive of pimply skin. McHugh understands `himples' as a merging of `Himmel' (German for sky) and `pimples', a reading that tempts us to hear `wart' in the reference to Wharton's Folly. `Collines' is French for hills, ostensibly the paragraph's main focus (in addition to mountains). The picture is brought to completion with another allusion to the Magazine wall in Phoenix Park, the line `Behove this sound of Irish sense' (FW 12^13),

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echoing a famous epigram composed by Swift upon ¢rst sighting the Fort: `Behold the proof of Irish sense, / Here Irish wit is seen. / When nothing's left that needs defence, / They build a magazine'. Once again the wall is perceived as a monument to Irish shame: much like the Wellington memorial, which celebrates the exploits of an Irish-born gentleman who famously renounced his Irish identity to become a hero for the glory of the British crown.18 The association of wall, mound and gravestone is thus maintained throughout the Wake's opening pages, where, as we have seen, a metaphorical correspondence between di¡erent ideareal locations is suggested and paronomastically implemented. The Wallinstone museomound comes to designate, at one and the same time, a series of monuments in Dublin's largest park, a fallen giant's phallus, a hill on a historic battle-¢eld, and the most famous gravestone in Christendom ^ all in the space of a few paragraphs. The procedures of word selection and word combination brought to evidence here typify the way in which plots are constructed in the Wake: the text exploits and stages a slippage of meaning between lexemes that are mutually replaceable but not synonymous. Such a performance (re)produces the movement of time as selfdi¡erence; as digression; as lapse. In the play of imperfect substitutions, of translations without equivalence, narrative time surrenders its constant form. Joyce's principal source for this type of syntactic invention was Vico's etymological method. As I had occasion to suggest in the course of Chapter 1, Joyce learnt from Vico that the analysis of myths and word-histories could be a supremely creative endeavour, in other words, that mythopoesis and etymological reconstruction are potentially the same thing. It is useful to recall, here, that in Vico's discussion of the mind of ancient poets memoria and fantasia are conceived as twin aspects of the same creative enterprise. The interpretation of myths and the invention of fantastic etymologies are means to a single end: that of comprehending the minds of those ingenious humans who ¢rst created laws from lawlessness and literature from illiteracy. Vico's philology thus enables an act of historical understanding which would be otherwise impossible, and which, in the Neapolitan philosopher's own words, is achieved by the rhetorician only with great e¡ort: To discover the way in which this ¢rst human thinking arose in the gentile world, we encountered exasperating di¤culties which have cost us the research of a good twenty years. [We had] to descend from these human and re¢ned natures of ours to those quite wild and savage natures, which we cannot at all imagine and can comprehend only with great e¡ort. (NS ½338) Such a descent entails a work of imaginative identi¢cation which is by its own nature irreducible to grammatical structures. We may only hope to understand primitive humans on the grounds of some shared code or common existential condition. But the imperative of change which determines the passage of time makes it impossible to ascertain the nature (or even the continued existence) of such a code. Vico's use of the word `human' in the two sentences quoted above brings this problem to evidence.

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In the ¢rst instance `human' is a general concept referring to a primitive biological species favoured by God and placed by providence at the forefront of history. In this context, the word might encompass such meanings as `imaginative' or `god-fearing'; but it certainly could not be combined with the adjective `re¢ned'. In the second case, `human' suggests a rather di¡erent denomination, responding only to those qualities which Vico associates with the re¢nements of his time (the human age). Reason, re£ection and urban civility are among the meanings generally attached to the latter concept, meanings that are in plain contradiction with the type of mind-set targeted in Vico's investigations. We thus come to appreciate how, in The New Science, `human' and `human' do not always signify the same thing; how the same word in the same paragraph may in fact be used in two con£icting senses. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand by which the reader is invited to trace the e¡ects of time on the modi¢cations of the human mind, a subtle word-game with a distinct post-structuralist £avour, which juxtaposes the concept of human being with that of human becoming to reveal a discrepancy that is both historical and semantic. Vico's lesson, here, is that the translation from one stage of humanity to the other is possible only on condition that the primordial truth value of metaphor be recognized: rhetoric will take us further back in human memory than the study of pure grammatical forms: To complete the establishment of the principles which have been adopted for this Science, it remains in this ¢rst book to discuss the method which it should follow. It must begin where its subject matter began, as we said in the Axioms. We must therefore go back with the philologians and fetch it from the stones of Deucalion and Pyrrha, from the rocks of Amphion, from the men who sprang from the furrows of Cadmus or the hard oak of Vergil. With the philosophers we must fetch it from the frogs of Epicurus, from the cicadas of Hobbes . . . (NS ½338) Vico's belief in the primacy of metaphor accounts for his interest in ^ and idiosyncratic use of ^ etymology. Functioning like extended metaphors, Viconian etymologies prioritize becoming over being, tracing, even at the heart of philosophical discourse, the continuous shifts of meaning which alone make a history of ideas possible. Seeing as the modi¢cations of the human mind invariably follow an ideal evolutionary pattern leading from a highly imaginative if unsophisticated mode of expression to a re£ective and abstract idiom typical of modern science and philosophy, Vico feels con¢dent that he can reconstruct the intellectual trajectories which evolve modern signi¢cations from primitive ones. Thus he discovers, at the origin of every abstract noun or philosophical concept, a basic yet still uncomprehended primordial sensation, a striking image or a reference to some material object. The case of lex (law), deriving from ilex (oak) and legumina (vegetables), is a famous example with which readers of Beckett's Exagmination essay will be familiar. Other examples follow a less straightforward deductive path: polemos (war) is traced back to polis

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(city),19 and the very concept of humanity is shown to originate in the universal practice of burial (humare).20 Primitive language may be infantile and unsuited to the articulation of complex ideas, but, steeped as it is in necessity, it is also eminently inventive. Born of the need to externalize bodily sensations, it has the immediacy of gestures and the concrete associative genius of children's speech. And yet, for all its ingenuity it cannot lie since lying, Vico observes, is a prerogative of older, more evolved, types of rhetoric: Irony certainly could not have begun until the period of re£ection, because it is fashioned of falsehood by dint of a re£ection which wears the mask of truth. Here emerges a great principle of human institutions, con¢rming the origin of poetry disclosed in the work: that since the ¢rst men of the gentile world had the simplicity of children, who are truthful by nature, the ¢rst fables could not feign anything false; they must therefore have been, as they have been de¢ned above, true narrations. (NS ½408) Vico's conclusion, here, is that fabulation and the search for truth are in fact two sides of the same philosophical endeavour. As we have seen, this idea is fundamental to his entire project ^ the setting up of a new (that is, non-Cartesian) science by which to account, through an analysis of ancient myths and rhetorical ¢gures, for the evolutions of the human mind. Vico writes polemically of a modern language that has lost its power to be inventive and truthful at the same time. We must regard his etymological method, however extravagant, as an attempt to make up for this loss. It doesn't matter that the etymologies are oftentimes outlandish. We recall that for the author of The New Science ¢ction and truth are coextensive; indeed there is no knowledge more perfect than the knowledge one has of one's own creation. Joyce understood full well the anti-Cartesian implications of Vico's etymological method. Time and again, his ¢ction draws our attention to the signi¢cance of etymology construed not as a science of true origins but as a child-like indulgence in the combinatorial potential of words or in the adventurous pursuit of hitherto unexplored meanings. Already in Stephen Hero we are told of the protagonist's fascination with word-derivations: `He read Skeat's Etymological Dictionary by the hour and his mind, which had from the ¢rst been only too submissive to the infant sense of wonder, was often hypnotised by the most commonplace conversation. People seemed to him strangely ignorant of the value of the words they used so glibly' (SH 30). And a few lines down: `It was not only in Skeat that he found words for his treasure-house, he found them also at haphazard in the shops, on advertisements, in the mouths of the plodding public. He kept repeating them to himself till they lost all instantaneous meaning for him and became wonderful vocables' (SH 30). No ¢ction could be truer to Vico's idea of the origins of poetic imagination than this picture of a young boy coming upon words as though they were objects of marvel. In Joyce, as in Vico, children are seen to maintain with words a relation of privileged

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immediacy. They are especially alert to the untapped resources of language in the same way that they are extraordinarily sensitive to the novelty of the surrounding world. To their impressionable minds, words are not mere tools of communication; they are, before anything else, mystical names ^ the stu¡ of prayer and religious incantation ^ bearing the uncanny power to evoke all kinds of unexplained emotions. Thus in the opening paragraph of Dubliners, to take another example, a young boy gazes up at a faintly lit window and tries to articulate all that he has recently experienced by repeating, formulaically, the mysterious word `paralysis'. It is as though the mouthing of the word were capable of giving weight and substance to his entire universe: `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 Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the sound of some male¢cent and sinful being. It ¢lled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work' (D 7). The scene is echoed in A Portrait of the Artist, where the very development of Stephen's psyche is shown to coincide with the progressive expansion of his vocabulary. We approach the novel as a Bildungsroman not merely of the artist, but also of the artist's language skills. Indeed, Stephen's struggles with language are instrumental in shaping his consciousness as well as in advancing the narrative. No single experience seems more important to plot or character growth than the hero's encounter with words; no event is more foregrounded than his attentiveness to the speech of others (be it a sermon, a bedtime story or a heated political debate): Trudging along the road or standing in some grimy wayside public house his elders spoke constantly of the subjects nearer their hearts, of Irish politics, of Munster and of the legends of their own family, to all of which Stephen lent an avid ear. Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learnt them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the real world about him. (P 64) In light of these precedents the Wake's self-de¢nition as `the last word in stolentelling' (FW 424) takes on a more positive, more optimistic signi¢cance than the discourse of plagiarism would ordinarily a¡ord. Alongside the motif of plagiarism we discern in Joyce an intention to rejuvenate language, to force it into a condition of maximum vividness by removing it from what Vico calls the barbarism of re£ection ^ a dreary state of expressive sterility in which words have been left to languish through rational and scienti¢c overuse. It is easy to see how portmanteaux like `shuit', `collideorscape' and `sanglorians' ¢t into this scheme. We come upon them as new objects quite simply because they are new objects. But even in the case of familiar words such as wall, fall or mound the Wake manages to impress upon us an uncanny sense of discovery. Weaving around every lexical item a network of paronomastic associations it transforms common signi¢ers into `wonderful vocables': strange and unstable atoms of discourse open to substitution and in¢nite relocation.

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This operation is crucial to our understanding of the Wake's temporal economies on at least two counts. First, it informs the con¢guration of time on the syntagmatic level by organizing the novel's mechanics of emplotment and providing for the invention of syntactic patterns. Secondly, it foregrounds the metaphorical stratum underlying every meaning or concept, thus inscribing at the heart of meaning itself a principle of change, indeed troubling the very idea of meaning with the pressure of passage and self-di¡erence. The e¡ect of such a strategy is to a¤rm, as Vico's eccentric philology does, a primordial movement of becoming that predates and exceeds the formal structures by which we make sense of the phenomenal world.

Dyas in his Machina, or the Future of Time without Man To understand the productivity of Joyce's word-play in its contrapuntal relation to the work as a whole it is necessary to consider one additional e¡ect peculiar to the writing. The detail I want to emphasize concerns an aspect of the portmanteau at which I have been hinting throughout this chapter but which I have not been able to consider in its own right. As a rule, the portmanteau is always also a neologism, yet the element of pure invention, of absolute novelty that it implies, has not, to my knowledge, been taken into full account. The general tendency is to approach it only as a compound word, an unfamiliar object made of familiar ingredients. This is nowhere more evident than in Eco's mathematical analysis of `Sansglorians', reconstructed as one long word derived from the addition of ¢ve shorter ones (Sans ‡ Sang ‡ Glorians, etc.). It is true that `Sansglorians' combines multiple meanings. But it is also true that it is not simply the sum total of those meanings; nor is it just all of those words sounding at once. The point is that when we ¢rst come upon a given portmanteau it is, more often than not, as a word created ad hoc for the context in which it appears. We might liken the e¡ect to a momentary vacuum of sense, a staying of the process of signi¢cation corresponding to that part of `Sansglorians' that refuses to be translated into Sans and/or Sang and/or Glorians, etc. The neologism, in other words, is that feature of the portmanteau technique that holds on to the vocable's singularity. Before signifying several things at once `Sansglorians' signi¢es nothing; which is why it can replace `Sanglorians' at no apparent cost. Ultimately the neologism is a detour into meaninglessness, an interminable lapse that a¤rms the contamination of the logos by the utterly new. Now, accompanying this intuition ^ that a Wakean neologism could scarcely be more suited to its context, having been created speci¢cally for that context ^ is a second one that appears to be diametrically opposed to it. The image of the Wakean universe as a labyrinth of intersecting lexical chains held together by paronomastic association confers upon every segment of the text an impression of utter replaceability. And attendant upon this impression is the feeling, denounced by some of the Wake's readers, that the use of a particular

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word and its collocation in the sentence ^ or the occurrence of a particular incident at a speci¢c point in the narrative ^ are but the result of arbitrary and utterly inconsequential authorial decisions: acts of absolute creative freedom, all the more powerful for being uninvested ^ that is to say, indi¡erent to outcome or consequence. One is reminded here of the famous image from A Portrait in which Stephen's ideal artist is compared to a god who `remains . . . re¢ned out of existence, indi¡erent, paring his ¢ngernails' (P 233). The corresponding metaphor from the Wake updates Joyce's principles of composition embracing, in a single utterance, the play and counter-play of randomness and divine providence: `Dyas in his machina' (FW 55). Deus ex machina or a double trapped in his machine? The logic of collideorscapes is exempli¢ed in this clash of two opposite drives, where risk is raised to the status of method and supreme reason is handed over to chance. Jean Paris and Derek Attridge have both commented on the primacy of chance or coincidence in Joyce's compositional technique, and their words, though referring to the poetics of the Wake at large, seem perfectly suited to unpack the Dyas/Deus construction: `Coincidence [Attridge explains] has a venerable history in comedy, of course, but its traditional use in the genre is precisely to suggest the providential hand ^ clasped ¢rmly in the authorial hand ^ that guides the paths of men and women, thus draining it of its contingency and arbitrariness. Joyce's comedy is very di¡erent: it celebrates precisely that contingency and arbitrariness' (1995: 18). In the same vein Paris de¢nes `the irony of the portmanteau style' as `the enthronement of a rule of chance that extends the author's intentions, to the degree that they are perceptible, and proceeds little by little to replace them, functioning like a delirious mechanism . . .' (my translation).21 As an extension of the author's intentions chance is at once Joyce's privileged technique and his undoing. It is a piece of technological equipment ^ a `delirious mechanism' or `machina' ^ in which Joyce's divine authority is imaged. And it is also the e¡acement of that image. Not because the machine must inevitably spin out of control like some monstrous creation; but rather, because like the passage of time or the impossible giving of the Derridean gift, pure chance cannot make a monument of itself, cannot sustain a process of emplotment or ideal presentation without turning into something quite di¡erent ^ say, fate or divine intention. We must therefore take note of a striking paradox that comes to the fore whenever we allow the Wake to tell us about itself, to make a theme of its strategies of self-e¡acement and self-generation. It is a paradox concerning chance and the nature of the written sign; speci¢cally, the impossibility of putting chance on record. How can the utterly unrepeatable feature in any document? How can the aleatory be programmed and still be recognized as such? The fact that the two prevailing metaphors in the Wake's self-referential discourse should be the universe and the autotelic machine is signi¢cant in itself. The work's compulsion to £aunt (and thus contain) its own mechanics of indeterminacy and self-determination is well in evidence throughout the narrative; and in this

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sense, the description on page 55 of a textual `machina' that runs on chance and providence is best construed as one of a series ^ a series in which we ought to include such technological inventions as the collideorscape (FW 143), and the vicociclometer (FW 614).22 `Life [the text informs us] is a wake' (FW 55) and the Wake a kaleidoscope of images of life passing in view, in a recurring sequence, like the scenery outside a fast revolving car [It: macchina]: Cycloptically through the windowdisks and with eddying awes the round eyes of the rundreisers [tourists], back to back, buck to bucker, on their airish chaunting car, beheld with intouristing anterestedness the clad pursue the bare, the bare the green, the green the frore, the frore the cladagain, as their convoy wheeled encirculingly abound the gigantig's lifetree . . . (FW 55) The insistence, throughout this passage, on notions of circularity (cycloptically; round; rundreisers; intouristing . . .) acknowledges a debt to Vico's history, and, simultaneously, contrives to organize the universe's evolutionary drives, to show the unfolding of time come, as it were, full circle. Time pictured in its entirety ^ such is the ambition of the Wake at its most self-re£exive (and also at its most Viconian). Indeed, to the extent that it can make a theme of itself, that it can describe its own operative logic, the Wake will always come across not only as a self-su¤cient order of creation, but also as a closed structure, a structure that contains and controls its own variations. The pressures of closure, it would appear, apply even to the most open of semiotic machines. As Eco has observed, `[t]o create the impression of a total lack of structure, a work of art must possess a strong underlying structure. The possibility of switching from one level to another could be e¡ected only by a cunningly organized network of mutual relationships. This is the structural problem of the so-called contemporary ``open works of art'', in which the free interplay of ambiguities always presumes a rule of ambiguation' (1989: 67). Accordingly, the many self-re£exive passages in which Joyce's last novel celebrates its randomness suggest that the randomness has already been accounted for ^ that it has been foreseen by the system and is, in fact, always systematized in advance. From the point of view of themes and general structural patterns the Wake's self-de¢ning openness is, therefore, always conditional, its investment in the future a calculated risk. Provisionally, we may conceive of the Wake's immarginable foresight as a kind of all-embracing memory, a mnemotechnics so extraordinary, so absolute, as to anticipate and record the unforeseen in all its possibilities. Derrida's comparison of the Wake to a `1000th generation computer' is, in this respect, very much to the point. Derrida speaks of a species of writing that indebts us to it, that holds us for ever in thrall. This debt marks the greatness of Finnegans Wake, but also its unbearable legacy. It is the in£uence exerted by a body of knowledge, by a system of encyclopaedic documentation that lets nothing fall outside its range of reference. The extended present from which this act of memory/foresight is launched cannot be escaped. Its in¢nite range closes upon

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the reader; it swallows, literally, everything, giving rise to that strange mix of wonder and `resentment' discernible in Derrida's words: Can one pardon this hypermnesia which a priori indebts you, and in advance inscribes you in the book you are reading? One can pardon this Babelian act of war only if it happens already, from all time, with each event of writing, and if one knows it. One can pardon it only if one remembers too that Joyce himself must have endured this situation. (1984: 147) Joyce himself, Derrida comments, is the `patient' of his own scheme: which is to say that the machine recoils perversely upon its inventor, who must endure its work of translation passively.23 Joyce-the-author enters the play¢eld of the text as Joyce-the-Name (there can be no simple confusion between the two), only to be included in the series, always already encoded, of variations and equivocations. Such is his fate as the signatory of this most calculating and most comprehensive of literary works. We ¢nd the same dynamic allegorized in yet another self-referential metaphor from the Wake ^ one that stresses not the work's cybernetic procedures, but its cosmic scale and labyrinthine temporal structure. In the course of Chapter V the text is famously compared to an unsigned letter rescued accidentally from the rubbish-dump of history. The letter, we are told, makes for poor historical evidence, having `acquired accretions of terricious matter whilst loitering in the past' (FW 114). Soiled and rendered illegible by the passage of time, it falsi¢es the memories it preserves. And its progressive material deterioration coincides with constant changes in the data conveyed. Readers must therefore surrender to a vision of reality in which `every person place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle . . . [is] moving and changing every part of the time: the travelling inkhorn (possibly pot), the hare and turtle pen and paper, the continually more and less intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators, the . . . variously in£ected, di¡erently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns' (FW 118). Once again, this is the Wake in the act of de¢ning itself, and of summing up within its vast thematic range `all possibilities of time', including all the disparate time-sequences involved in its composition: the time of the inkpot; the mismatched tempos of the pen and the paper; the evolutions of the minds which penned the document; and our times too ^ the time-frames of the readers' future misreadings. All possibilities of time have been included in the plot, even the unforeseeable; and yet ^ this is the crucial point ^ the collisions of chaos and cosmos, of blind chance and deaf fate, of the random and the providential, produce no harmony, no unifying human perspective (if the pen and the paper are, like the turtle and the hare in Zeno's race, so hopelessly out of synch, it is no wonder that the script is as good as illegible, and that the words seem to be changing in sense, sound and spelling every part of the time). There is, to be sure, a syntactic order at work, a holding together of terms and sequences that is far from

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haphazard. But this order takes shape as an unworking of the very grammatical structures which determine our understanding of such relations as part and whole, contained and container, subject and world. Let us pursue the allegory further: what the `chaosmos of Alle' describes is a totality of time in which all things are in £ux. But it is not merely the objects contained in time that change; the assertion that everything is `moving and changing every part of the time' implies that the £ux goes on incessantly and also, notably, that the parts of which time is comprised are themselves subjected to movement and transformation. The image conforms to Deleuze's de¢nition of time as a multiplicity that contains number only potentially: as the whole divides, the units change in essence and are therefore impossible to add up to the original structure. Finnegans Wake is such a whole. As a self-declared `chaosmos of Alle' governed by a mock Deus ex Machina the book exempli¢es the type of break with normative hermeneutic procedures that is at stake in the invention of a subjectless and predicateless syntax. It is this radical break, rather than a simply conceived indi¡erence to the task of interpretation, that Deleuze invokes when he speaks of the modern text as a truth-producing machine having no problem of meaning, but only a problem of use. The productivity of Joyce's machine would have to be construed in direct contrast to what Patoc­ka calls `the synthetic view of meaning'. Where the latter names an interpretive model guided by the assumption that the sense of a work can be reconstructed gradually `out of [its] basic elements, as out of bricks', Joyce's word-games instantiate a syntactic order that coordinates the production of truth in advance of any interpretive possibility. Here the totalizing memory is not that of an ideal and stable present in which past and future are condensed. It is that of an event that is neither point nor number: a totality of time that does not contain the past within the present, but that is itself the gathering of both dimensions in a relation without synthesis, without hierarchical distribution. This act of gathering ^ of holding together ^ that I have called paragrammatical syntax bears the same logical imprint as the bizarre conjunction that situates time concurrently in the class of things that exist and in that of things that do not exist. It allows us to think time as dissymmetrically divided between the present and the past (or between an actual and a potential dimension); and it brings to relief, in Derridean thought, the original disparity between the present and the now. It is evident, Derrida explains, it is indeed evidence itself, that `system and nonsystem, the same and the absolutely other, etc., cannot be conceived together' (1973: 150^1). And yet this impossible concept, this uncanny togetherness that challenges the founding certainty of science and metaphysics, is precisely what the Wake's self-referential metaphors require us to think through. An echo from `Ousia et Gramme' spells out the temporal implications of the issue: `[f]rom Parmenides to Husserl, the privilege of the present has never been put into question. It could never have been. It is what is self-evident itself, and no thought seems possible outside its element' (1982: 34).

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Manifestly, yet against all evidence, against the evident itself, words like `Dyas' and `Chaosmos' are engineered to overtake the interpretation of the Aristotelian `now' as self-same chronological unit. As a result, they contravene the rule of logical non-contradiction, disabling choice and paralysing critical judgement. This paralysis ^ or, to be more precise, the loss of meaning for which it stands ^ is an opportunity for chance to come forth. Always as rupture; always as an event that remains foreign to any teleology. Chance has no proper place in a text apart from this condition of foreignness, which we associate, following Derrida, with a trait peculiar (and indeed essential) to the act of writing: to wit, the possibility that a sign, a mark, an in¢nitesimal component of text be repeated and dissociated from immediate context, even as it remains irreducible to the economy of signi¢cation. We ¢nd this trait exempli¢ed in the number, in the letter and in the proper name, all three of which are inscribed in the play of address and destination without being subordinated to the imperative of meaning: One could initially ask oneself what these elements have in common ^ these stoikheia that include the letter or the trait, the number and the proper name ^ such that they are to be found thus associated in the same series and such that their relation to chance should be analogous. That which they have in common, I will claim, is their insigni¢cance in marking. (Derrida 1998: 15) Derrida returns here to issues examined in the early writings on Husserl. His concern is with the teleological paradigms governing the trajectories of signi¢cation in metaphysical discourse, and more speci¢cally, with the disarticulation of theories of language which equate meaning with intentionality. `My Chances' takes up the question by focusing on the mark as the site of a secret deferral, a lapse of time that remains irreducible to any human interpretation. Such a deferral calls for a radical revision of the notions of destiny and destination when it implicates writing in a temporal project `more primordial' than any subjective history ^ still more primordial, in fact, than the original `Geworfenheit' (the condition of being always already thrown into the world) inherent to the existential structure of Da-sein. To insist on the insigni¢cance of the mark, in this context, is to think the nonelemental element of time, to contemplate its divisibility and its potential mobilization, without recourse to subjectivist paradigms. In other words, it is to be suspicious of a philosophical tradition that correlates the iterability of all that is written with a view of language as sense-oriented reference. Derrida speaks, to this e¡ect, of the need to recast the question of Da-sein's relation to the world in terms of `another thinking of destination, of chance' (1991: 106). Such thinking would be able to focus on the event and its mode of circulation in a manner that accounts for its singularity, for its uniqueness even in repetition. In the chance of a mistranslation, it would allow for time's project to

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be de£ected to a future beyond any expectation, a future that unhinges the entire history in which the destiny of the subject is inscribed. This is a detour that cannot be anticipated, but that pertains to the thought of a primordial temporality inasmuch as it is always already divided from itself: marked and re-markable. Without the mark, Derrida insists, there could be no dispatch; and without the iterability of the mark no act of translation, no chance for an object of thought to di¡er, shift context or perdure. Thus, included in the fore-structures of text but not subordinated to the economy of meaning, the letter, the number and the proper name exemplify, as `non-signifying marks', the possibility of chance being committed to script ^ and of script being committed to chance. The case of the proper name, in particular, allows us to discern the logic of the mark and the re-mark in the subatomic con¢guration of every linguistic sign. Iterable and in¢nitely citational, the name maintains, across di¡erent contexts, an index of its own peculiar self-di¡erence. It circulates; and remains, with each citation, recognizably itself. But in contrast to the concept or the common noun, it falls short of certifying any degree of identity among the di¡erent objects with which it comes to be associated. Even as it circulates, it holds on to a proper element that remains incommunicable, secret, unwilling to involve a community: The ideal iterability that forms the structure of all marks is that which undoubtedly allows them to be released from any context . . . This iterability is thus that which allows a mark to be used more than once. It is more than one. It multiplies and divides internally. This imprints the capacity for diversion within its very movement. In the destination (Bestimmung) there is thus a principle of indetermination, chance, luck, or of destinerring. (1991: 106) By virtue of its insigni¢cance the mark entails a radical rethinking of the concepts of Oneness and Sameness. It displaces the name conceived as an index of self-identity, in the same way that it unsettles the number conceived as a unit of calculation. To put it more simply (though I run the risk, here, of misrepresenting the terms of the problem), if one had to identify a minimal unit of measure in Derrida's philosophy of time ^ a correlate of the Aristotelian  ^ this unit would be the mark. Only the mark, Derrida insists, is already iterated, internally divided and re-marked: in short, already programmed to exceed itself. As with Bergson, as with the Wakean parable of the salmon, Derrida's time ceases to accommodate the counting of units of movement when the unit that is counted is completely given over to a self-di¡erential logic. The inaugural event is already deferred, and the minimal unit ceases to be a unit. It is ¢tting that Derrida should designate the oblique trajectory of the number, the letter and the proper name by means of a portmanteau word combining the senses of destiny, errancy and error. Like Joyce's `chaosmos', his `destinerring', (or `destinerrance' as it appears elsewhere) describes not just any movement, but the movement of time itself insofar as it can be identi¢ed with the circulation of the `now'. I have pointed out that for Derrida, far from being a

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synonym of presence, the `now' names an origin that recurs, but recurs only in its uniqueness. In Deleuzian terms this same movement corresponds to the gathering-in-itself of the whole of time in the past. In other words, the simultaneous participation of the `now' to the realm of existence and non-existence gives us to think, here, an all-containing structure, the universality of which is absolutely real, absolutely immanent yet also incongruous ^ anachronistic in its relation to itself (hence the event, not as a coexistence of all time-lines in the present, but as a coexistence of past and present in the past). As a word that houses two contradictory meanings, `chaosmos' (or, for that matter, `destinerring') £aunts its resistance to logic and refuses to be an atom of meaning unto itself. The lapse into indirection is e¡ected by way of an excess of intentions, coexisting yet mutually exclusive. Yet it should be clear that the force of this portmanteau (and of portmanteaux in general) lies not in the contradiction of meanings per se, but in its counter-productive rhetorical function; that is to say, in the way it produces a hesitation between meaning and non-meaning, between work and waste, between system and desystematization. It is in the conjunction/disjunction of these pairs (a conjunction/disjunction that operates at the level of textual productivity and not of interpretation) that time comes to be ¢gured not merely as a medium in which passage occurs, but as what errs, di¡ers and passes. We have seen such contradictory (non-)logic at work in the rhetorical machinery of the Wake, where by resisting translation and alienating words from their conceptual underpinning the Joycean collideorscape (pun, portmanteau or paronomastic series) draws attention to the internal divisibility of its constitutive elements and opens the work to the de£ections and interruptions of chance. Chance is inscribed in the work as slippage or as error; `a slip of the time between a date and a ghostmark [McHugh: postmark]' (FW 473), it is not merely the conceptual negative of destiny, but rather its supplemental counterpart ^ its ghostly double within an overcoded system which it returns to haunt whenever the question of the mark, as constitutive element of the system, is broached. Joyce seizes on the temporal implications of this paradox. By insisting on the in¢nite divisibility of the mark and transforming words into wonderful objects of discovery his writing pursues the ideal of a quintessentially modernist text that weaves and unweaves itself, `endlessly changing surface'. This ideal counterpoints the text's encyclopaedic ambitions. It coincides with an impulse to accumulate, in the smallest syntagmatic unit, time in all its possibilities; indeed, it foregrounds this impulse while endeavouring to render the very notion of syntagmatic unity unstable. The destabilizing force of the chance event (as logical error or ghostly slip of the pen) may well be what Joyce had in mind when speaking of the pun as a means of dismembering the Trinitarian unity of the logos. The passage, brief as it is, is worth quoting a second time: Now does not every word we use represent a Trinity: it has a sense, a sound, a power to evoke pictures. One does not feel it as rule unless `something goes

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wrong', i.e. either the sense is stupid, or the picture obsolete, or the sound false. Would it not be possible to write a book where all these three elements of literature are segregated and dissociated? (Deming 1970: 532^3) In the text of Finnegans Wake `something goes wrong', or is liable to go wrong, at every juncture. Each instance of word-play ^ each deviation from intended meaning ^ adds to the sum total of time's possibilities, and, concurrently, signals the possibility of an event that would, at least in principle, take place in excess of any totality. My line of reasoning, thus far, has been to understand this excess as a mark of time's self-di¡erential structure, that is to say, as an index of the present falling out of step with itself. There is, however, one other point to be made, a point that inheres to the ¢gure of time as a `chaosmic' whole: there could be no duration without a disjuncture at the heart of the present, without an excess of narrative, which invents the very possibility of a future ^ not a future contained within time, but a future of time. The Wake acknowledges the irreducibility of such a future to received fore-structures of intelligibility. Its gamble ^ to emancipate syntax from logic, to practise narrative as a work of in¢nite recombination by which every syntactic unit (sentence or word, or minimal lexical fragment) is surrendered to the errancy of a `ghostmark' ^ opens up time to its unforeseeable form, a memory in excess of memory for which a proper context and a proper medium remain to be invented.

Chapter 4

The Rhetoric of Memory

The marking of time (of time as passage) would have had to be for Joyce something other than the mere record of an extraordinary event. It would have had to coincide with the passage of time itself ^ staging a loss of self-presence, performing the blackout of a lapse of consciousness. Joyce knew if such a performance was truly to signal an awakening from the nightmare of history it could leave no clear evidence of its occurrence; it could not but elude memory. And yet its experience was to be included, somehow, in the production of Finnegans Wake (precisely where the concepts of experience, production and inclusion are disabled). This is indeed one of the features which best characterize Joyce's oeuvre: whether it corresponds to the forging of a young artist's conscience, or to the epic of an entire nation; whether it reads as one city's intimate journal or as language's own Bildungsroman, Joyce's ¢ction contrives at all times to explore memory's limits, causing memory to outbid itself, putting it to work at the very point of its structural breakdown. Even as the limits of memory are engaged and exceeded, some form of memory is always operative in the texts, always and uninterruptedly in session. In Chapter 2 I touched on the signi¢cance of memory in Ulysses as a guarantee of the artist's self-identity: `But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory . . .' (U 242). Stephen's realization, amid the ghosts of the municipal library, relies on an association of remembrance with a rhetoric of souls and spirits. The work of memory, in that scene, consists of re-collecting lost fragments of the self; of piecing the self together, and, ¢nally, of infusing the remembered self with life. To remember is not simply to evoke the past, but to recuperate it to the order of living presence. It is to cancel out death, death construed as sheer waste and loss of meaning, and thus to hold on to the idea of an original unity of the self. Memory must be regarded, in this context, as a nostalgic endeavour ^ and, concurrently, as a technique by which to bring such an endeavour to completion. It is, in John Rickard's words, a `tool that the Joycean subject uses to pull things together, to ``protect the crisis'' of identity, attempting to create a narrative of wholeness or integrity' (1998: 20^1). Rickard's de¢nition is valuable in that it focuses on the utilitarian quality of the Joycean subject's memory. But in point of fact, the insight can and should be extended beyond the study of Ulysses to any subjectivist idea of recollection. A memory that works, that is put to any use whatsoever, is always in the service of subjective identity. It has permanence and continuity as its goals ^ speci¢cally, the

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permanence and continuity of the subject's life-history. It follows that when we speak of memory's limits, of the point at which memory breaks down, we are always automatically referring to the ¢nitude of the subject, and to an interval of time that falls beyond life. Rickard has provided a detailed account of the correspondence between theories of memory inherited by Joyce and the notion of entelechy employed in Ulysses. As an entelechic force, he explains, memory is at once a life-renewing impulse and a principle of textual cohesion. It breathes vital energy into words and organizes the novel's tension between unity and fragmentation. The etymology of entelechy can be traced back to Aristotle's understanding of the term as a movement from a potential (or virtual) state to its actualization. Later usage has come to qualify this idea with the theological concept of the `soul', and with the notions of ful¢lment, ripening and teleological progress. Rickard points out that in Ulysses all three connotations are brought to bear on issues of personality, character and self-identity: `the soul or unifying principle unconsciously informs and develops or actualizes the inherent potentialities of a human being' (ibid.: 28). There is, to be sure, something oppressive, even nightmarish, about the idea of memory as a work of self-maintenance. In Stephen's case, the preservation of a viable sense of self requires the artist to acknowledge his debts and to confront the inescapability of a goal-oriented history. Memory, here, is synonymous with the weight of tradition, which comprises, in Joyce's mock-epic design, not merely the totality of one's past (be it personal or national) but the burden of reconstituting that past, of handing it down, trans¢gured, to the present. We have seen that in the Wake this work is taken to an absurd extreme; as is the economic principle which it is supposed to serve. Even where it is a simple matter of collecting historical facts, Joyce's ¢nal masterpiece crosses the line that separates hyper-productivity from waste. No text is more preoccupied with the workings of its own memory. And no memory is more powerful. The book's intertextual resources and its extraordinary appetite for citation testify to this power which has been compared, it bears repeating, to that of a `1000th generation computer'. The latter image may be seen to clash with the idea of memory as a vital, entelechic force, a component of evolutionary progress speci¢cally associated with organic and soul-bearing life-forms. At the same time, it posits the existence of a formidable cognitive paradigm thus contributing to an interpretation of the Wake's memory as an autotelic structure; it is suggestive, in other words, of a species of mind that organizes, albeit arti¢cially, the multitude of information we are wont to associate with the totality of the text itself. Like Rickard's notion of entelechy this highly advanced memory machine answers to the readers' need for a principle of textual cohesion: a principle akin to a law of gravity by which the Wake regulates its centripetal and centrifugal instincts. Before embarking on an analysis of memory's less practicable modes of operation in Joyce's last novel, it is important to take stock of the word's polyvalence, of its complicity both with a metaphorics of the machine (as a tool or technical

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aid), and with a discourse concerning life, mind, soul and the preservation of meaning. As the Wake juggles all these di¡erent connotations it impresses us with the urgency of two related questions: given the systematic undermining of the structures of subjectivity in the Joycean collideorscape, how is the maintenance-work of memory to be construed? And, assuming it is possible to speak of a memory in excess of the phenomenological subject, in excess, in fact, of the entire history of meaning, what is the nature of the past of which such memory keeps record? A 1000th generation computer is both less and more than a live human consciousness. It is an imitation of the human mind, only a dead, unnatural semblance. At the same time, it is an extension of that which it imitates. It marks the possibility of a survival of consciousness, allowing consciousness to exist beyond its projected end. Death in life; life in or beyond death: this is the rhetorical ground on which the question of a memory in excess of subjective identity will have to be played out.1 Derrida employs this very rhetoric and set of ideas in the course of a discussion of Freud's metaphors of writing: `Freud does not explicitly examine the status of the ``materialized'' supplement which is necessary to the alleged spontaneity of memory . . . Far from the machine being a pure absence of spontaneity, its resemblance to the psychical apparatus, its existence and its necessity bear witness to the ¢nitude of the mnemic spontaneity which is thus supplemented. The machine ^ and, consequently, representation ^ is death and ¢nitude within the psyche' (1978: 227^8). The di¡erence between a machinic and an organic form of memory is here inextricably linked with the question of the supplementary status of the written sign. There is no memory, Derrida insists, no survival of truth or culture without the ¢nitude (the psychic death) of which the sign is a guarantee. Truth itself is entrusted to writing from the moment it is constituted historically; in other words, from the beginning.2 Joyce's suspicion of the truth of origins leads him, in turn, to explore the ¢ction of a memory unfamiliar to life and uncontained by consciousness. Always more than a mere imitation of consciousness, this supplemental memory is responsible for that coincidence of present and past which Richard Ellmann identi¢es as a characteristic feature of the Wake's temporality (1982: 551). Its object, we recall, is the past in its entirety, the recollection of all the past and its total synchronization. Joyce's own metaphor for this totalizing memory rivals Derrida's futuristic computer in storage capacity. Synchronized, the whole of history is conceived by Joyce as a rubbish-dump. This dump, as it turns out, is in fact the world itself (le monde); and, in a typical variation, the monumental `museomound' (FW 8) in which all the past is stored and recollected without any apparent criteria of selection. The image of the museomound describes, in fact, both a place and a process of archivization. Memory (or a simulacrum of memory) preserves itself by accumulating objects of the past and including them in the living present (or in a simulacrum of the living present).3 Accumulation and inclusion are the mound's two most vital operations. Cumulative and inclusive structures emerge throughout the episode (but also throughout the Wake) in a series of metaphorical displacements involving

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food, scenes of banqueting and related images of oral activity. It is worth recalling, with regard to this point, that the mound, in addition to being a phallic war monument commemorating Wellington's exploits, the death of hundreds of soldiers in a `charmful waterloose country' (FW 8) and HCE's alleged acts of exhibitionism in Phoenix Park, is also a Mund (German for mouth) by paronomastic association.

Living Death The signi¢cance of oral imagery, in Joyce as in psychoanalytic literature, derives from the status of the mouth as a privileged marker of the boundaries of the ego. The operative assumption, here, is that the unity of the ego is established by analogy with the form of the human body. To focus on the mouth is to insist on an idea of the ego as an anthropomorphic receptacle of memories and objects of identi¢cation. Self-identity is adjourned and reinforced by virtue of these memories which bring an original narcissistic a¡ection back to life. Freud famously claimed that identi¢cation constitutes `a preliminary stage of object-choice' and that `it is the ¢rst way ^ and one that is expressed in an ambivalent fashion ^ in which the ego picks out an object. The ego wants to incorporate this object into itself, and, in accordance with the oral or cannibalistic phase of libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so by devouring it' (1957: 249^50). Playing on the variety of associations that accrue to the consonant cluster `M-N-D', the Wake's geography stages a radical recon¢guration of the ego's intimate space. Only this space, which in theory corresponds to pure interiority, is in fact laid open to public scrutiny. In the paragraphs immediately preceding the description of the museomound, after the motif of Finn's mythic fall from the ladder is introduced, we come upon a scene of mourning in which a dead man's recumbent body (Finn's but also HCE's) is identi¢ed with the landscape of the city of Dublin. From Howth Castle to Chapelizod, by way of the Magazine Fort in Phoenix Park, the main topographic features of the novel are gradually brought to relief as parts of HCE's anatomy. Within the geographic scheme established by the passage (FW 6^7) the phallic connotations that attach to the mound seem both obvious and predictable; yet even this rather safe interpretation has been, at one time or other, debated. As Louis Mink points out `[m]ost readers of Finnegans Wake have seen the Wellington Monument in Phoenix Park as the erect penis of the sleeping giant; but in geographical fact this would make him remarkably and ridiculously short in the leg' (1978: xxv). The objection is worth registering, though the faith Mink displays in the Wake's commitment to realistic detail is not entirely warranted. In light of the numerous sexual overtones that accompany the motifs of the fall and the wall in the novel, it is reasonable to assume that the geography has in fact been distorted by the same process of oneiric or metaphorical condensation that turned the Magazine Fort and the Wellington Memorial into a single site. In truth the anatomical accuracy of the body^landscape parallelism is

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rather beside the point here. What matters is the parallelism itself, the idea, posited early on in the narrative, that the city and the mourned dismembered body at the centre of the Wake's ¢ctive universe are one and the same; and, consequent upon this similarity, that they are both made the object of voyeuristic interest. Everything in the Wake is laid open to the subject's glance ^ everything including the protagonist who is characterized, time and again, by his own insatiable voyeuristic and exhibitionist tendencies. As a masterbuilder he delights in the erection of `a waalworth of a skyerscape of most eyeful hoyth entowerly . . .' (FW 4). As an embodiment of Dublin's landscape he reminds us that `when the clouds roll by . . . a proudseye view is enjoyable of our mounding's mass, now Wallinstone national museum, with, in some greenish distance, the charmful waterloose country' (FW 7^8). His married life is recorded and analysed in great detail by four chroniclers who command `a profusely ¢ne birdseye view from beauhind' (FW 564) as well as an `[e]xcellent view from front' (FW 582) of all the proceedings. Even the moment of his tragic death is transformed into a spectacle, `[f]or whole the world to see' (FW 6). The ubiquity of the eye, displayed throughout the novel, correlates with the ubiquity of HCE, whose body, as we have ascertained, stands for the whole of Dublin, and, by extension, for the world at large. In turn, the insatiable voyeurism/exhibitionism of the I gives rise to a total collapse of spatial distinctions. What I mean by the expression `a total collapse of spatial distinctions' is that in the Wake's interplay of voyeuristic gazes and exhibitionist acts the di¡erence between mind and world, between the subject and its horizon, between seeing and being seen, is emptied of consequence. The very notion of subjective interiority is impaired. We begin to understand the challenge posed by the Wake's universe to ego-centric models of memory and historical progress once we appreciate the extent to which these models rely on the distinction between the subject's interiority and the objective world, and on the spatial-syntactic categorizations which keep the distinction in place. Thus in Hegelian phenomenology, recollection (Erinnerung) is approached as a process of interiorization (the etymological resonances of the German term are instructive) whereby the mind appropriates objects of intuition and experience to the uses of an enduring philosophical knowledge. The dialectical movement of history would be unthinkable without such a process, as would the survival of the living present in which past and future are at once preserved and contained. Likewise in Freud the recovery of lost images of the I is conceived in terms of an activity of inclusion and containment, an activity that enables the narcissistic ego to resist change and to cope with any event that might threaten its sense of self-identity. In the wake of Freud's analysis, mourning has become a foremost literary and philosophical concern. Contemporary theoretical debate continues to focus on mourning as a process of narcissistic identi¢cation in which the loss of a loved object is overcome by means of a metaphorical ingestion and absorption of the object itself. Derrida, notably, has come to associate the intra-subjective dynamic born of this process with what he calls a work of spectral spiritualization:

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Mourning always follows a trauma. I have tried to show elsewhere that the work of mourning is not one kind of work among others. It is work itself, work in general, the trait by means of which one ought perhaps to reconsider the very concept of production ^ in what links it to trauma, to mourning, to the idealizing iterability of exappropriation, thus to the spectral spiritualization that is at work in any tekhne. (1994: 97) Mourning haunts at the same time as it faces us with a series of terrible injunctions: to remember the other; to preserve the other in ourselves; to carry the other inside us; to become the other; to force the other into becoming part of us; and ¢nally, if the mourning is successful, to forget the other as such: [I]n normal mourning, if such a thing exists, I take the dead upon myself, I digest it, assimilate it, idealize it and interiorize it in the Hegelian sense of the term. . . . In the work of mourning, the dead other (it may be an object, an animal, or some other living thing) is taken into me: I kill it and remember it. But since it is an Erinnerung, I interiorize it totally and it is no longer other. (Derrida 1985: 58) Derrida, however, is interested in a di¡erent type of mourning, a mourning `without possible normality' (1994: 97) that does not lay self-di¡erence to rest but allows the ghost to perform its acts of ventriloquism, of disruption of identity, and of continuous unhinging of the present. `In this mourning work in process, in this interminable task, the ghost remains that which gives one the most to think about ^ and to do. Let us insist and spell things out: to do and to make come about, as well as to let come (about)' (ibid.: 98). Such mourning unhinges the present because it remains faithful to the spectral otherness in which the present is constituted. In other words, it keeps memory of the other but does not appropriate that otherness for itself. As an interminable work in process mourning names a constant and ongoing activity that cannot be dissociated from history, from evolution, or even from the workings of Viconian providence. Accompanying every instant of psychic life, it punctuates the expansion of the subject's interior landscape, regulating its attempts to adapt to the world or to gain mastery over it. But it also inscribes in the subject, in history, the necessary mark of an outside: a mark irreducible to subjective identity, the symptom of a memory that can neither be owned nor, for that matter, remembered. By de¢nition such memory de¢es rational models of history. Its event, to borrow Derrida's formula in discussing the gift, keeps with history `a relation without relation of familiar foreignness' (1992: 7). We recall that for Derrida this relation is coextensive with a phenomenological impossibility. The gift exempli¢es `the impossible' insofar as its truth remains incompatible with any chance of presentation. There can be no evidence of the gift, no bringing to presence. There can also be no debt, and by extension no memory. The very question `what is the gift?' does the gift violence, since `[f]rom the moment the gift would appear as gift, as such, as what

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it is, in its phenomenon, its sense and its essence, it would be engaged in a symbolic, sacri¢cial, or economic structure that would annul the gift in the ritual circle of debt' (ibid.: 23). The true gift, in other words, can only occur on condition of an absolute and universal obliviousness. Oblivion, in fact, is but another name for the relation without relation which the gift keeps with history. All work of impossible mourning is founded on the void of this (non-)relation which cannot be signi¢ed or even brought to mind. In the manner of the tracing of the trace, or of the giving of the impossible gift, oblivion haunts the narcissistic scene, at once shaping and supplementing the ego's e¡orts at self-maintenance. The paradoxes inherent to the scene are played out in an unsettling coexistence of selfhood and otherness, in the `impossible synthesis' of these two terms, which, as we learn from Levinas, bears witness by its very impossibility to the grounding of time in an immemorial past: Time, rather than the current of contents of consciousness, is the turning of the Same toward the Other. This is a turning toward the other who, as other, would jealously preserve temporal diachrony in this unassimilable turning to representation. Like the immemorial at the site of origin, it is the in¢nite that is the teleology of time. (Levinas 2000: 111) The ¢gure of an `immemorial' past cleaving the present, doubling and unhinging it in the instant of representation, also informs Derrida's understanding of the concept of trauma, and may help elucidate his association of mourning with the logic of `spectral spiritualization . . . at work in any tekhne '. Derrida insists that mourning is triggered by the experience of an unbearable foreignness at the heart of the same ^ a foreignness that is too damaging for the ego to acknowledge. The ego takes the lost object inside itself as a memory under erasure, so that the trauma (which would normally need to be recollected in order to be forgotten) is twice negated: ¢rst, insofar as it is replaced by a mnemic sign; and secondly, insofar as the original memory is always already forgotten.4 This bottomless negativity invites and at once resists inclusion within the vital structures of the ego. It inscribes inside the ego the mark of an outside that remains impossible to digest. The image Derrida employs to illustrate this paradox, perhaps his most striking yet, derives from Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's analysis of the fantasy of incorporation in melancholic depression. Speaking of the ego's fragmented topography, Derrida describes a `cryptic enclave' that forms inside the self, inside the general space of the self, a kind of pocket of resistance, the hard cyst of an `arti¢cial unconscious'. The interior is partitioned o¡ from the interior. The most inward safe (the crypt as an arti¢cial unconscious, as the Self 's artifact) becomes the outcast . . . the outside ( foris) with respect to the outer safe (the Self ) which includes it without comprehending it, in order to comprehend nothing in it. (1977: 74^5)

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A death that cannot be mourned normally refuses to be idealized and thus re-claimed. This is to say that even though it is included in the ego's intimate structures, it maintains an element of absolute alterity vis-a©-vis the ego's life and history. Such alterity cannot be signi¢ed and cannot be passed on. It has no ideal substrate and is therefore alien to the uses of tradition or communication. It is death in life ^ or, what is the same thing, relation without relation. Joyce's ¢ction displays a constant awareness of the structural failures inherent to the ego's narcissistic economy. The reader will recall that the Willingdone memorial doubles as a tourist site and as a mausoleum, that it commemorates a series of historical battle¢elds while marking the place of a mythic fall. Erected on a spot where `oranges have been laid to rust upon the green' (FW 3) ^ where Irish turf, in other words, has been tragically and irreversibly altered ^ it is also con£ated with the Holy Sepulchre. Scarcely a page into the book and it is already very di¤cult to determine who, in fact, is being mourned. On show is the corpse of Finn/HCE, around which the world of the Wake is assembled. It is through the spectacularization of the mound, viewed as an analogue of HCE's dead body, that we begin to comprehend the relation between the histories contemplated in the Wake ^ personal, Irish, European . . . universal ^ and the original act of forgetting which constitutes them. One may be tempted to speak of the `mound' as some kind of symbolic substitute for the corpse. But it is more than just that. The mound is the corpse and the grave and the tombstone. It is the burial ground where the body is preserved as well as the `mausolime wall' (FW 13) which re-marks its presence. Finally, it is also the body itself, in part and in whole, `interred in the Dublin landscape':5 Finfoefom the Fush. Whase be his baken head? A loaf of Singpantry's Kennedy bread. And whase hitched to the hop in his tayle? A glass of Danu U'Dunnell's foamous olde Dobbelin ayle. But, lo, as you would qua¡o¡ his fraudstu¡ and sink teeth through that pyth of a £owerwhite bodey behold of him as behemoth for he is noewhemoe. Finiche! Only a fadograph of a yestern scene. (FW 7) As I have argued elsewhere, this passage describes a scene of self-mourning in which the demise of a ubiquitous and all-embracing I becomes, absurdly, the very object of incorporation in the ego. Such is HCE's appetite for universal identi¢cation that he has become one with the community that mourns him. And when his body is o¡ered to his mourners as a Eucharistic meal he vanishes into thin air so that all that is left of his death is a faded record, a non-document, `of a yestern scene'. Let us entertain this ¢ction for a short while. It is a scene of impossible mourning which forces upon the imagination the paradox of a death experienced, so to speak, as such. Death-as-such,6 as unconditional exhaustion of life, is by de¢nition the most unrepeatable of phenomena. It is in fact what can never be reduced to experience since it annuls, by virtue of its singularity, the very ground on which experiences present themselves. We might call this ground live-presence, or, equally well, live-memory. In either case the

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experience of death-as-such would be that which wreaks havoc on the primary institutions of subjective identity, that is to say, on those structures which compel us to think of the subject as one and same. In their place the absurd logic of self-mourning instates a model of self-identi¢cation founded on an irreducible otherness-to-self, namely, on the memory, always already forgotten, of a traumatic event that has occurred beyond the possibilities of subjective experience. Such a memory haunts. And its haunting bespeaks a history in which the present carries within it all of the un-translatability of the immemorial past. Blanchot will characterize this haunting in terms of `a passivity bereft of self ': In the relation of the self (the same) to the Other, the Other is distant, he is the stranger; but if I reverse this relation, the Other relates to me as if I were the Other and thus causes me to take leave of my identity. Pressing until he crushes me, he withdraws me, by the pressure of the very near, from the privilege of the ¢rst person. When thus I am wrested from myself, there remains a passivity bereft of self (sheer alterity, the other without unity). There remains the unsubjected, or the patient. (WoD 18) The themes of patience and passivity are discussed throughout The Writing of the Disaster, always in fragmentary paragraphs that shun de¢nition and put a strain, in a manner perhaps less apparent than Joyce's but not less arresting, on the rules of grammatical correctness: Passive: the un-story, that which escapes quotation and which memory does not recall ^ forgetfulness as thought. That which, in other words, cannot be forgotten because it has always already fallen outside memory. (WoD 28) The ¢rst thing to be disrupted by this state of passivity is the quiddity of the experience, the as such of death which henceforth is always located in the realm of the other. In this context Blanchot prefers to speak of the death of the other as the only mortality that matters, a mortality that keeps the patient in a sort of idle time, suspended in `endurance without duration (which is to say patience)' (WoD 118). This time, which is the time proper to patience and passivity (assuming only for the sake of argument that the passive could be said to have or to own a time), has `always already fallen outside memory'; which is to say that its event is in an immemorial past, or, what is the same thing, in a future unavailable to historical appropriation. The exteriority to history which the ¢gure of passive endurance re-marks is indeed what makes past and future interchangeable ^ what correlates the immemorial and the unforeseeable ^ in many post-structuralist discussions of time. Time's most essential characteristic, the ability to pass beyond the present, is a re£ection of this exteriority.7 Hence the necessity for Blanchot, as for Derrida, of pursuing the aporias of mourning as far as they will go, always insisting on death's constitutive otherness. As an event that is always already forgotten, death gestures to a past which I cannot ever claim for myself. It stands, precisely, for a past that de¢nes me in¢nitely, to the point of ceasing to concern me.

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A de¢ning yet immemorial past is, in this sense, the main object of the poststructuralist inquiry into time; it is the phenomenon I attempt to characterize here, without con¢dence of doing it justice, as the experience of death-as-such. Such an experience entails the scandal of being faced with the monument of one's own demise (henceforth no longer one's own). It is an experience at the limit of experience, a fantasy of survival that Derrida equates, time and again, with the very institution of literature ^ even with literature's raison d'eªtre.8 This same fantasy e¡ectively sets the Wake's narrative in motion when, at Finn's funeral (FW 5^7), the I attests to its own ¢nitude ^ `Finiche' ^ which it could never know. Shortly, we shall come back to a detailed investigation of the function of this not-knowing in the Wake's hypomnesic techniques. At this point it must su¤ce to say that by confronting its readers with the immense di¤culty of thinking an immemorial past the Wake does more than test and exceed the limits of human memory: it taps into memory's unknowable element, into the passivity of a past `bereft of self '. It will be instructive, at this stage, to compare Joyce's use of paronomasia with Blanchot's, all the better to understand the speci¢city as well as the exemplarity of Joyce's endeavours to test the immemorial by way of a mnemonic overload. Let us recall, resuming the argument of Chapter 3, that for Joyce paronomasia serves a double purpose: it con¢gures narrative information in excess of logical-grammatical structures and it exposes conceptual language to its metaphorical substratum. The digressive assembly of paronomastically resonant lexemes organizes the `langscape' (FW 594) of Finnegans Wake, recasting the whole in the form of a universal and in¢nitely expanding ego ^ it is an ego that embodies a city that contains all the cities in the world; but also an ego that is critically impaired, its unity destabilized by the radical otherness it bears inside.9 The split in the ego is re¢gured by the dream-work as a crack on the `eggo', thus con£ating, through the story of Humpty Dumpty, the themes of death and self-mourning with the leitmotif of the mythical fall of/o¡ the wall. Allegorically speaking, the fall marks both the beginning and the end of universal history. It is in the real-time narration of this history that we come upon a concrete example of Wakean mnemotechnics, a classic instance of memory pushing beyond memory's limit; like all signi¢ers in the Wake, the name of Humpty Dumpty is inscribed in a paronomastic series which runs through the entire book. It is a receptacle of images, a place in which words gather, changing as they recombine, but always retaining something of their previous collisions with other words. Humpty's hump, which is also a mound, is paired up with the recycling dump of history; it is the same rubbish-dump from which Biddy will recover a `partly obliterated' (FW 111) letter used to incriminate HCE. In turn Biddy's status as the `original hen' (FW 110) brings into play the old paradox of evolutionary beginnings: what begot the ¢rst hen who produced the ¢rst eggo? The Wake will not try to answer that question; but it will insist on the idea of an origin always more original than the original One10 ^ an event buried `toofarback' (FW 4) in the past for any monument or document to be able to make

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sense of it, so that `the farther back we manage to wiggle the more we need the loan of a lens to see as much as the hen saw' (FW 112). It bears repeating here that the most distinctive feature of the Wake's discourse on time is that it thematizes and records the obliteration of its own letter. All that remains, as the book weaves and unweaves itself, erasing its own memory, is the memory of far too many languages crammed in a lexical fragment that has always already fallen outside the sentence. It is safe to assume that Biddy's `orange£avoured mudmound' (FW 111), the `museomound' (FW 8) and the `knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust' (FW 3) stand for the same `eggtentical spot' (FW 16): a spot where Humpty, Finn and HCE lie buried `by the mund of the magazine wall . . .' (FW 7). It is equally safe to infer that knock, hill, mound, hump, even wall and world, are used at one time or other in the Wake as interchangeable but notquite-equivalent terms. To be sure, these suppositions are possible on account of a memory spanning hundreds of pages. Only, it is a selective and forgetful memory ^ a `lethemuse' (FW 272) that creates narratives by virtue of its very forgetfulness, always repeating an originary di¡erence. Blanchot's texts too rely heavily on paronomasia in order to tease out the pregrammatical connections obtaining between certain words.11 But the e¡ect is quite di¡erent. Whereas Joyce endeavours to cast words within in¢nitely cumulative series, allowing sundry meanings to accrue to each paronym in an associative pattern that becomes increasingly di¤cult to motivate, Blanchot simulates an essayistic style, submitting a limited cluster of concepts to careful scrutiny only to disarticulate all de¢nitions by accentuating the slippage of meaning generated in the paronomastic chain: The attention waits [L'attention attend ]. He does not know if this attention [cette attente] is his, separated from him and waiting [attendant] outside him. He remains only with it. The attention [L'attention] that waiting [l'attente] gathers in him is destined not to arrive at the accomplishment of that which he awaits [ce qu'il attend ], but rather to let all accomplishable things diverge through waiting alone [ par la seule attente], the approach of the unaccomplishable. (Blanchot 1999: 22^3) Paronomasia in Blanchot's case resembles a method of thinking through by thinking again, of unpacking a concept by returning to it from di¡erent angles. The point of the exercise, however, is not that of exhausting all points of view for the sake of a complete picture. Rather, it is a matter of testifying to a void at the origin of thought, tracing the constant displacement and relocation to which thought is susceptible when its address falls outside subjectivist paradigms. It is as though the entire project of being ^ its human-existential parable ^ were emptied of content (here, in particular, we may grasp the di¡erence between Joyce and Blanchot), and memory itself were withheld in the act of repetition. Ultimately, the fragmentary incompleteness of errant thought, a necessary incompleteness, is all that can be brought to evidence in the discourses of patience, passivity and oblivion. `Passivity, passion, past, pas (both negation

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and step ^ the trace or movement of an advance): this semantic play provides us with a slippage of meaning, but not with anything to which we could entrust ourselves, not with anything like an answer that would satisfy us' (WoD 16^17). In opposition to the `answer that would satisfy us' Blanchot will theorize the fragment, the incompleteness of which must not be confused with the crafted open-endedness of ambiguous narratives. Fragmentary writing, as we observed in Chapter 3, opens up thought to time's self-di¡erential logic. It is the literary form of an in¢nite return that knows no sameness. Its open-endedness coincides, in Blanchot's texts, with the subject's withdrawal into a state of indescribable passivity: a passivity that belongs to no one since it never ceases to hand the `One' over to an Other `outside of all sovereignty' (WoD 33). How can such an outside be assimilated to the temporal economy of any particular work (for instance, to the dialectic between narrated time and time of narration)? The ¢ction of an unnarrated time produced in excess of the Wake's encyclopaedic design revolves around the allegorical and rhetorical dramatization of this logical impasse. Joyce's writing records the history of an all-containing and all-subsuming ego ^ an ego fractured by the impossible knowledge of its own death, which it has already experienced. The immemorial is given to language in this paradoxical act of self-mourning. It is given to language, I claim, therefore also to memory ^ but to a memory which, as we evince by the syntactic mapping of any paronomastic sequence, remains unsubordinated to the dialectical progression of time in the living present. Plainly enough, such a memory is also irreducible to received ideas of narration to the extent that it does not come alive in the activity of a self-identical narrator. Forgotten already, preserved in history as the outside of history, it is not so much remembered as redismembered.

Redismemberment I: Invoking Mnemosyne Redismemberment is as good a name as any for a memory predicated on death ^ a memory that belongs to the corpse rather than the living person. Far from serving the subject's instinct of self-preservation this memory repeats an original loss inde¢nitely. And because it belongs to the corpse, which owns nothing, not even its own death, what repeats is fated to remain un-embodied: without property of place or identity. Writing, for the author of Finnegans Wake, is a way of entrusting this memory to words, still un-embodied and unclaimed. In order to do so ^ in order, that is, to repeat what remains unremembered ^ Joyce privileges two hypomnesic techniques, one of Viconian origin, the other vaguely inspired by Freud. Freud's science famously suggests a way of interpreting a narrative by focusing on its more inexpressive segments, whereas Vico's method taps the resources of a universal memory in order to reconstruct the origins of human culture. As we observed in the course of previous chapters, such work entails an act of extreme self-dispossession which is the essential condition for the historian's descent into the inarticulate mind of primitive humans.

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Vico and Freud have come to be regarded by Joyce scholars as something of a natural pair.12 Common to both is the notion that human culture originates in physical instinct, and that history is as much an account of the rise of civil institutions and social norms as it is a narrative of the senses fashioned by highly imaginative beings ^ by poets and mythic heroes ^ whose motives are in fact instinctive before they are re£ective. John O'Neill's `Vico mit Freud Rejoyced' and John Bishop's `Vico's Night of Darkness' are among the most interesting essays to explore the Vico^Joyce nexus in the light of a Freudian intertext. Both studies take their cue from Vico's description of the robust corporeal imagination of the ¢rst gentiles, in which Freud's account of the birth of human civilization seems to have been anticipated. O'Neill identi¢es the Vichian family-unit as `the sensuous form' (1987: 160) in which civilization unfolds. In his words, `Vico's familization of world history humbles the conceits of rationalist philosophy and theology with the ¢rst poetry of those awkward sensate bodies whose language shone beyond the beasts and £ora, turning the thundering crack of the sky into Jove's voice. Before such poetry there is neither divinity nor humanity' (ibid.: 161). The reader's attention is directed, here, towards Book II of The New Science, and speci¢cally towards those paragraphs dealing with the wisdom of the theological poets who created the civil institutions from their ignorance of their natural surroundings. Vico and Joyce, O'Neill maintains, converge `in Freud's vision of the history and civilization of our carnal knowledge' (ibid.: 160). The strict correlation theorized by Vico between sensory experience, ignorance of natural surroundings and the history of civilization is also the focus of Bishop's reading of The New Science. Bishop equates the notion of `Poetic Wisdom' with Freud's description of the repressed unconscious fears that resurface symbolically in our dream world. His argument is one to which I am vastly indebted, proceeding as it does from the assumption that Vico's chief purpose was neither to ascertain the repeatability of historical events nor to demonstrate the predictability of every occurrence, but rather to identify the unconscious historical forces that motivate and determine the making of civilized mankind. In this sense Bishop's original and most important move consists in presenting the a¤nity between Vico and Freud in terms of the interest both thinkers have in the development of the infant mind: `What Vico called ``Poetic Wisdom'', Freud explained two hundred years later as the primary process of the unconscious. But Vico also anticipates Freud and contributes to Ulysses and the Wake by drawing a rich fund of insight from the observation and the memory of human infancy' (Bishop 1986: 185). The memory of human infancy looks back to a time and an experience before human character was even formed. It is in the light of this extreme recollective enterprise that the importance of Vico's analogy between the history of civil institutions and the life-cycle of human beings comes most compellingly into focus. Vico conceives of language as an extension of corporeal experience and regards corporeal experience as an original hermeneutic act. His claim that `words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies'

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(NS ½237) expresses the banal but very concrete truth that bodily structure is the material substrate underlying all speech, that word-production is inseparable from the shape of the mouth and the function of the vocal cords. But the claim is also meant in another sense: that the history of words begins in the attempt made by inarticulate humans to hold on to transient physical sensations. According to this view, words evolved originally not as vehicles for ideas but as durable substitutes for feelings. In their most basic and primitive form they are nothing but mute babblings and onomatopoeic sounds. Vico assumes that a certain primordial inarticulateness shapes, after this paradigm, every aspect of linguistic communication, including word-structure, syntax, metaphoric constructions and even (or indeed especially) features of poetic metre and style. The object of The New Science is to read this inarticulateness, in which the memory of human origins is kept and which the associative language of children and of poets instinctively re-enacts. It is for this purpose that Vico establishes a symmetry between the poetic instinct and the historian's principle of etymological reconstruction. Notably, this instinct has no basis in self-awareness. Having equated the corporeal imagination of Vico's ¢rst gentiles with the Freudian unconscious, Bishop describes the poets' immersion into a world of sensory stimuli as a form of nescience. Vico's theory of origins, Bishop explains, `regards as primary the not-knowing of the human mind' (1986: 189). The proper Viconian word for this `not-nowing', is `ignorance', which begets wonder and curiosity. Poetry, Vico implies, is conditional upon a natural curiosity, a¡ecting the ignorant but marvelling mind (NS ½374^5). To be sure, there is more to this idea than a proto-Romanticist delight in the genius of the child-poet. Throughout The New Science poetry takes on the meaning of creation latent in its Greek root. Time and again the word is used as a synonym of human productivity ^ that same productivity to which Vico refers when he writes that `the world of civil society has certainly been made by men' (NS ½331; my emphasis). We recall that for Vico to create is also to know; and there is no science more self-evident or more authoritative than that which the scientist himself has made out of his own nature. In other words it is not only poetry that begins in not-knowing, but also knowledge itself. The statement has the force of a theoretical principle: it is necessary that knowledge be born of ignorance, in the same way that it is structurally indispensable that the historical present be derived from an obscure past. By this principle alone does consciousness come to know itself historically. This is where Vico's account of historical knowledge comes closest to anticipating a post-structuralist insight. Vico understands that if the etymologist is able to retrace the act of self-creation by which the mind comes to know itself, it is because the primordial and vigorous sensations of nascent mankind are themselves already entrusted to language ^ or, at the very least, to some form of productive arti¢cial memory. Self-knowledge always and necessarily entails a compromise with rhetoric. Such a compromise, by which nature is handed

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over to memory, universalizes human experience; only it reverses the dialectical procedure on which the so-called human sciences ordinarily rely: Man in his ignorance makes himself the rule of the universe, for in the examples cited he has made himself an entire world. So that as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (homo intelligendo ¢t omnia), this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendo ¢t omnia); and perhaps the latter proposition is truer than the former, for when man understands he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them. (NS ½405) The causal connection that binds knowledge to ignorance and ignorance to metaphor in Vico's theory is revealed in this contraposition of a rational metaphysics by an imaginative one. Not only are metaphor and ignorance treated as correlate terms by Vico, they are also seen to supplement the origins of historical understanding in much the same way that, for Derrida and Blanchot, a primordial forgetfulness supplements all work of recollection and interiorization. In Vico's case, `ignorance' makes knowledge possible when it stirs men into using language creatively, making unprecedented comparisons, establishing hitherto unthought of connections between familiar and unfamiliar things. We have seen that metaphor and mythic narrative are the ideal tools for this type of creative endeavour, which, for all its anthropocentrism, requires the possibility of the disappearance of the self into the new objects it creates. Indeed, if the Science can lay claim to any historical accuracy or scienti¢c truth, this is only to the extent that it considers human nature the source of all evidence and `the measure of all things' (NS ½120). But human nature is also the theory's unknown. Withdrawn from evidence by virtue of its `inde¢nite' character it is always still in the making; uncreated (by the poet) or undeciphered (by the modern scholar), it is a secret conserved in the metaphoric modi¢cations undergone by the human mind. As a science of the unknown Vico's theory does more than promise to de¢ne the inde¢nite or shed light on what is obscure; it puts the inde¢nite and the obscure to work, employing them as instruments of philosophical knowledge. Vico's new critical art relies on a logic akin to divination that takes its authority from the rational civil theology of divine providence. Given that the role of providence is to supervise the course the nations run while safeguarding the sacrosanct principle of free human agency, we may understand Vico's concept of divination as an inborn faculty of the mind by which the mind regulates its actions and decisions vis-a©-vis what it cannot know: the future, God, human nature itself. A juxtaposition of Viconian and Bergsonian ideas becomes possible here, at the very point where the two philosophers seem to be furthest apart. We know

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that for both Vico and Bergson the concept of free will is a non-negotiable axiom, though it is not understood in quite the same terms. In Vico's case free will is the chief endowment of human nature, a de¢ning property that even God cannot change; in Bergson's, it is the principal corollary of an understanding of time as non-teleological evolution. In an inspired reading of Matter and Memory, Elizabeth Grosz associates Bergson's concept of freedom with a state of neurophysiological indeterminacy. She speaks, to this e¡ect, of `the interposition of a temporal delay between [perceptual] stimulus and response' (2004: 176). It is clear that this idea has little to share with the politics of choice commonly understood, with the individual freedom of liberal humanism, or, for instance, with the universal right to self-determination. Rather, freedom here is a direct correlate of time's openness, of its futural-creative disposition. It is, in other words, the very impulse that charges life with the power to consume and produce, to undo as well as create. In this sense, there can be no meaningful distinction between free will and duration itself intended as the condition in which every evolutionary being is always already situated. Transposed to a Viconian context, the same idea of free will yields a somewhat perverse thesis. From a Viconian perspective, there is no contradiction between the evolutionary nature of time and the theological precept that man is created in God's divine image.13 Indeed it is the need to think these two truths together that inspires the rational civil theology of divine providence and ultimately constitutes its raison d'eªtre. According to Vico, traditional philosophy has misunderstood providence because, in the best of cases, it has looked for it in the wrong place. Instead of concentrating on the interpretation of myths and social customs, it has directed all its e¡orts to the development of natural theology and physics. As usual Vico makes his point by means of an idiosyncratic philology: [These philosophers] ought to have studied it in the economy of civil institutions, in keeping with the full meaning of applying to providence the term `divinity' [i.e., the power of divining], from divinari, to divine, which is to understand what is hidden from men ^ the future ^ or what is hidden in them ^ their consciousness. (NS ½342) Divinity, as it is intended here, is a contemplation of the inaccessible. Vico alludes to this faculty elsewhere in a discussion of the way in which phantasia `reveals and con¢rms its own divine origin' (1993: 42). Phantasia, Vico explains, is what `makes present to our eyes lands that are very far away'; it `unites those things that are separated . . . overcomes the inaccessible . . . discloses what is hidden and builds a road through trackless places' (ibid.: 43). It is of `divine origin' inasmuch as it is a gift of Providence ^ that is to say, a gift by which Providence gives itself to mankind. As an attribute of Providence divinity will shine its light on all phenomena that surpass the limited scope of man's sel¢sh ends. Beyond all intentional action a providential mechanism attends to the invention of the future as to the reconstruction of an obscure and forgotten past; whence the opinion, held by many commentators, that Vico never properly

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distinguished memory from imagination. We know that Vico's own pronouncement to this e¡ect was unequivocal: la memoria e© la stessa che la fantasia [`memory is the same as imagination']. But we ought not to infer, merely on account of the overlap of these two concepts, that the author of The New Science was insensitive to the di¡erences obtaining between them. Far from misrecognizing the speci¢city of sound historical research Vico understood the need for an accurate recollection of the past. By subordinating his philological studies to the contemplation of the attributes of Providence he contrived to restore to memory an ancient power ^ one it had held before its association with the history of reason. Donald Verene o¡ers a detailed account of the way in which Vico's discourse on memory develops as an impassioned defence of rhetoric. Verene points out that in antiquity, as well as in the Renaissance, memory is generally associated with that branch of rhetoric that Vico refers to as topics. It is an art `tied to the notion of place, commonplace, or topos'. To meditate this art, as Verene explains, `is to allow the mind to return to those origin points that are the very being of the thinker and the human world ^ for the human to narrate to itself what it has originally created' (Verene 1983: 29). At the same time as it organizes the primary faculties of the human mind (memory, imagination and ingenuity), Vico's ars topica provides the mnemonic signposts by which to e¡ect such a return, thereby revealing, in the pre-re£ective origins of philosophical thought, memory's properly divine nature: All three [faculties] appertain to the primary operation of the mind whose regulating art is topics, just as the regulating art of the second operation of the mind is criticism; and as the latter is the art of judging, so the former is the art of inventing. And since naturally the discovery or invention of things comes before criticism of them, it was ¢tting that the infancy of the world should concern itself with the ¢rst operation of the human mind . . . With reason then, did the theological poets call Memory the mother of the Muses; that is, of the arts of humanity. (NS ½699) As `mother of the Muses' and of `the arts of humanity' memory possesses a genuinely generative capability. In conjunction with a secret wisdom ^ a wisdom born of ignorance and still shrouded in mystery ^ it inspires men to act providently on their immediate needs at the same time as it lends those needs a universal human signi¢cance which alone makes them interpretable (`meditable') to scholars of later generations. In a very concrete sense this memory enables mankind to give birth to itself. The universality of human nature cannot be grasped, however, without a certain concession to death. Indeed, a ¢rm conceptual bond obtains between mortality and universal human experience ^ all men are, after all, proverbially mortal. This bond is implicitly recognized in Vico's observation that human nature ¢nds its faithful historical expression in the universal practice of burial (humare): to realize what a great principle of humanity burial is, imagine a feral state in which human bodies remain unburied on the surface of the earth as food for

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crows and dogs. Certainly this bestial custom will be accompanied by uncultivated ¢elds and uninhabited cities. Men will go about like swine eating the acorns found amidst the putrefaction of the dead. And so with good reason burials were characterized by the sublime phrase `compacts of the human race' . . . and with less grandeur were described by Tacitus as `fellowships of humanity' (humanitatis commercia). (NS ½337) The arts of humanity, arts in which human memory and human commerce attain universal expression, take assurance in the fact that, regardless of age or cultural denomination, burial has always been the way of civilized history. But a burial plot is more than just the place where an important rite of passage is consumed. Vico's point is that graves mark the site where humans of all generations communicate with their departed. In the last analysis, it is this insight that authorizes Vico's belief in the possibility of compiling a mental dictionary by which to codify history's universal human substance, thereby granting the new scientist the power to speak in a language shared by the living and the dead.14 Vico's hypothesis, along with the cluster of ideas which give it shape, is comically reworked into Joyce's own invocations of Mnemosyne as he guides the reader inside the Museyroom. Within this interpretive framework the monument features as a gallery of topiche sensibili, a memory theatre in which the mind, even before it is called upon to accumulate and recycle the past, rehearses the `commonplaces' which have to be run through (i luoghi che si devon scorrer tutti [NS ½497]) in order for Joyce's colossal mnemonic exercise to get under way. As the burial site of a mythical Everybody ^ the common place par excellence ^ the mound guards an experience that is at once humanity's most secret and its most common. Such an experience is always already a shared past; but it is not a past that can be brought to light. Its invention, gift of providence, is absolutely immemorial, like the original not-knowing of the mind without which, Vico informs us, there would be no poetry and no human history.

Redismemberment II: Encryption Bishop's analogy between Vico's notion of ignorance and Freud's theory of the unconscious substantiates his thesis that the universal history recorded in the Wake unfolds, in its entirety, inside the body of one sleeping Dubliner. Lying unconscious on his bed HCE dreams the Wake and recollects, without realizing it, the memory of all humanity, of which he is a product. This memory, Bishop explains, preserves a collective past. It voids individual consciousness, exposing it to all the historical forces, personal or otherwise, which have contributed, since the beginning of time, to the formation of the hero's present: It was from Vico that Joyce learned, even while writing those two egotistical biographical novels, Stephen Hero and A Portrait, that no infant born into the world of gentile nature can even remotely attain a `personality' without

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the prior existence of scores of people in the world immediately around it, and of billions of others buried in the night of a historical past ordinarily lost to consciousness. (Bishop 1986: 213) The dreaming mind which according to Bishop conjures the universe of the Wake is a space inhabited by ghosts. The dream-work itself reveals the unsteady foundations on which identity stands re-imagining the subject as a composite structure formed by the experience of others, and allowing the dreamer to have it both ways: to be utterly unconscious of his past, and to be a¡ected ^ if only through the production of dream-sequences ^ by the past of which he is unconscious. Within his dream the dreamer has no proper identity; yet, to the extent that his memories originate from within the body, he is certainly and materially one. Bishop's conclusion, to this e¡ect, is that the universe of Finnegans Wake is not so much egocentric as `somatocentric' (ibid.: 215). By this he means that, although the concept of individual identity comes undone in Joyce's text, as surely as it is undone in sleep, one individual body continues to contain, experience and remember the entire human past. The fact that this body is unmistakably gendered and obviously misshapen seems to matter less than the evidence by which it is found to be altogether deprived of independent volition, unaware of itself, and driven to ful¢l desires that are for the most part not its own: Like the New Science, Finnegans Wake generates a vision of human consciousness in which individual personality can be spoken of only as the summed collection of all persons who have collided with it, made its existence possible, and even vaguely helped to shape it; paradoxically set within an individual body, the book devastates as completely as the condition of sleep the whole notion of discrete individuality. (ibid.: 214) It appears, here, that some form of individuality is being salvaged by Bishop at the same time as the complete devastation of the concept is announced. In actual fact, what is recuperated through the ¢gure of `an individual body' is the reader's con¢dence in a self-identical point of origin ^ that is to say, in individuality understood in its most speci¢c and irreducible sense.15 Right when it has the book `set within' a self-enclosed space, Bishop's reading rea¤rms the prerogative of the One-and-same (that is, of an organic and indivisible agent of experience) to maintain itself by interiorizing and containing the totality of its contradictions. In this respect, the unconscious body dreaming at the centre of Finnegans Wake functions as a framing device; in the act of summing up and collecting all the past it restores self-sameness to a position of absolute authority. By the same logic, the move from egocentrism to somatocentrism disquali¢es the Cartesian subject only to revert to an idea of embodiment that circumscribes alterity. Ultimately, embodiment presumes an entelechic-mnemic activity (or, to borrow Bishop's terms, a work of summing up and collecting) that is able to organize all the traces of self-di¡erence which come to the surface in sleep.

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Beyond the boundaries set up by this framing device is the time (the past) of an absolute passivity. If the passage of time will be seen to evade most parameters of scienti¢c investigation, it is because such a past predates all work of containment and self-preservation. Incommensurate with the present it puts a strain on the idea of scienti¢c evidence itself. So much so that while it has indeed been possible to situate the immemorial past in the space of a primordial forgetfulness (Blanchot), or to speak of it in terms that pertain to the discourse of trauma (Derrida and Levinas), neither the concept of forgetfulness nor that of trauma has remained unscathed by the association. As we observed, these could not be, even for Joyce, the trauma and the forgetfulness of a self-identical subject ^ not, in other words, a trauma or a forgetfulness that a rational science of the unconscious would be able to handle. In the Wake's (un)weaving of all possibilities of time the immemoriality of an absolute past coincides with a ¢gure of mnemonic excess: `redismemberment' comes to describe the insistence of a technique by which the text's memory surpasses the history of reason. Another way to phrase this is to say that the Wake complicates the classic idea of the text as symptom of the subject's repressed experiences. The notion that Joyce's work is not only a product of the ungovernable eruptions of the unconscious but also an imitation of the subject's (de-)signifying operations makes for a well-rehearsed and widely accepted critical premise, one that ¢nds its most challenging formulation in a series of in£uential lectures and seminars given by Lacan in the mid 1970s. In the analytic situation the symptom is traditionally understood as an appeal to the analyst's interpretive abilities; it is that aspect of the subject's psychic makeup that wants to communicate. What this will to communicate attests to, ultimately, is the ineluctability of the signifying process, the command of the phenomenal world, with its investment in meaning and subjective experience, over the workings of the unconscious. In his later writings, Lacan would challenge this view, de¢ning the symptom not as a message but as a peculiar way of con¢guring one's enjoyment of the unconscious. Famously, this notion rests on a model of subjectivity constituted in separation and lack ^ a lack that cannot be repaired, to be sure, but only accepted. Yet even here, symptom formation continues to address, insistently, the possibility of interpretation (a return to the order of signifying forms). It is by virtue of this possibility, always mediated by the Other, that the analysand is able to project and recover the image of an individuated I, to identify with the symptom. In his reading of the Wake Lacan comes to associate the symptom's individuating power with the author's proper name. `Joyce' (with its suggestions of jouissance and its striking semantic proximity to the name of the father of psychoanalysis) becomes a cipher which functions in replacement of the nom du pe©re (the name and the law of the Father, the very name of the law) allowing the writer's signature to encompass and overcome the experience of a psychotic foreclosure of signifying possibilities: It is only in so far as the unconscious will tie itself to the sinthome ^ which is what is unique for each individual ^ that one can say that Joyce . . . is

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identi¢ed with the individual. He is the one who takes upon himself the privilege of having existed to an extreme degree in order to embody [ pour incarner en lui ] the symptom, for which reason he escapes all possible death . . . (my translation; Lacan's emphasis).16 As Rabate¨ has shown, Lacan's engagement with the Joycean `sinthome' marks a paradoxical return to a conception of the ego that he had actively repudiated throughout much of his career (Rabate¨ 2001). `Sinthome' is an archaic spelling of symptoªme that allows Lacan to characterize Joyce as a Holy Man (saint homme): a heroic, larger-than-life ¢gure whose ecstatic experiences produce the symptom as a joyous a¤rmation of a purely egocentric world. In this context, the expression `pour incarner en lui le symptoªme' will be seen to carry an overt Christian-mythical overtone that matches Joyce's view of the artist as alterChrist, recasting the poetic process as a theological drama wherein the Father's law is replaced by the miracle of the £esh. Julia Kristeva takes up this theme in a study of the motif of identi¢cation in Ulysses. Aside from the evident debt to Lacan's theory it will be noted that her analysis re£ects an idea of writing-assymptom that is eminently compatible with Bishop's description of the Wake as a somatocentric text. Joyce's artistic project is approached by Kristeva as an attempt to revitalize the metaphors and semiotic procedures through which subjective identity is formed. What is at stake in Joyce's treatment of the mechanics of identi¢cation is the possibility of ¢ction itself: the act of creating images with all that it entails for a theory of poetic production. Joyce, she writes, explores the symptom of writing in its underlying intrapsychic dimension which . . . resides in the capacity of the speaking being to identify with another subject or object, or part of a trait thereof. It is the mechanism of identi¢cation as motor of the Imaginary and the disquieting human adventure within meaning that literature conveys in its human characters, its verisimilitude, its catharses, and with so many other topoi by now itemized by both classical and not-so-classical literary theory. (1988: 167^8) Like memory for Vico, Kristeva's notion of identi¢cation originates in the body's ability to become the image of the other; it gives the body over to metaphor and makes of metaphor an intensely corporeal experience. `Identi¢cation . . . is a transference of my body and of my psychic apparatus in-process-ofgestation ^ therefore incomplete, mobile, £uid ^ to an Other, the ¢xity of which is, for me, a point of reference and, already, a representation. It is in taking myself for them, in becoming like them . . . that I become One, a subject capable of verbal and pre-verbal representations' (ibid.: 168). The logic of the symptom is explicitly restated here in terms that pertain to the individual's will to survive. By modelling itself after the image of the other the subject endeavours to hold on to its individuality in the face of constant change, and this process is `our only means', Kristeva insists, `of preserving our psychic space as a living ``system'' ' (ibid.: 169). What, indeed, is this instinct of self-preservation if

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not a `vital . . . teleological and unconscious force' (Rickard 1988) by which the subject, as a cohesive living system, negotiates and polices its external borders? Its rationale is the rationale of all scienti¢c models of memory: a reappropriation by the subject of the contents of the unconscious. Kristeva and Lacan have inspired numerous readings in which the di¤culty of Joyce's style is seen to be symptomatic of the foundational anachrony that structures all acts of self-presentation. Hilary Clark, for one, has engaged with the Wake's dramatization of its own illegibility to describe Joyce's style as a broken language marked by the `shame of the Irish writer working in English as an alien tongue' (1997: 461). Inherent to this shame, and to the art it produces, is the subject's desire for an original pre-traumatic unity, a nostalgia that harks back to a sense of undividedness associated with the memory of the maternal body. Needless to say, such desire is fated to remain unful¢lled. If the Wake is clear about anything at all it is in its a¤rmation that there is no such thing as a pristine relation to the mother tongue; words are always already mediated, always stolen or plagiarized, or recycled into a `secondmouth language' (FW 37). Clark observes, to this e¡ect, that `in the Wake the body of language is broken and eaten, but unlike the body of the Father it remains broken ^ it remains waste, litter' (1997: 467). In this reading, language itself becomes an object of impossible mourning, pined for as that ideal of unmediated expression which it can never live up to, as the unattainable possibility of speaking ¢rstmouth. Clark's diagnosis is that the writing of Finnegans Wake carries on its material surface ^ in the multilingual puns and the equivocations ^ the signs of a melancholic alienation from this very ideal. It is this sense of alienation that produces the impression of a text that refuses to communicate: Like Shem holed up in his Inkbottle, the depressive is entombed in the past, impossibly desiring a lost object that he or she can neither retrieve nor escape. . . . [T]he rhetorical operations of the Wake ensure that the past (the sore point of trauma, whether psychological or colonial) will insist symptomatically at every point in the text. (ibid.: 468) Clark's main theoretical reference here is Kristeva's description of melancholia as an `unsurpassable experience' that holds the subject `riveted to the past' (Kristeva 1989: 60, quoted in Clark 1997: 468), unable to grow, to evolve, to renew its ties with the world as it would under normal circumstances. The sore point of trauma to which the paragraph alludes preserves a memory of enduring death. By repeating this memory while refusing to communicate it, the Wake bears witness to an absolute loss ^ a loss of presence and of immediacy, yet, paradoxically, a loss that manifests itself. Hence its status as an `unsurpassable experience'; the latter expression names an intransitive temporal design in which we recognize, picking up the theme of Chapter 2, a peculiar Wakean formula: the ¢gure of a time that will not pass, a present deprived of future. Fittingly, Kristeva speaks of `an exitless vault' (1989: 60), an image that situates this time at the intersection of life and death.

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The issue is taken up by Christine Van Boheemen in a book-length study devoted to the signi¢cance and the speci¢city of the trauma of colonial experience in Joyce's work. Van Boheemen's hypothesis is that Joyce's writing `dramatizes the presence of a void at the point of origin because the historical condition of being Irish entails the excruciating necessity of postulating that void in the face of the overwhelming encroachment of hegemonic culture' (1999: 75). By foregrounding the material aspect of language ^ the black-onwhite of the printed word, the ink-stain which litters the page ^ Joyce is able to bear witness to an identity already excluded by the logic of power. His art is wrought in the language of loss, its fabric the wound of Ireland's inclusion in a history already appropriated by others: [A] postcolonial subject can only mourn the gap that divides himself or herself from the possibility of interiority and self-presence that might have been had history been di¡erent. In the case of an Irish writer, growing up with English as his ¢rst language, the aspiring artist is forced to allude allegorically, and in the sermo patris of the oppressor's language, to what can never be voiced with immediacy: the loss of a natural relationship to language, the lack of interiority of discourse and coherent selfhood. (ibid.: 2) According to Van Boheemen, Joyce's commitment to the material residue of writing aligns his project with Lacan's account of the trajectory of the signi¢er. Just as the Lacanian signi¢er carries on its £esh the evidence of its internal lack, so the `possibly meaningless materiality' (ibid.: 163) of Joyce's fetishized word preserves, by the sheer power of its a¡ective charge, the truth of the traumatic past in which it is constituted. This charge, Van Boheemen insists, exceeds the opposition of speech and writing. Its presence is textual and corporeal at one and the same time: Joyce's `symptom' contains the real reminder that philosophy, art, technology are produced by the £esh. However, instead of labeling it `symptomatic', I wish to see it as an act of resistance against the hegemonic imposition of a structure of subjectivity which splits body from language. In fact, I propose we understand Joyce's drive to bring the body into word as the product of a di¡erent way of conceiving the practice and substance of language, perhaps analogous to that of ancient Irish oral culture, preserving an incantatory mode. (ibid.: 205) In this as in other readings cited above, reference to the Joycean symptom serves to describe a trajectory of return. Whether the return is con¢gured as a reinstatement of the form of individual identity, as a £eshing out of the displaced subject of language, or even as a non-discursive manifestation of the wound of colonial experience, its structural and ideological attainment remain conditional upon an anthropomorphic presentation of the past ^ `une structure qui est celle meªme de lom' (Lacan 1982: 5). Such a presentation is to all

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intents and purposes a work of anamnesis. As we have seen, the past that commands its focus breaks into language as memory's material excess and encumbers the process of signi¢cation by its refusal to be symbolized. It is thus preserved within the subject's psychic topography as a forgotten experience, but an experience that is always already constituted, notably, in the now of internalized corporeal sensations. In my understanding, the prehuman past of which the Wake's obscurity is a symptom overtakes this temporal scheme. The book's verbal and syntactic inventions convey not the evidence of a repressed experience but rather a trauma borne in absolute passivity ^ a loss of self-identity that cannot be ascribed to any `living system' or individual agency. As I pointed out earlier, the Wake illustrates this phenomenological impossibility in the scene of HCE's identi¢cation with his own mourners (FW 7). In that fantasy, the corpse takes the stance of the autobiographer; he signs the text and recollects the past from a position that disquali¢es all relations to self, that disables, in fact, the very logic of self-reappropriation which is the essence of the Hegelian Erinnerung. Joyce contrives to stage this phenomenological impossibility in his method of composition. His deployment of an in¢nitely divisible mark, of a sign inscribed in destinerrance does not only open his writing to the production of an absolute future (a future more futural than any prospective modi¢cation of the present), it also situates in that future the symptomatic return of a past more primordial than any intentional or existential trajectory. Abraham and Torok's notion of cryptic mourning o¡ers a valid theoretical paradigm by which to plot the narrative of this return. In their analysis of the symptomatic e¡ects of melancholic bereavement Abraham and Torok focus on the connection that obtains between the oral activity underlying melancholic depression and a certain practice of linguistic obfuscation. Cryptic mourning is described as a type of `mouth-work' in which the pain occasioned by the loss of a loved object is at once denied and attributed to the lost object itself. Such a denial/displacement entails a distortion of the ordinary protocols of verbal communication because it deprives language of its ¢gurative potential and because it takes care to maintain an unbridgeable distance between words and their source: Because our mouth is unable to say certain words and unable to formulate certain sentences we fantasize, for reasons yet to be determined, that we are actually taking into our mouth the unnameable, the object itself. As the empty mouth calls out in vain to be ¢lled with introjective speech, it reverts to being the food-craving mouth it was prior to the acquisition of speech. Failing to feed itself on words to be exchanged with others, the mouth absorbs in fantasy all or part of a person ^ the genuine depository of what is now nameless. The crucial move away from interjection (clearly rendered impossible) to incorporation is made when words fail to ¢ll the subject's void and hence an imaginary thing is inserted into the mouth in their place. (Abraham and Torok 1994: 128^9)

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The protection of a secret identity (and, along with that identity, of a secret name) represents the true objective of cryptic mourning. By ingesting the other, complete with its own secrets and its unnameable name, the bereaved subject enacts a fantasy whereby it convinces itself that it has nothing to mourn. This is, in Abraham and Torok's de¢nition, `the magical ``cure'' by incorporation' (ibid.: 127); it consists of a magical act insofar as the remedy it provides is both instantaneous and illusory, causing the pain to disappear as though no reason for grieving had ever existed. So extreme is the mourner's inability to mourn ^ that is, to internalize the trauma in a gradual and healthy manner ^ that the word which might have helped to work through the pain, or even merely to acknowledge it, is disabled. It is excluded from the mourner's vocabulary and erased from language, only to return, distorted beyond recognition, in what can only be described as the anonymous speech of another. The crypt, in this context, must not be confused with the Freudian unconscious. Nor indeed is the secret it perpetuates merely to be understood as a repressed experience. A crypt is the clandestine space in which history's relation (without relation) with an absolute past is played out. It is the monument to an ingested but undigested secret ^ a secret history keeps even from itself. The monument is erected in order to conceal within the subject the evidence of a pre-subjective rift. Abraham and Torok speak to this e¡ect of a `supplemental topography' (ibid.: 135) in which the lost object's psychic makeup is duplicated in its entirety. In the peculiar syntactic constructions occasioned by this type of identi¢cation the object adopts the subject as its own front. The object's unconscious, complete with its lexical gaps and its repressions, is secretly taken on loan only to foreground a condition of indi¡erence that separates the subject's vocabulary from its a¡ective experience. Thus, where Kristeva, speaking of the crypt in her own right, would liken `the speech of the depressed' to `an alien skin' (1989: 53), Abraham and Torok introduce the paradoxical image of an object that `carries the ego as its mask' (1994: 141). The theory of endocryptic identi¢cation marks at once an important contribution to and a ¢rst step away from traditional conceptions of writing as a symptom of disruptive unconscious processes. Certainly less pliable to phenomenological categories than Lacan's and Kristeva's work, Abraham and Torok's project focuses on a text's resistance to intelligibility by addressing its recourse to arbitrary constructions and its systematic reduction of words to the status of fetishized names. The paradox of an object that carries the ego as its mask intimates the possibility of a writing that is symptomatic not of the subject's but of the lost object's con£ictual interiority. Encryption is understood here as a kind of secreting by proxy ^ in other words, as the concealment of a borrowed shame. The idea of a secret that can be exchanged, passed on, perpetuated without ever surfacing in consciousness is taken to an extreme consequence in Nicolas Abraham's theory of the phantom. By this concept Abraham identi¢es the symptomatic reappearance of a traumatic event that was never experienced in the ¢rst place. The secret in this case is always already secreted; it is inherited

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and carried by the patient as a sealed tomb ^ an unmentionable name within somebody else's vocabulary. Abraham's conclusion is that `[t]he phantom's periodic and compulsive return lies beyond the scope of symptom-formation in the sense of a return of the repressed; it works like a ventriloquist, like a stranger within the subject's own mental topography' (1994: 173). The pertinence of these metaphors to a reading of Finnegans Wake is in evidence. The ¢gure of the ventriloquist, in particular, threatens to dissolve that binary logic whereby a given space ^ the embodied standpoint from which history is enunciated ^ cannot possibly be subjective and objective, foreign and familiar, proper and wholly unassimilated at one and the same time. Abraham insists that: the imaginings issuing from the presence of a stranger have nothing to do with fantasy strictly speaking. They neither preserve a topographical status quo nor announce a shift in it. Instead, by their gratuitousness in relation to the subject, they create the impression of surrealistic £ights of fancy or of oulipo-like verbal feats. (ibid.: 173) The reference to the Oulipo is instructive. Intuitively, no method of composition seems further removed from Joyce's parodies of transubstantiation than the principle of writing within self-imposed constraints promoted by the oulipiens. It has been argued that the excessive productivity and the indiscriminate identi¢catory thrust which characterize the text of the Wake are indicative of an unprecedented creative licence, a literary technique that precludes nothing, indeed that transgresses every code, every generic and syntactic convention in order to sample all discourses. Joyce's style also compels us, however, to reconcile this same excessive productivity with the evidence of a mechanical procedure that de-personalizes the creator's unlimited freedom. It is here that the Oulipian analogy becomes relevant. Joyce once compared his work to a simple but perfect `engine with only one wheel' (1957: 251). The image has been discussed by Jean-Michel Rabate¨ who comments on its double signi¢cance, in the ¢rst instance as a metaphor by which to account for the text's serial-semiotic operations, and secondly as a marker of its ability to function independently of its author (1984: 81). Pursuing the argument further Rabate¨ refers to Joyce's rather extravagant suggestion that he might trust James Stephens to ¢nish the Wake if circumstances prevented him from doing so. The statement lends itself to an allegorical reading that shakes the institution of authorship at the very base. It is not only that Joyce came to imagine his `work in progress' as a self-generating textual system which would write itself on its own once Stephens had been given the instructions for use. The prospected signature-change entails a total relinquishing of property that embarrasses theories of the symptom, and ultimately dissociates the production of Joyce's work from any apparent logic of personal or even human reappropriation. It is almost certain that Joyce's choice of Stephens as his substitute had been dictated by the opportunity of including in his project, if only paratextually, the

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record of a remarkable set of coincidences. Ellmann relates the incident thus: `On May 31, Joyce remarked upon the coincidence that for several years he had been carrying in his pocket photographs of the portraits by Tuohy of his father, himself, and ^ James Stephens. Another coincidence however topped all the others: ``The combination of his name from that of mine and my hero in A.P.O.T.A.A.A.Y.M. [A Portrait] is strange enough. I discovered yesterday, through enquiries made in Paris, that he was born in Dublin on the 2 February 1882''. To Joyce this new fact was clinching and he gathered himself, if not to surrender the book to Stephens, at least to talk to Stephens about surrendering it' (Ellmann 1982: 592). The anecdote records the event of two signatures coming together, and with them two autobiographies that could never have been more personal, and yet are not. Perhaps James Stephens (born in Dublin on 2 February 1882) would have signed at the bottom of Finnegans Wake page 628, only to make the Wake ever more singularly Joycean. The fortuitous convergence of two names and two biographies would have entailed no less a transgression of syntactic categories than the book's technique of paronomastic composition, confronting the reader with a narrative project that accounts for strongly autobiographical motivations while unfolding at an uncanny remove from any personal history, indeed from the autobiographical subject's own word. The Wake's commitment to a logic of ventriloquism is fully dramatized in the course of Chapter XV. The episode plays out as an extended interrogation of Shaun, who now goes by the telling pseudonym of Yawn. A character known as Mamalujo (a composite of voices belonging to four old men) conducts the enquiry, which is reminiscent of a psychoanalytic session but also of a se¨ance. Yawn, who is apostrophized as an `Impassable tissue of improbable liyers' (FW 499) has taken the place formerly occupied by his deceased father; he rests on the mound, and responds to questions designed to raise HCE from the dead and to get him to testify at his own trial: Now, the oneir urge iterimpellant, I feel called upon to ask did it ever occur to you, qua you, prior to this, by a stretch of your iberborealic imagination, when it's quicker than this quacking that you might, bar accidens, be very largely substituted in potential secession from your next life by a complementary character, voices apart? (FW 486^7) Yawn, for his part, realizes that another is always speaking in his stead: `I'm not meself at all' (FW 487); `I have something inside of me talking to myself ' (FW 522). Gradually he yields control over his own words, and we begin to discern, in the answers educed by the four old men, the garbled voices of other members of the Earwicker family. One by one Shem, ALP and HCE speak through him, and though he insists on using the ¢rst person singular he is compelled, time and again, to acknowledge his own status as a passive vehicle for the work's multiplicity of voices. Such a recognition entails, as is often the case in the Wake, a confusion of pronouns as well as of tongues: `you may identify yourself with the him in you' (FW 496). The confusion is exacerbated by Joyce's

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ploy of omitting all references to the identity of interviewers and respondent(s). Every new utterance is introduced by a dash, so that the name of the speaker is systematically withheld. And although it is generally possible to disentangle questions from answers by attending to the paragraphs' sense and register, the fact that one answer is not always preceded by a single question contributes to the impression of a carefully constructed Babel. Yet, despite the overlap of voices, the direction of the old men's line of questioning is clear. Their theory, corroborated by Yawn's own deposition, is that Yawn is a front for the mound or Mund that was previously associated with his father. In this context, he is suspected of being an `earthpresence' (FW 499), an epithet strongly reminiscent of HCE's corpse interred in the Dublin landscape. Ultimately, this presence amounts to an `[i]mpassable tissue of improbable liyers': a tissue of lies, spoken, layer upon layer, in a `bizar tongue' (FW 499). Yawn's `tolkshap [McHugh: talk-shop]', yet another word for mouth, is compared to an exotic marketplace where trade and mistranslation are the norm.17 As for the high ground (the `altknoll' [FW 499]) on which Yawn means to sit: it is said to cover centuries of sin, made senseless by time (`insince insensed' [FW 499]) and obliquely suggestive of incest. No surprise, then, that `Whoishe?' (FW 499) and `Who's within?' (FW 500) should be the chapter's de¢ning questions. In the Wake, any attempt at answering these questions is destined to be frustrated, in the same manner that any attempt to distinguish the extradiegetic from the diegetic levels of narration is bound to fail. In sum, the reader of Joyce's ¢nal work is always confronted by the evidence that the external frame is in fact contained by what lies within it; so that, while it would not be incorrect to think of the geographical organization of the novel along the lines sketched out by Bishop ^ that is, as a world set within an all-containing body ^ faith in a reliable demarcation of subjective and objective spaces remains untenable. The subject, as Rabate¨ has put it, `¢nds himself in a mobile play of positions and inversions . . . plunged into a moving grammar [he] can be at any moment shuttled to and fro between the active and the passive' (1991b: 159). This is why the question of `who's within' must be pursued inde¢nitely. By the end of the se¨ance the interviewer's hypothesis has been vindicated. When HCE, who already encompasses the entire Wakean universe, emerges from within Yawn to deliver his monologue,18 the spatial paradox of an external space that is contained by its inside comes plainly into view. The appearance of the `ghostus' (FW 532) completes the symmetrical curve of a plot that repeats, only in reverse form, the instant of HCE's disappearance from his own funeral (FW 7). Viewed as a diptych the two episodes provide an ideal illustration of the phenomenon of cryptic mourning and of its uncanny linguistic e¡ects. The narrative they set up is precisely that of an internally divided ego that is adopted by its double as a mouthpiece. To recapitulate: in the ¢rst scene HCE vanishes ^ `¢niche[s]' ^ from the funeral banquet just as the mourners are about to `sink teeth' into his `£owerwhite bodey' (FW 7). The Eucharistic imagery written into the passage is instantly recognizable, the hero's fate

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plainly suggesting that of an incorporated host.19 In the second scene the host returns as a `holocryptog[r]am' (FW 546). Here HCE amounts to a virtual replica of himself, borne and secreted by his own son through whom he speaks and in whose hollow words he lies buried. The perverse (and always reversible) system of relations established by this intersubjective dynamic is characteristic of the Wake's narrative signature at large. The ¢gure of a mourned object that carries the ego as its mask shapes both the syntax and the dramatic organization of the novel's competing voices. The extreme passivity it describes situates the speaking subject always in the place of a `spickspookspokesman' (FW 427) and digni¢es his word ^ but, then again, it is not exactly his word ^ as `the presence (of a curpse)' (FW 224). We return to the question of the Wake's excessive memory by way of this bracketed presence ^ this impossible symptom which, in Abraham's analysis, is congruent with a psychotic dissociation of the word from its living source. Abraham speaks unequivocally of `a formation of the unconscious that has never been conscious . . .' (1994: 173). The post-structuralist resonance of the phrase is unmistakable, Derrida's trace providing an obvious philosophical precedent.20 Here too we are invited to contemplate a past whose manner of returning bears no relation to that of a modi¢ed present ^ indeed, whose symptomatic re-emergence repeats `a memory of what has never been' (1977: 95). To the extent that it records the trauma of an absolute Other ^ precisely, a memory that is endured without ever having been experienced ^ the cryptogram preserves the trace of its own original obliteration. The description of the incorporated host as `a fadograph of a yestern scene' o¡ers a ¢rst allegorical account of this extraordinary mnemotechnic, so utterly concerned with its own inherent forgetfulness. I have touched on this paradox elsewhere proposing to interpret fadography as a technology that places photographic memory under erasure. The gloss is borne out a few pages into the Wake's opening chapter when the fading of the fadograph is duplicated by the `blurring' of a text engraved on the museum wall, now a ruined mausoleum: It reminds you of the outwashed engravure that we used to be blurring on the blotchwall of his innkempt house. . . . I say, the remains of the outworn gravemure where used to be blurried the Ptollmens of the Incabus. (FW 13) A certain fatalism attaches to both images. Fading and fate (Portuguese: fado) converge in the idea of an obliterated writing on the wall ^ `an outwashed engrave(m)ure' ^ the illegibility of which documents nothing if not time's inexorable passage. The permanence of this passage is the monument's theme, the Wake's impossible project: to make a fadograph of every mark and reproduce, in the deleted word or the counterfeit signature, the workings of a memory that has always already fallen outside itself. The past such a memory addresses remains, as we have seen, ungrounded in experience, which is to say that the site of its origin and recollection is not the living present, not the now of an introspective consciousness in which the entirety of time is dialectically

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accumulated. Nor is it, for that matter, the full material presence of the remembered human body. Rather, it is the word as incorporated object, the product of an impersonal, impassive Mnemosyne feeding the mind's primordial fascination with the hidden and the inaccessible.

Remembering to Forget Encryption, then, is the privileged rhetorical strategy by which the Wake performs its work of redismemberment. As the symptom of an event that pertains to the time of the other ^ an event that originates in the other and resists assimilation to the economy of the same ^ the cryptogram enjoins its reader to forget. It appeals to the reader's forgetfulness in a move that exposes history to the risk of a total loss of meaning. In Joyce's last novel such an appeal also coincides with a narrative thread that adopts Hamlet's encounter with the ghost of his father as its guiding myth; only the terms of the psychoanalytic parable instituted in Shakespeare's scene are here complicated by the paternal ghost's resignation to the failures of `mummery' (FW 535). A clash of two contradictory imperatives is staged during Yawn's interrogation by the four old men; the clash repeats the collision of remembrance and dismemberment brought to our attention at the entrance to the museomound, and lays out, for the reader's bene¢t, the all-important Wakean principle whereby `[w]hat can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for' (FW 482). `Decording', as Rabate¨ explains, implies both the undoing of a cord (and therefore, by inference, a process of unweaving) and an act of decoding: `If it is not coded it can be decoded, de-corded, unwoven, line by line' (1984: 79). But it is also, more simply, the opposite of recording. In this sense, to decipher a Joycean cryptogram is to play back the record (ricordo is Italian for recollection) while erasing it. The riddle of two contradictory but coexisting instructions, both equally important to the reader of Finnegans Wake, is resolved in this singular procedure. A brief passage from Chapter XVII makes the case somewhat more clearly: What has gone? How it ends? Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Today's truth, tomorrow's trend. Forget, remember! (FW 614) These words, as Jacques Mailhos has pointed out, acquire an added signi¢cance on account of their strategic collocation in the narrative. They are uttered towards the end of the night, just before waking ^ towards the end of the ideal eternal history covered by the book, this history without end which, suddenly and for an instant, seems to be driven by a single and de¢nitive teleology. Jacques Mailhos re£ects that the recommendation to `begin to forget' refers to the risk entailed by the approach of daybreak, a risk that invests the narrative

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even at its most basic level, as a representation of image-sequences formed in dream. `Begin to forget' translates, at this late hour, `begin to wake up', or `begin to leave the dream behind you'. The following phrase, `it will remember itself from every sides', details, on the other hand, the workings of an automatic memory machine, a machine that, as Mailhos insists, guarantees a perfect record of itself, since it must do the remembering in place of the fallible reader: We shall concentrate, here, on a very particular type of memory: an automatic memory which is integrated into the text itself as if to ensure the ful¢lment of the [re-]memoration duty in the most reliable way. In the study of this strategy, one might be tempted to invoke ^ if only metaphorically ^ computers and their electronic memories. (1994: 42) Such a memory, to be sure, also bears the responsibility of recycling the text, of returning it full circle to the riverrun of the opening paragraph. It is what makes the histories collected in the Wake eternal, and the night during which they are dreamt interminable. What role could the text's reference to (itself as) a faded record, or a forgetful memory, play in this scheme of things? Mailhos testi¢es to the following entries in Joyce's workbook VI.B.18: At the bottom of page 13, we ¢nd `forget dream', which is then developed at the top of page 14: `onrush of waking routs dream'. On page 98, the problem is ¢nally clearly formulated: `interpretation of dream / breakfast kills the memory of dreams / ¢rst thought of waking remember a dream . . .' (ibid.: 44) Joyce is aware that the desire to remember the dream, to interpret and make sense of it against all evidence of its insigni¢cance, is irrepressible. Yet the clarity of mornings that awaits the dreamer at the end of every night only betrays the dream, only distorts it. Being faithful to the dream entails being faithful to the immemoriality in which it is ¢rst received. In view of this realization, the Wake's commitment to the double imperative, `Forget, remember!', may be seen to point to a non-programmable lapse of memory that is the work's (the dream's) single chance of surviving its projected end. The burden of an immemorial past opens time to the invention of the future, to a `posthumust' time (FW 422) centred outside history, always originating beyond the living present. Forgetting, in this sense, is allied with invention. Unprogrammed by de¢nition ^ one cannot plan to forget ^ it is a precondition for the arrival of the other, an event that comes to pass, necessarily, in the manner of an interruption. Even the self-remembering machine, then, must be able to forget. Time itself (this is the Wake's most rewarding insight on the subject) depends on it. As it impresses upon its reader the absolute importance of the `lethemuse' (FW 272) for the production and organization of its narrative, the Wake teases out of Vico's principle ^ la memoria e© la stessa che la fantasia ^ this ingenious complication. History may be no more than an imaginative recomposition of

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elements already held in memory, but the marking of time, of its waste and its in¢nite detour, belongs to what Vico would call the hidden and the inaccessible. In Joyce's ¢nal masterpiece the work of the muse corresponds to an originary giving that does not show itself ^ that is never humanized and never made present. Like Vico's divine providence, whose achievements, as we recall, would not have been possible if its designs upon humanity had not been obscure to the humans who endured them, the forgetfulness of Joyce's memory machine has no recognizable face. Yet unlike providence, which regulates history's cycles, which is programmed to make the programme work, forgetfulness breaks into history unforeseen. And it remains unseen, its motives encrypted and incomprehensible. Joyce's thesis presupposes, here, a distinction between invention and the imagination. It recognizes, by this distinction, a prerogative of the modern literary text, and a commitment to the most rigorous articulation of time's phenomenal paradoxes: if poetry is to be truly inventive, if it is to do justice to the immarginable character of time, the work must toy with the impossible and remember to forget.

Chapter 5

Technologies of Forgetting

The project of thinking through the nature of time is also that of handing down the truth of its obscure beginnings: it is the very impossibility of returning to a measureless past ^ or, in other words, the problem of remembering to forget. But what, according to Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida, is the role of invention in thinking this impossibility? And how does technology ¢t in? I have argued that the Wake's strategies of encryption mark the event of an immemorial past, a past that originates outside history and that remains irreducible to the order of subjective experience. A brief discussion of one image from the book's concluding chapter will serve, at this late stage, to illustrate the connection between the truth of this past ^ what we might call its pastness or its unavailability to historical understanding ^ and the formal structures that characterize the instant of (its) ¢guration. Here, it will not simply be a matter of disregarding the text's repetitive mechanism, or of looking beyond its strategy of lexical decomposition and recombination hoping to ¢nd, in that beyond, some deeper or more authentic thesis on time as measureless passage. What will hold our interest, rather, is an aspect of the Wake that is already encoded in the mechanism as its constitutive failure ^ wasteful and counter-productive, poietic invention ¢nds its place in the circuit of memory and imagination as an originary component (a source of the work) and as a moment of structural breakdown (a limit). The vicociclometer is without question the most recognizable of the Wake's machine-metaphors, and the most obviously pertinent for the purpose of my argument. The Wake provides a relatively uncomplicated analysis of its internal structure ^ an analysis that has the added advantage of condensing many of the Wakean motifs encountered and commented upon thus far: Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational gazebocroticon (the `Mamma Lujah' known to every schoolboy scandaller, be he Matty, Marky, Lukey or John-a-Donk), autokinatonetically preprovided with a clappercoupling smeltingworks exprogressive process, (for the farmer, his son and their homely codes, known as eggburst, eggblend, eggburial and hatch-as-hatch can) receives through a portal vein the dialytically separated elements of precedent decomposition for the verypetpurpose of subsequent recombination . . . (FW 614) The bulk of the description is self-explanatory, as is the general thrust of the passage: if a cyclometer is an instrument that gauges the revolutions of a

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wheel, the vicociclometer must be a tool by which we count the revolutions of what Vico terms `an ideal eternal history traversed in time by the history of every nation' (NS ½349). To count the revolutions of history is to follow its providential course, and thus to keep track of its turns and its repetitions. This, the Wake tells us, is the task of schoolboy-evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, who understand history's millwheeling pattern by virtue of having studied or documented it. But it is also the prerogative of an archetypal farmer whose comprehension of history's `exprogressive process' is more personally invested, certainly more concrete, than that of any scholar. In his dealings with nature, the farmer (also an almighty father in a work-aday trinity) does more than observe time's cyclical motion: he lives by a rhythm nature herself has established and labours to codify this rhythm for everyone's domestic consumption. His knowledge is expressly non-academic. Born of a vitality and a productive vigour traditionally associated with rural life, it re£ects a concrete, that is to say practical, understanding of agrarian law and a commitment to the civilizing power of an honest day's work. Once again the relevant intertext by which to unpack this detail is provided in The New Science which stakes its authority not on the abstract logic of metaphysicians but on the study of the social and domestic customs (the `homely codes') developed in the course of human history. Here it is opportune to recall that, according to Vico, agrarian law signals the origin of both civilization and literacy (NS ½603^06). To the extent that we can take the allusion seriously (the danger with Finnegans Wake is seldom one of over-interpretation, but more often one of misjudged earnestness), the farmer's codes may be seen to stand for a historically preserved truth that is, in essence, pre-grammatical. On the face of it, everything we are told about the vicociclometer contradicts the thesis of time unfolding as measureless passage or pure irredeemable waste. Time appears to be countable after all, and history's revolutions only repeat `the sameold gamebold adomic structure' (FW 615), decomposed and recombined ad in¢nitum `so that the heroticisms, catastrophes and eccentricities transmitted by the ancient legacy of the past . . . may be there for you, Cockalooralooraloomenos, when cup, platter and pot come piping hot, as sure as herself pits hen to paper and there's scribings scrawled on eggs' (FW 614^15). Stripped to its most basic function the ciclometer is, before anything else, a mechanical-mnemonic device that gathers and recycles elements of the past. It is memory understood at once as a process of cultivation and as a work of ingestion, absorption and physical re-elaboration.1 Within this interpretive scheme, `wholemole' and `millwheeling' come to resonate with the meanings of wholemeal and £our, bringing to mind an image of bread which, together with the eggs and the pot of piping hot tea, anticipates the Wake's rush towards breakfast (and thus, as Mailhos might remind us, towards oblivion). The millwheel names a cyclical mechanism that relies for its movement and its e¤ciency on a constant £ow of river-water. As for the substitution of wholemole for wholemeal, it re-introduces a discourse on moles and molecules that we have already learnt to associate with Stephen's conception of self ^ that is, with his

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thematization, in Chapter IX of Ulysses, of what changes yet remains the same in the (un)weaving of our bodies over the years. As with other Wakean metaphors of memory, the machine's ¢rst impulse is cumulative and its second recombinatorial. In the phrase `. . . receives through a portal vein the dialytically separated elements of precedent decomposition', the allusion to Vico's providential cycles is overlaid with an allegory of Joyce's narrative method. The word `dialytically' invokes both Hegel's dialectical method (the process by which the Hegelian subject is able to contain its internal contradictions) and an idea of history as prosthetically aided digestion. Earlier we observed that it is the Wake's standard practice to condense multiple images from history and myth, to cite indiscriminately and break words down into fragments in order to recombine them into new lexical units. The ¢gure of the ciclometer suggests that time is both the driving force behind this operation (the river that runs the millwheel) and its raw material (the previously decomposed and soon to be recombined stu¡ of history). In fact, time is encoded in the mechanism at a number of di¡erent junctures. Joyce speaks of history as a series of catastrophes, eccentricities and heroic/erotic acts `transmitted by the ancient legacy of the past'. This legacy is none other than the past itself, its pastness handed down in pre-grammatical codes. The extreme redundancy invested in the proposition has the e¡ect of redistributing the notion of `past' across di¡erent words: past is the time in which history unfolds as well as the providential law that regulates history's transmission. That this law is `autokinatonetically preprovided' con¢rms the pertinence of the Viconian intertext: the reference to auto-kinesis indicates that the wheel of history stirs itself and moves spontaneously; yet this movement is founded on a bottomless passivity, an inheritance that predates every historical action, even the most original. In this particular sense, the word `legacy' stands for a temporal matrix that is always already given; it names a radical force of temporalization, an order bequeathed to history by an evermore `ancient' past. The same order (and the same slippage of meaning between di¡erent denominations of the past) informs the machine's strategies of decomposition and recombination. Ostensibly, the vicociclometer's insistence on the combinatorial aspect of narrative production is consistent with a conception of history as repetition (or recycling), the operative assumption being that nothing new is ever created, and that every innovation proceeds from a reworking of some basic idea already posited, or contained potentially, in human memory. The past is in this sense a container, a fund of recombinable forms. It is the world itself, the totality of ideal truths available, whether by memory or imagination, to the project of human knowledge. Within this totality, however, the possibility of precedence and subsequence features as pre-given. In other words, it attaches to the work of memory and imagination as a previously inherited paradigm. Inscribed in the allegory of the ciclometer is thus a past that overtakes itself, a preprovided temporal horizon that inheres in memory, a¡ecting memory with an originary force of passage. Notably, this discrepancy between one determination of the past and its double mirrors an incongruity we have already

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observed at work in the Wake's rhetorical strategies. Indeed it may be helpful, recalling the analysis of Joycean word-play in Chapter 3 (and bearing in mind the connotations evoked by the word montage), to think of the Wake's entire collideorscapic apparatus in terms of a peculiarly cinematic method of distributing narrative information, a compositional technique that produces memory traces, welds them together and causes them to collide or escape at vertiginous speed.2 The analogy is best understood as a comparison between two ¢ctional technologies. Joyce's machine reinvents the cinematograph as a memory-aid, a radically new possibility of imagining the past in which the tension between temporal passage and imaged movement is always in evidence. Two questions help us bring this possibility into proper focus: how does time as pure passage a¡ect the materiality of the cinematic image? And how does the unforeseeable, pace Bergson, intervene in the ¢eld of mechanical recombinations and decompositions? If for Bergson the kaleidoscopic character of cinema implies that our perception of movement (and our consequent understanding of evolution) is always mediated by abstraction and representation (CE 331^3), for Joyce it means that the faculty of making images (the dual activity of memoria and fantasia) can be conclusively detached from its traditional human source ^ from the eye intended not only as a marker of human presence, but also as an instrument by which the subject maintains an active relation with the world. In this particular sense, the vicociclometer is to be thought of as the site where techne and virtuality meet. The total memory for which the ciclometer stands obeys the same combinatorial logic as the book's paronomastic chains and portmanteau word-formations. On the surface, the series of temporal and logical connections these ¢gures establish are of a reversible nature. Whenever the reader is prompted to analyse a portmanteau word, it is precisely in order to reverse the process by which it was originally constructed, thereby mastering that process, making it repeatable. We read the word by decomposing and recombining it and we assume these two operations to be symmetrical. Yet, as we have seen, portmanteau words are also always charged with a neologistic potential; and the paronomastic chains that mobilize so many adamelegiac narratives are always haunted by an ever more primordial truth, a singular event that circulates in the manner of a secret name or a phantom. The historical knowledge produced by the vicociclometer is similarly organized. A truth that escapes all combinatorial logic makes for both its source and its barrier. When I argue that this truth cannot be grasped through a work of anamnesis or recollection I mean that the thought that produces it unfolds in an irreversible time. This is as much as to say that it operates inventively. It cannot be otherwise since the truth at issue here is of the order of unforeseeable (and irreversible) events. The ¢lmic quality of Joyce's work has been the subject of continued critical attention at least since the 1970s. Already in Tindall's Reader's Guide one encounters a few passing remarks concerning the a¤nity of Joyce's technique with the language of ¢lm. Tindall writes that as early as the ¢rst chapter of

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A Portrait `Joyce arranged his matters in a way that suggests Gri¤th's montage, the movie-maker's art of putting unrelated things side by side'. More pointedly, he observes that `[t]he placing of matters throughout the Wake seems a kind of montage by juxtaposition as the pun seems montage by superimposition' (1969: 17). More recently, William Costanzo and R. Barton Palmer have persuasively demonstrated the pertinence of an Eisensteinian theory of montage to a stylistic analysis of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.3 Costanzo explains that the correspondences between the principle of montage and the workings of Joycean word-play are best approached by way of a comparison with the structure of ideographic writing. The claim draws on an argument put forward by Eisenstein himself in a seminal essay entitled `The Cinematographic Principle of the Ideogram'. Two factors de¢ne the truth of the ideogram in Eisenstein's view: ¢rst, that its structural integrity is based on con£ict; and second, that though it is composed of con£icting elements, it is never quite reducible to the sum of its parts. In this sense, the ideogram must be regarded as a complex form ^ a compound image. At the same time, Eisenstein insists, it is also the result of a productive operation insofar as the juxtaposition of its constituent elements ultimately serves to give birth to a new idea or a hitherto inconceivable concept: The point is that the copulation (perhaps we had better say, the combination) of two hieroglyphs of the simplest series is to be regarded not as their sum, but as their product, i.e., as a value of another dimension, another degree; each separately corresponds to an object, to a fact, but their combination corresponds to a concept. From separate hieroglyphs has been fused the ideogram. By the combination of two `depictables' is achieved the representation of something that is graphically undepictable . . . this is ^ montage! (1949: 29^30) The element of cinematic creativity is given in this leap from object to concept, in this conversion which must somehow be understood as a product that is not a sum, and, more problematically, as a `representation' of something that was not of the order of images to begin with. Con£ict, collision and combination are the key words of Eisenstein's argument. Montage, he writes, `is con£ict. As the basis of every art is con£ict' (ibid.: 38). The applicability of the axiom to a description of Joyce's narrative method is obvious enough: like Joyce's technique of breaking up words and stringing the recycled fragments together, cinematic montage entrusts the syntagmatic-combinatorial aspect of narrative production to a principle of violent coordination ^ a syntax without harmony, which is to say without predetermined paradigms of formal or logical agreement. Costanzo sums up the issue in the following terms: Joyce's puns work much like Chinese ideograms and Eisenstein's dynamic editing. When Joyce calls his book a `meanderthalltale' (19.25), he is yoking single words with simple denotations into a new expression, something richer, more complex, more volatile. Like the Chinese word for East,

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which superimposes a picture of the sun on a picture of a tree . . . the combination of neanderthal, meander, and me and the tall tale challenges the mind to make connections, to synthesize the seemingly unfamiliar into concepts that are yet to be explored. (1984: 179) It is here that we discern both the limit and the potential of montage in reproducing the movement of time. By challenging the mind to make new connections the method clearly taps into some kind of creative impulse, but insofar as it functions by synthesizing already available data, this impulse lacks the dimension of absolute novelty, of invention in the proper Bergsonian sense. To put it di¡erently: though it may be tempting, in light of the a¤nity between theories of montage and Joyce's practice of lexical recombination, to construe the vicociclometer as a spinning cycle of images ^ a measure of in¢nitely wound tape, not unlike a movie reel, in which £ashes of the past are gathered, broken down and rearranged into a cinematic sequence ^ such a reading is in danger of repeating the confusion of time and chronology diagnosed by Bergson, turning a blind eye, once again, to the movement of more-than-simultaneous creation and destruction that properly characterizes the Wake's investment in the economics of pure waste. The cinematic comparison, then, can only be sustained with a proviso: that the principle of combination be viewed in conjunction with the technological element that makes for both its limit and its source. The inventive possibility of the collideorscape emerges at this limit as the originary forgetfulness of the machine ^ the absence of a kernel of experience supporting the productive process. From this perspective, what we contemplate in the image of a past that overtakes itself is, to be sure, not an abstract representation of movement but rather time as a whole (its virtual memory, its providential programme), preserved in all its possibilities and simultaneously temporalized. In order to articulate this notion fully I should like to refer once again to Deleuze's characterization of the past as the site of an `immemorial or ontological Memory' (B 57). The reader will recall that for Deleuze the past and the present are at ¢rst distinguished from each other not as di¡erent points in a linear continuum but as two qualitatively distinct elements of time. Within this framework the past is construed as the form into which time divides in order to be preserved in itself. Indeed Deleuze goes as far as to say that the past, absolute and independent of the present, is virtually identical with the `in-itself of being' (B 55). By the same rationale, memory is regarded as a virtual dimension, an impersonal and strictly non-psychological image of time standing for time as a whole: Memory is not in us; it is we who move in a Being-memory, a world-memory. In short, the past appears as the most general form of an already-there, as preexistence in general, which our recollections presuppose, even our ¢rst recollection if there was one. (TI 98) If the principles of combination, collision and juxtaposition are insu¤cient to describe the temporal logic invested in the Wake's rhetorical machinery, it is

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because they imply, in every case, a relation between discrete objects distributed outside each other, a relation that I have termed reversible and quanti¢able, using the words in their Deleuzian/Bergsonian acceptations. What is lacking in this relation, the element that consistently falls short of the process that attempts to ¢gure it, is the radical creativity Deleuze associates with the order of virtuality, with a techne that, far from imitating physics (the movement of bodies in nature), repeats a measureless past, a memory outside memory presupposed by all our recollections, `even our ¢rst recollection if there was one'. For Joyce too, the past is originally constituted as an impersonal order of time, a passive underside of human history providing the grounds for a complete dissociation of subjective interiority from the notion of temporal £ow. The museomound, the littered letter, even the Wake itself are all allegories of this past which proceeds, as we have seen, from an exteriority-to-self resisting all sameness. I have argued that the Wake thinks through this exteriority by repeating two basic moves: ¢rst it portrays the past in a dynamic and contradictory relation to human memory, characterizing it as both memory's measure and its unmanageable surplus; secondly, it suggests that in exceeding even the most far-reaching memory, in confronting memory with a limit that is also its structural failure, the past hands itself over to the immemorial, which is to say that it opens time to the interruption of another time, a more-than-simultaneous double that insists in the now, guaranteeing its in¢nite iteration, but without ever coming to presence. In light of this dynamic, Joyce's invention of the vicociclometer will be seen to entail no less than the (¢ctional) possibility of picturing the whole of time in motion, and, as a result, of thinking the passivity of the past from the vantage point of a technological eye.

The Ciclometer as Internal Cinematograph Joyce's construal of cinema as a mechanical memory-aid comes into plain relief in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver dated 27 June 1924. Speaking of his nearblindness following a di¤cult operation on his left eye, Joyce wrote: `The long drudgery and disappointment in Trieste . . . and then the labour of Ulysses must have undermined my strength. I was poisoned in more ways than one. I mention this because whenever I am obliged to sit with my eyes closed I see a cinematograph going on and on and it brings back to my memory things I had almost forgotten' (1957: 216). The ¢rst curious detail to take note of here is the association of cinema with blindness. The connection between the cinematograph and memory is posited plainly enough, but what sense can we make of it in the context of Joyce's reference to his deteriorating eyesight? Several glosses come to mind but none seems to account for the speci¢c value of the `cinematograph' as a viable technology for the blind. Nevertheless, let me venture the following: forced to sit with his eyes closed Joyce directs his glance inward and remembers it is possible to produce and project images that are not actually occurring in front of his eyes. It is

140

Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida

true that technically this possibility has always been in play, actualized, as it were, in the twin faculties of human memory and imagination; but with the modern invention of the cinematograph it now appears displaced onto a disembodied mechanism, puri¢ed of the trappings of personality and experience. The signi¢cance of the cinematograph, its power as a virtual or mechanical eye, is thus not in the images it records but in what it brings to the act of seeing. What Joyce pictures, with his eyes closed, is the internal mechanics of image-production desubjecti¢ed. The same dynamic will account for Joyce's fascination with the ¢gure of the fadograph. Like the ciclometer, fadography prompts a cinematic comparison. It requires us to think of the intensity of the image and to associate the structural limits of memory-imagination with that intensity. Once again, what lends pertinence to the allegory is a technology that abstracts movement from nature; but what is speci¢c to this technology (and thus more signi¢cant) is the notion of a memory-image fading from mind and matter. Indeed, the fadograph is to be interpreted less as a moving picture than as the graphic presentation of a fadeout (of a withdrawal from presence). The picture is in motion only to the extent that it changes in essence, that the ¢lm itself, the photographic paper that sustains the fantasy, is a¡ected by the passing of time. The paradox is of a kind with the structure of the Derridean crypt. Like the crypt, Joyce's fadograph marks the site of an externalized duration ^ or, what is the same thing, an `internal exteriority'. The fading ¢lm sustains a work of recollection that, true to the Hegelian and Freudian models, ¢nds ful¢lment in a narrative of self-reappropriation (in principle, an inward glance is always narcissistic); yet, while it simulates Erinnerung, it also disarticulates the inside from the inside, the same from the same, the present that is ever present from the now that, as we learnt from Aristotle's Physics, must somehow di¡er from itself, must be `other and other' each time. This disarticulation is what Derrida refers to when he speaks of `spectral spiritualization' or when he associates the `time . . . of the specter' with `the doubtful contemporaneity of the present to itself ' (1994: 40). At stake, once again, is an injunction to think productivity otherwise ^ not in opposition to the concepts of waste and expenditure, but in a relation that ¢nds them necessarily co-implied. Translated to a Deleuzian register the injunction is the same: to think productivity otherwise is to think the co-implication of the virtual and the actual. For Deleuze the idea of time as a whole (of time in all its possibilities) is inseparable from a continuous process of actualization which in turn necessarily opens onto a state of virtuality. The recognizable template of this theory of production is, of course, the dual movement whereby time is preserved in the totality of the past while it also divides, other and other, into the £ow of the present. In disarticulating the same from the same, the inside from the inside, the present from the now, Joyce's internal cinematograph interrupts the continuity of a temporal frame in which everything is already given, in which time is equated with history and historical knowledge is produced by recon¢guring available data. The possibility of a true origin, of the invention of an unforeseeable event, rests here

Technologies of Forgetting

141

on the uncanny mirroring of the subjective gaze in the mechanical. We are able, by extending this model, to reconcile the allegory of memoria and fantasia inscribed in the vicociclometer with the impossible command that introduces the machine and stands as its most immediate context in the book: Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Today's truth, tomorrow's trend. Forget, remember! (FW 614) Let us note once more the singularity of a memory-programme that leaves the human subject entirely outside the circle of (self-)knowledge; agency is given to the machine and only to the machine while `we' are involved as passive mediators, mere vehicles of gestures and words. The image suggests that if it is at all possible to picture a proper movement of time, to fashion a parable or a thesis that would faithfully re£ect the paradox of time's enduring pastness, it is only from a position that the Wake deems incommensurate with the order of human knowledge or subjective experience. Plainly enough, the truth of this `enduring pastness' could never be historicized. Nor indeed could the impulse of simultaneous generation and dejeuneration which describes time's evolutionary nature. Played out in the narrative design of the Wake's technologies of forgetting, it exceeds recollection and surpasses any project of imaginative or ¢gural self-understanding. Like the future itself, like a receding posthuman horizon, it remains `hidden from men' as Vico would say ^ still an unreadable ¢gure that continues to exert on memory its unmistakable attraction. It is ¢tting, then, that the Wake should associate knowledge of history's universal codes with `scribings scrawled on eggs': indecipherable marks written on a surface that we are already accustomed to associate with a riddle about in¢nitely regressive origins. As the allegorical equivalent of the text's resistance to translation, the writing on the egg allows us to identify the e¡ect of an enduring pastness in the Wake's processes of semiotic and ¢gural production. In the tension between the machine's continuous recycling of historical knowledge and its communication of that knowledge by means of an indecipherable script, we may recognize the contraposition of a practicable hermeneutics (one in which words are de¢ned by their contexts and meaning is constructed gradually as though `out of bricks') with an impractical alternative in which truth is allowed to circulate, to be thought, shared and translated only in the unique (and therefore always already consumed) event of its ¢rst production.

Notes

Chapter 1: Time's Nature 1. `Time is invention or it is nothing at all. But of time invention physics can take no account, restricted as it is to the cinematographical method' (CE 371). 2. John Protevi's Time and Exteriority (1994) contains an extended exegetical analysis of Derrida's `Ousia and Gramme' and of the Aristotelian and Heideggerian texts with which that essay engages. Particularly insightful is Protevi's discussion of the manner in which the concept of sense in Heidegger's (1996) Being and Time remains haunted by a spatial connotation that all but paralyses his project of de¢ning a pure, original temporality corresponding to the sense of Da-sein's being (see especially pp. 111^52). 3. Heidegger ¢rst distinguishes between a vulgar understanding of time and a more authentic primordial temporality in Being and Time (see especially pp. 371^98; div. 2, ch. VI). A more detailed engagement with the argument of the Physics is then provided in the Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1982: pt. II, div. 19). 4. I ought to emphasize that by making this distinction I am not trying to rede¢ne the genre of Finnegans Wake. Nor indeed am I trying to make a case against reading the Wake as a novel. My purpose, rather, is to describe a quality of narrative time that is peculiar to the Wake but not featured in its novelistic structure. 5. As I shall argue in the course of Chapter 2, these operations are far from incidental to an understanding of time's nature. 6. For a detailed analysis of the way in which the Penelopean motif functions as a stylistic template and an organizing pattern of thought in Joyce's work see Vicki Maha¡ey (1988), especially pp. 133^91. Particularly useful, for the purpose of my argument, is Maha¡ey's observation that Joyce's recourse to this model `suggests that reality is neither hierarchical nor dialectical; instead, it is an alternating movement between coherence and incoherence' (ibid.: 189). 7. My chief debt to the volume is an article by Sam Slote which, following a careful syntactic analysis of a single sentence in the Wake, brings into sharp relief a temporal project articulated in the text's displacement of tenses and grammatical subjects. 8. For a reading of Joyce and Bergson that makes the most of this point, see Justin Beplate (2005). 9. The motif of thinking oneself to death rewrites a cliche¨d expression of great relevance to Joyce's own experience. Whereas drinking oneself to death suggests consuming oneself from the inside, thinking oneself to death denotes an insistent, even obsessive, work of self-representation. When the two verbs are juxtaposed, the degenerative process in which the drinking/thinking self is involved is displaced

Notes

10.

11. 12. 13.

143

onto another self ^ a self in in¢nite self-reproduction ^ that comes into being at the same time as it is consumed. Timothy Murphy makes the opposite case when he argues that `Vico's model of historical repetition, despite Joyce's many hints to the contrary . . . tends to privilege a static form of signifying repetition that does not account for its own production' (1998: 715). Evidence in support of this conjecture is derived from the etymological proximity of the Greek words `nomos' [law] and `nomisma' [coin], as well as the Latin `nummus' [coin], `nomen' [legal right] and `nomine' [name] (NS ½433 and ½487). For Heidegger's most direct discussion of Ereignis, see On Time and Being (1972: especially pp. 19^24). The wider context within which this excerpt is embedded contains numerous references to the myth of Tristan and Isolde and to the legend of Charles Parnell.

Chapter 2: Time in Figures 1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

Bergson's de¢nition of time as invention makes for an especially relevant intertext here. Readers of Ulysses will be reminded here of the importance accorded to the motif of micturation in that novel. Peeing establishes a symbolic correspondence between the protagonists: it kicks o¡ Bloom's day with `a ¢ne tang of faintly scented urine' (U 65) and crowns his nightly encounter with Stephen in a memorable description of their parallel, yet dissimilar urinations (U 825). In Chapter X of Finnegans Wake the twins seem to be re-enacting that very same scene (and the set of relations which it brings into play): but where Stephen and Bloom re£ect on womankind and her moon-like `potency over e¥uent and re£uent waters' (U 824), Shem and Shaun contemplate mother earth and the eternal £ow of her cycles. Interestingly, in one of his many attempts to justify his use of the pun in Finnegans Wake, Joyce once declared: `it is not my fault that God made the same organs serve two purposes' (Deming 1970: 532^3). For a detailed analysis of the signi¢cance of the circle in the structural organization of Finnegans Wake see Clive Hart (1962, especially pp. 44^71, 109^28 and 129^44). Highly pertinent to the present discussion is Hart's summary of the Wake's narrative design in terms of the following geometric model: `Around a central section, Book II, Joyce builds two opposing cycles consisting of Books I and III. In these two books there is established a pattern of correspondences of the major events of each, those in Book III occurring in reverse order and having inverse characteristics' (ibid.: 66^7). To this e¡ect Shem observes that an `Ideal Present Alone Produces Real Future' (FW 303). I take my cue here from Strother B. Purdy who argues that `to call Finnegans Wake Einsteinian or Heisenbergian makes little sense, even less than it does to call it a scienti¢c work. No twentieth century science provides more than a super¢cial source for the book' (1982: 216). The injunction to `make it new' was famously sounded by Ezra Pound, and has since come to stand as a slogan common to the entire modernist avant-garde. Timothy Murphy provides the most compelling critique of this view, emphasizing the innovative thrust of Joyce's repetition technique.

144

Notes

9. The embedding of acts of narration within the Wake's in¢nite play of unclaimed discourses (in other words, the ¢ctive presentation of a character as story-teller) is a manner of establishing what little we have in the novel of stable individual identity. There is a sense in which Shaun's self-identity ^ his claim to a story by which he might be recognized regardless of the name-changes to which his character is subjected ^ is best guaranteed by his act of telling (in fact, repeating) his `own' tale. Possession of a story is as much capital as one can hope for in a text where proper names are being continually substituted. For a reading that looks at the ¢gure of the narrator in Finnegans Wake, questioning the legitimacy of its use, see Rabate¨'s (1986) `Narratology and the Subject of Finnegans Wake'. 10. This will become the subtitle to George Otte's essay (1985). 11. In point of fact, Joyce was also prepared to admit that `Lewis's was by far the best hostile criticism that had appeared' about Finnegans Wake (Ellmann 1982: 596). 12. Lewis speaks of a `torrent of matter [that] is the Einsteinian £ux. Or (equally well) it is the duration-£ux of Bergson ^ that is its philosophical character at all events' (1957: 103). 13. The numerous Einsteinian resonances which clutter the episode have been commented upon by Laurent Milesi, who re-reads the Joyce^Lewis polemic as a war of styles and rhetorical stances. According to Milesi, Joyce's principal objective in creating Professor Jones's extravagant idiom was to expose Lewis's patently incongruous and self-contradictory rhetoric ^ a rhetoric which constantly undermines the philosophical agenda for which it is a vehicle. Milesi argues that `[u]nlike Lewis's sloppily bellicose prose, the linguistic strategies tapped by Joyce's text are indissociable from his narrative and thematic priorities'. Jones's lecture is ¢lled with countless `deferrals of arguments or lapses into `temporisation' and with `many uncontrolled references to time or the Zeitgeist that eventually suggest Lewis's own time obsession' (1994: 12). By contrast, the Wake's recourse to puns and unpredictable verbal constructions can be seen to match Joyce's relativist inclinations challenging the unity and integrity of the word as minimal unit of signi¢cation ^ or, to keep Milesi's relativist metaphor going, as `atom-signi¢er'. 14. A more detailed exploration of this paradox is provided in Chapter 4. 15. This notion is meant to complicate, without refuting it, David Hayman's interpretation of the Wake as an `inverted world' which we enter by `follow[ing] the ``riverrun'' backwards from the sea as in the playback of a ¢lmstrip' (1974: 340). 16. `If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice . . . No justice ^ let us not say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws ^ seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead' (Derrida 1994: xix). 17. For a detailed reading of the economic presuppositions informing the Gracehoper's wastefulness see Sam Slote, `The Proli¢c and the Devouring in ``The Ondt and the Gracehoper'' '. I am greatly indebted to this essay, despite disagreeing with some of its claims concerning the relation between the Gracehoper and the Ondt. Particularly insightful, and pertinent to my argument, is Slote's suggestion that `[t]he Gracehoper exceeds Ósop's grasshopper in that he does not just waste time, he inhabits a squandered temporality where temporal designations and di¡erentiations are no longer pertinent' (2000: 57).

Notes

145

18. Interestingly, Shaun's rhetoric peculiarly con£ates these values with a kind of socialist party cult ^ `[w]e shall not come to party at that lopp's . . . for he is not on our social list' (FW 415). 19. `Pero© mi sbalordiva; da ogni sua parola, da ogni suo atto risultava che in fondo essa credeva la vita eterna. Non che la dicesse tale: si sorprese anzi che una volta io, cui gli errori ripugnavano prima che non avessi amato i suoi, avessi sentito il bisogno di ricordargliene la brevita©. Macche¨ . Essa sapeva che tutti dovevano morire, ma cio© non toglieva che oramai ch'eravamo sposati, si sarebbe rimasti insieme, insieme, insieme. Essa dunque ignorava che quando a questo mondo ci si univa, cio© avveniva per un periodo tanto breve, breve, breve, che non s'intendeva come si fosse arrivati a darsi del tu dopo di non essersi conosciuti per un tempo in¢nito e pronti a non rivedersi mai piu¨ per un altro in¢nito tempo. Compresi ¢nalmente cosa fosse la perfetta salute umana quando indovinai che il presente per lei era una verita© tangibile in cui si poteva segregarsi e starci caldi ' (Svevo 1987: 159). 20. It is, in fact, Blanchot who ¢rst insists on the interpretation of the myth as one of misrecognition: `But the aspect of the myth which Ovid ¢nally forgets is that Narcissus, bending over the spring, does not recognize himself in the £uid image that the water sends back to him. It is thus not himself, not his perhaps nonexistent ``I'' that he loves or ^ even in his mysti¢cation ^ desires' (WoD 125). A few pages later, the connection between narcissistic self-misrecognition and the event of modernism is made plain when Blanchot, quoting Schlegel's maxim `Every poet is Narcissus', proceeds to outline the inadequacy of the romanticist notion according to which poetic creation is a mark of pure subjectivity and the poem an ideal re£ection of the Self from which it originates: `One ought, no doubt, to understand Schlegel's statement in another way too: in the poem where the poet writes himself, he does not recognize himself, for he does not become conscious of himself. He is excluded from the facile, humanistic hope that by writing, or ``creating'', he would transform his dark experience into greater consciousness' (WoD 135). 21. See, for instance, Derrida's discussion of the autobiographical motifs staked in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1987: especially pp. 259^83); or the more recent discussion of the death drive and its relevance to technologies of representation in Archive Fever (1996). 22. Compare this reference to laughter with the following passage from Rabate¨'s `Lapsus ex Machina': `As Freud well said, the more one looks for the meaning of the joke, the less one laughs, for laughter comes from an economy ^ in Finnegans Wake, an impossible economy. The paradoxical economy of Finnegans Wake carries along a perpetual mobilisation and a cumulative discharge which is liberated in ¢ts and starts in the laughter which surges up now and then, is triggered o¡ by the sudden sense of a suddenly signi¢cant nonsense . . . without the author having foreseen the points of intersection of the crazily entwined series. The whole ``risicide'' (161.17) strategy of the ``risible universe'' (419.03) doubtless converges towards this unstable mixture, the writable-risible, the pure jouissance of the signi¢er outside meaning . . .' (1984: 97^8). 23. To this e¡ect Hegel describes work as `desire held in check, £eetingness staved o¡ ' (1977: ½195).

Chapter 3: Making Time 1.

Incidentally, the word appearing in Joyce's text is `sanglorians' (FW 4) and not, as Eco mistakenly writes, `sansglorians'. This slight error does not change the

146

2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

Notes substance of Eco's argument. But it illustrates ever so ¢ttingly the weight that error and lapsus carry in the structuring and de-structuring of the Wake. A more detailed discussion of these issues is forthcoming in this chapter's ¢nal section. Gerald L. Bruns elaborates on the idea of the pun as a textual event that resists translation. A pun, he explains, `is not a species of analogy; it is not translatable. Even to speak of it as being ``so dense'' that no one can ``unpack'' it is to misconceive it, because a pun is all surface and no depth. The exegete slides across it and frequently slips and falls. Think of the pun as parodistic, a comic ironic double of the concept, or perhaps a whole region of language sounding at once in the tiny space of a single word whose meaning at ¢rst seems plain but then is withdrawn. One does not so much speak such words as hear them. Puns happen. We don't cause them; on the contrary, to speak is to prevent them from happening' (1987: 138). `ce brouillage . . . nous rende a fortiori inaptes a© reconna|ª tre comme a© localiser les composantes du discourse. Ainsi le signi¢ant par ses alte¨ rations renvoie a© des signi¢e¨ s e¨ trangers, voire incompatibles, et si, ``seul les e¨ le¨ ments porteurs d'information sont pertinent en linguistique'', on peut dire qu'ici la signi¢cation va s'abolir de ses propres exce© s' (Paris 1967: 58). For an introductory discussion of twentieth-century narratological issues that pits these assumptions together, see Rimmon Kenan (1996: especially pp. 7^14). Cf. Weir's discussion of mimesis as productive process in Writing Joyce (1989: 33^53; Ch. 3). I speak of syntactic components, here, to emphasize the extraordinary combinatorial power, and consequent narrative potential, vested upon each segment. I should also clarify that the delimitation and abstraction of a given segment ^ for instance `sh' rather than `shu' ^ is entirely arbitrary, revisable and unregulated by morphological laws. Deleuze explains this process of reintegration ¢rst by a¤rming the identity of time and memory in Bergson's system, and then by speaking of pure time as a totality that is at once virtual and simple: simple, because it cannot be broken down into component units; virtual, because even in its simplicity it is already implicated in a process of internal change which is as unavoidable as it is unforeseeable. See Bergsonism, Ch. 5. Frank Kermode and Peter Brooks, though starting from an altogether di¡erent premise (Brooks's theoretical framework is psychoanalytic, whereas Kermode begins his theory of ¢ction with a discussion of Apocalyptic myths) also provide viable models by which to comprehend the extent to which readers of narrative must rely on endings to confer meaning and purpose upon the passage of time. For both Kermode and Brooks the sense of directedness supplied by an ending will turn a random string of occurrences into an organized and meaningful narrative sequence. Plots entail a humanization of time. And time ¢nds its purpose, its originary motivating impulse, in a narrative's desire for its end. In Brooks's research this dynamic is conceptualized in the following terms: `The very possibility of meaning plotted through sequence and through time depends on the anticipated structuring force of the ending: the interminable would be the meaningless, and the lack of ending would jeopardize the beginning. We read the incidents of narration as ``promises and annunciations'' of ¢nal coherence, that metaphor may be reached through the chain of metonymies: across the bulk of the as yet unread middle pages, the end calls to the beginning, transforms it and enhances it . . . The sense of a beginning, then, must in some important way be determined by the sense of an ending' (1984: 93^4).

Notes 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

147

Deleuze refers to this image in many of his works, most notably in Cinema 2 (1989: 131) and in The Logic of Sense (1990: 114). To borrow a classic example: `the circle is square' is a perfectly grammatical though self-contradictory sentence. Husserl posits the identity of science, logic and the grammar of judgement-forms in the opening pages of his Formal and Transcendental Logic: `Scienti¢c thinking, the continual activity of the scientist, is judicative thinking: not just any judicative thinking, but one that is formed, ordered, connected, in certain manners ^ according to ¢nal ideas of reason. The formations generated in the course of such thinking ^ in science, formations expressed in language and permanently documented ^ have a coherence that is ``logical'' in the speci¢c sense to theoretical reason: the coherence of theories and, at a higher level, the coherence of ``systems''. They are built up in determinate forms, out of fundamental propositions or principles, theorems, arguments, proofs, and so forth; lingually they are built up in multi-membered locutions . . . In our further considerations pertaining to the systematic clari¢cation of the idea of logic, we shall address ourselves exclusively to the signi¢cational side of scienti¢c locutions ^ that is to say: purely to judicative reason itself and the formations it produces' (1969: 26^7). For an interesting study of the way in which the Wake challenges the opposition between centre and digression, see Chapter 8 of Derek Attridge's Peculiar Language. Several manifestations of this logic of in¢nite deferral have been analyzed by Joyce scholars. Stephen Heath, for one, claims that the writing of Finnegans Wake `develops according to a fundamental incompletion . . . the ¢nal revelation of meaning being always for ``later'' ' (1984: 31). Heath's thesis is echoed by Thwaites who observes that meaning in Joyce `is structurally and necessarily something which is not yet entirely present, but is still to arrive' (2001: 177). Joyce's writing bears the structure of a signature or a promise in that it entrusts the ful¢lment of its meaning to the future: a future which is synonymous with risk and, as we have seen, with the possibility of misinterpretation. A promise, Thwaites explains, `always looks ahead to ¢nd its meaning in what is not yet' (ibid.: 5). Eliot comments on the universality of Ulysses, famously comparing Joyce's method of composition to a scienti¢c discovery: `In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a signi¢cance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history' (1923: 270). `E¨crire, oeuvre de l'absence d'oeuvre, production qui ne produit rien que (ou a© partir de) l'absence de sujet' (1973: 79). For a more complete picture of the immediate theoretical context within which this argument is developed see also Derrida's `Two Words for Joyce' and Laurent Milesi's `L'idiome babe¨lien de Finnegans Wake'. The most famous historical episode concerning the Fort occurred during the Easter rising of 1916, when a group of rebels raided the building and tried to take possession of its contents. On ¢nding the main area locked they decided to blow it up but the explosion failed to produce anything louder than a disappointing thud. A famous anecdote has it that when confronted with his Irish origins Wellington replied: `being born in a stable does not make one a horse'.

148

Notes

19. `Thus from the cities, which Plato tells us were born on the basis of arms, and which began to govern themselves in military fashion before the existence of such wars as are waged between cities, we get the very name of war; for the Greek polemos, war, is from polis, city' (NS ½639). 20. `Apollo is also the founding god of humanity and of its arts . . . This humanity had its origin in humare, to bury (which is the reason we took the practice of burial as the third principle of our Science) and the Athenians, who were the most human of all the nations, were, according to Cicero, the ¢rst to bury their dead' (NS ½537). 21. `Et c'est bien la© l'ironie du style-valise: l'intronisation d'un hasard qui, prolongeant les intentions de l'auteur, pour autant qu'elles soient perceptibles, va peu a© peu s'y substituer, fonctionner comme un me¨canisme de¨lirant . . .' (Paris 1967: 58). 22. A more detailed discussion of the vicociclometer is provided in Chapter 5. 23. I shall return to a more precise de¢nition of the concept of passive endurance in the course of Chapter 4. At this stage it will su¤ce to say that `endurance' is being employed here as a quasi-synonym of `experience'; only, it is a synonym in which the £ip-side of experience ^ the blind spot of the phenomenal, as it were ^ is articulated.

Chapter 4: The Rhetoric of Memory

E

1. Compare this to Andrew Treip's description of Wakean time as `something of an entropic, soggy afterlife-within-death' (1994: 3). 2. On this point see also Derrida's `Introduction' to Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry (1989). 3. Notable, to this e¡ect, is the text's insistence on the demonstrative gesture `this is' throughout the entire museomound tour. 4. Herman Rapaport accounts for a similar dynamic by tracing the overlap between Derrida's discourse on trauma and his thematization of such ¢gures as the cinder and the proper name: `The cinder,' Rapaport writes, `marks the place for the proper name, that is to say, the advent of the proper name's future as something that has undergone destruction by ¢re . . .'. In this sense, it is regarded by Derrida as `the trait of the end of mourning, the openness of a future in which mourning and all its apparatuses are annihilated, e¡aced from memory, and, as such, made inaccessible to witnessing and to history' (Rapaport 2003: 92). 5. Joyce adopts the symbol (FW 6) to represent the body of HCE `interred in the Dublin landscape'. 6. The expression is problematic and, as will be shown presently, subject to revision. I employ it here for the phenomenological rigour which it invokes and, in the longer run, overturns. 7. As Branka Arsic¨ suggests, this Blanchotian thematics of passivity constitutes a sort of middle ground, or point of possible comparison, between Deleuze's and Derrida's separate attempts to think the outside of thought: `Here, where the stakes are raised in the game of inventing ``new'' thinking, one hears a ``total a¤nity in the `theses' '', listening with a Deleuzean ear to the Derridean words, or reading with Derridean eyes these Deleuzean words written down by Derrida, one sees oneself hearing the same Derridean-Deleuzean claim: to address passivity in a di¡erent way, to think passivity di¡erently' (Arsic¨ 2003: 148).

Notes 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

149

See, for instance, Derrida's extended reading of Blanchot's The Instant of my Death, in Demeure (2000: especially pp. 49^50). The aesthetic, political and theoretical rami¢cations of this issue are examined by Rabate¨, who argues that Joyce's ¢ction is marked throughout by a sustained engagement with a modernist philosophy of egoism. Taken to its furthest artistic expression in the dream-work of Finnegans Wake such a philosophy, as Rabate¨ explains it, entailed a rejection of provincialism and a paradoxical adhesion to a principle of uncanny hospitality: `Joyce's aesthetic individualism led him to assume more and more radically the role of . . . someone who dares to confront the unspeakable Other . . . Joyce wishes to embody the spirit of a collective ego, to be one with or to ``atone'', as Stephen would say, with its ethical substance (Hegel's Sittlichkeit). This ethical substance is not, in Joyce's case, limited to Ireland and to its divided community, but includes the whole of Europe, and reaches forward into the linguistic domains of Africa, Asia, Australia and America. As he hoped, individual artistic toil might redeem and perhaps heal the diseases of the collective spirit such as xenophobic nationalism, fascism, and religious bigotry' (2001: 82). John Bishop provides a detailed reading of the motif of the egg and the hen in Finnegans Wake, showing how Joyce's deployment of this motif participates in the novel's discourse on identity and gender di¡erence. I am particularly indebted to Bishop's suggestion that `the Wake's recurrent references to ``the Hen'' also ultimately evoke those times in which Haroun Childeric Eggeberth, ``eriginating from next to nothing'' in a dark body of water, was ``formelly confounded with amother'' ^ and all the more particularly because the Greek to hen signi¢es, in philosophy, ``the One'' out of which the phenomenal world splinters ``ab ove'' (154.35 [L. ab ova, ``from the egg'', idiomatic for ``the beginning''])' (1986: 376). On Blanchot's use of paronomasia and its bearing on Derrida's reception of Heidegger, see Herman Rapaport Heidegger and Derrida (1991: especially pp. 104^74; Ch. 3). Joyce himself perceived the a¤nity. Ellmann testi¢es to at least two occasions on which the Irish novelist saw ¢t to compare the two thinkers (1982: 340 and 693). There is a striking consistency with the two anecdotes despite the fact that they are set almost 20 years apart. In both cases the comparison is clearly to Vico's advantage, yet it is notable that Joyce's purpose is not to disprove Freud's conclusions; rather, it is to put the novelty of his ideas in doubt. Vico's tap-dancing around this theological problem leads him to separate Hebrew from Gentile history; but one may assume that such a disingenuous solution is, for him, nothing more than a legal disclaimer, so much so that The New Science is full of instances in which elements from the Old Testament are seen to overlap with, or even to corroborate, evidence from classical mythologies. On this point see Fisch's `Introduction' to The New Science (1968: xxxii). As Lorraine Weir points out, Vico's `Mental Dictionary comprised of particulars is the record of memory's journey towards universals which, by de¢nition, exceed its human grasp' (1994: 246). The concept of the individual, as Derrida observes, `always risks pointing towards both the ego and an organic or atomic indivisibility' (1991: 107). `C'est en tant que l'inconscient se noue au sinthome, qui est ce qu'il y a de singulier chez chaque individu, qu'on peut dire que Joyce, comme il est e¨crit quelque part, s'identi¢e a© l'individual. Il est celui qui se privile¨ gie d'avoir e¨ te¨ au point extreª me pour incarner en lui le symptoª me, ce par quoi il e¨ chappe a© toute mort possible' (Lacan 1982: 5).

150

Notes

17. And, co-implied with the institutions of trade and translation, is the entire project of hermeneutics as explained by Vico. See above Chapter 1, pp. 27^8. 18. `Amtsadam, sir, to you! Eternest cittas, heil! Here we are again!' (FW 532). 19. The variety of signi¢cations that accrue to the word `host' in Finnegans Wake is teased out by Jean-Michel Rabate¨ in James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism. On a simple etymological level ^ one with which readers of Vico would be familiar ^ the host gathers in its orbit the ideas of hostility and hospitality, the guest and the inn-keeper (It: Oste) but also the hostile enemy and the ghost. Rabate¨ shows how this series of coinciding contraries is reworked in the Wake within a narrative thread that includes a mythical re-elaboration of the motifs of citizenship, exile, paternity, incest and sodomy. HCE's status as an incorporated host draws on all these motifs. I should like, in this note, to take stock of the pertinence of this narrative thread to the system of intersubjective relations (spatial, sexual, syntactic) set up by the crypt. As Rabate¨ explains, `one might say that Joyce never stopped pondering the intricacies lurking in the overdetermined bond uniting the guest (like the child narrator of ``The Sisters'', Stephen, the Cad, and Earwicker's sons) with the host or Host. When Guest and Host merge, a sort of superimposed ectoplasm creates the uncanny ¢gure of a paternal Ghost' (2001: 176). 20. Borrowing the formula from Levinas, Derrida famously de¢nes the trace as `[a] past that has never been present' (1973: 152).

Chapter 5: Technologies of Forgetting 1. For a detailed reading of the vicociclometer that links the metaphor of the machine to the theme of cultural production and consumption, see Donald Theall (1997: 62^72). 2. Joyce's interest in cinema, both as a source of entertainment and as a new artistic medium, is documented in various biographical sources. Richard Ellmann informs us of Joyce's desire to open the ¢rst regular movie theatre in Dublin (1982: 300^3) and reports the writer's mixed feelings about producing a ¢lm version of Ulysses, noting that `[o]¤cially he discountenanced the idea (though he had once endorsed it), on the ground that the book could not be made into a ¢lm with artistic propriety. But he allowed Paul Le¨on to keep the matter going, talked with [Sergei] Eisenstein about it, and did not discourage Stuart Gilbert from trying his hand at scenarios for Ulysses and Anna Livia Plurabelle' (ibid.: 654). Eisenstein himself testi¢es to Joyce's curiosity about ¢lm technique when, in a somewhat sketchy account of their meeting, he writes: `With great sincerity, Joyce asks me to show him my ¢lms since he has become interested in the experiments in the language of cinema that I am carrying out on the screen (just as I am fascinated by his kindred researches in literature)' (1983: 214). 3. In dialogue with Costanzo and Palmer, other scholars have identi¢ed a principle of cinematic montage at work in Joyce. See, for instance, Burkdall (2001). Common to these studies is the tendency to adopt Eisenstein's theory as a theoretical framework by which to codify Joyce's combinatorial technique.

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Index

Abraham, Nicolas 107, 124^6, 129 adamelegy 8, 9, 13, 17, 32, 64, 136 Altieri, Charles 10 Aquinas 40 Aristotle 1, 3, 4, 6, 17, 20, 29^30, 40, 49, 68, 78, 79, 97, 98, 102, 140, 142n.2 Arsic¨, Branka 148n.7 Attridge, Derek 24, 25, 64, 66, 69^71, 86, 93, 147n.12 Aubert, Jacques 2 autobiography 48, 56, 57, 59,124, 127 Barthes, Roland 13 Bataille, Georges 63 Battistini, Andrea 10^11, 68 Beckett, Samuel 6, 18^20, 28, 31, 82, 89 Benstock, Bernard 79, 80 Bergson, Henri 3, 18, 32, 33^4, 38, 40^44, 46, 49, 50, 52, 71^4, 98, 115^16, 136, 138^9, 142n.8, 143n.1, 144n.12, 146n.7 compared with Vico 18, 115^16 Bishop, John 5, 113^14, 118^19, 121, 128, 149n.10 Blanchot, Maurice 12, 60, 74, 83, 84, 109^12, 115, 120, 145n.20, 148n.7, 149n.8, 149n.11 Borges, Jorge Luis 76^7 Brooks, Peter 146n.8 Bruno, Giordano 46 Bruns, Gerald 157, 146n.2 chance 12, 19, 20, 28, 67, 82, 84, 93^5, 97^9, 106 cinema 52, 136^40, 142n.1, 149n.81 (see also montage) Clark, Hilary 122 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 2

collideorscape 67, 69, 71, 73, 84, 91, 93, 94, 99, 103, 136, 138 Costanzo, William 137 crypt 107, 127, 140, 149n.78 de Man, Paul 39^40, 41 death 1, 21, 23, 32, 51, 54^5, 60, 62^3, 75, 87, 101, 103^5, 108^10, 112, 117, 121, 122, 142n.9, 145n.21, 148n.1 death-as-such 108^10 Deleuze, Gilles 13, 15, 29, 52^3, 56, 71^2, 96, 99, 133, 138^40, 146n.7, 147n.9, 148n.7 on the co-existence of past and present 52, 72, 99 on the modern literary work 67, 99 on ontological memory 52, 138 and the outside of thought 12, 56, 63 on time as open whole 67, 73, 140 on time's most characteristic operation 53, 56, 82 on virtual multiplicity 72^3 Derrida, Jacques 4, 16, 17, 24, 26, 28^30, 55, 60^63, 79, 94^8, 103, 107, 109^10, 115, 120, 129, 133, 140, 142n.2, 145n.21, 147n.16, 148n.2, 148n.4, 148n.7, 149n.8, 149n.11, 149n.15, 150n.20 on the gift 32, 60^62, 93, 106^7 on impossible mourning 106^7 on the iterability of the mark 97^9 on spectrality 55, 105^7, 140 on three traumas of human narcissism 60 Descartes, Rene¨ 22, 26 desire 2, 34, 38, 39, 41, 53^5, 59, 60, 62^3, 71^2, 84, 119, 122, 131, 145n.23, 146n.8, 150n.2

158

Index

Devlin, Kimberly 56 dialectics, dialectical 12, 32, 48, 54^6, 61, 63, 64, 84, 105, 112, 115,129, 135, 142n.6 Dublin 88, 104^5, 108, 127, 128 duration, dure¨ e 18, 100, 109, 116, 140 opposed to spatialized time 3, 49, 73 Eagleton, Terry 45^6 earth 8, 14^16, 36, 60, 87, 117, 128, 143n.2 (see also geomater) Eco, Umberto 16^17, 64, 68, 69, 92, 94, 145n.1 Einstein, Albert 6, 40, 44, 143n.6, 144n.12, 144n.13, 147n.14 Eisenstein, Sergei 137^8, 150n.2, 150n.3 Eliot, T. S. 83, 147n.14 Ellmann, Richard 1, 16, 24, 40, 41, 82, 103, 127, 144n.11, 149n.12, 150n.2 encryption 118, 125, 130, 132, 133 entelechy 41, 57, 101^2, 119 Erinnerung 105, 106, 125, 140 etymology 5, 6, 8, 10^11, 13, 16, 31, 32, 85, 87^90, 102, 105, 114, 143n.11, 150n.19 event 3, 6, 7, 9, 11, 15, 16, 19, 20, 31^2, 36, 40, 62, 86, 91, 95^100, 101, 105, 106, 109, 110,113, 125, 127, 131, 133, 136, 141, 143n.4, 144n.12, 145n.20 Deleuze on 52, 72, 99 Derrida on 29^30, 61, 95^8, 130 unforeseeable 28, 34, 39, 136, 140 textual 10, 67, 146n.2 excess 6, 9, 11, 13, 15, 32, 35, 47, 48, 51, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60, 62, 63, 66, 67, 71, 73, 74, 75, 82, 83, 99, 100, 103, 110, 112, 120, 124, 126, 129 fadograph, fadography 51, 108, 129, 140 Ferrer, Daniel 24, 25 Fisch, Max Harold 5, 149n.13 foresight 31, 44, 50, 56, 61, 94 (see also providence) forgetfulness, forgetting 32, 51, 58, 108, 109, 111, 115, 120, 129^32, 133, 138, 141

Freud, Sigmund 10, 24, 40, 60, 103^5, 112^14, 118, 125, 140, 145n.22, 149n.12 future 3, 4, 16, 29, 31^3, 36^41, 48, 50, 52, 53, 55, 59, 61, 67, 71^3, 75^6, 83, 92, 94^6, 98, 100, 105, 109, 115^16, 122^4, 131, 141, 143n.5, 147n.13, 148n.4 geomater 14, 51 (see also earth) geometry 34, 36, 44, 50^51, 53 Gilbert, Stuart 82, 150n.2 grammar, grammatical 21, 23, 46^7, 65^7, 71, 78^85, 88, 89, 96, 109^11, 128, 134^5, 142n.7, 147n.10, 147n.11 Grosz, Elizabeth 116 Guattari, Fe¨lix 12 Hart, Clive 6^7, 16^17, 37, 143n.4 Hayman, David 144n.15 Heath, Stephen 147n.13 Hegel, G. W. F. 26, 46, 54^5, 62^3, 105^6, 124, 135, 140, 145n.23, 149n.9 Heidegger, Martin 4, 30, 75, 142n.2, 143n.12, 149n.11 hermeneutics, hermeneutic 26^7, 67, 69, 75^6, 82, 113, 141, 150n.17 Hermes 26^7 (see also Mercury) Homer 14, 82 human 5^10, 14^16, 18^22, 24, 28, 32, 34, 41, 49^50, 52, 59, 60, 76, 78, 86, 88^90, 95, 97, 102^4, 110^19, 121^4, 126, 130, 132, 134, 135, 136, 139^41, 148n.20, 149n.14 humanization of time 11, 75, 132, 146n.11 human measure 3, 32 human nature 5, 8^9, 19, 115^17 Humpty Dumpty 86, 110^11 Husserl, Edmund 4, 54, 78^9, 96^7, 147n.11 imagination 60, 63, 90, 108, 113^14, 117, 127, 132^3, 135, 140 instant of 33, 36^9, 62 immanence, immanent 19, 23, 28, 99 immarginable 2, 6, 7, 9, 11, 14, 23, 94, 132 (see also measureless)

Index immemoriality, immemorial 107, 109^10, 112, 118, 120, 131, 133, 138^9 invention 3, 10, 18, 26, 27, 32, 34, 51, 64, 71^2, 83, 88, 92, 94, 96, 116^18, 124, 131^2, 133, 138^40, 142n.1, 143n.1 Joyce, James (works other than FW) Dubliners 91 A Portrait of the Artist 57, 91, 93, 118, 127, 137 Stephen Hero 90, 118 Ulysses 11, 13, 14, 33, 41, 42, 51, 57^8, 62, 64^5, 82^3, 101^2, 113, 121, 135, 137, 139, 143n.2, 147n.14, 150n.2 Jung 10 Kermode, Frank 146n.8 Klawitter, Robert 46 Kristeva, Julia 24, 121^2, 125 Lacan, Jacques 42, 120^23, 125, 149n. 150n.16 Levinas, Emanuel 107, 120, 150n.20 Lewis, Wyndham 42^4, 144n.11, 144n.12, 144n.13 LÎwith, Karl 22, 28 machine 24^5, 67, 93^6, 99, 102^3, 131^3, 135^6, 138, 141, 150n.1 Maha¡ey, Vicki 142n.6 Mailhos, Jacques 130^31,134 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 40 Mathieu, Vittorio 19 McHugh, Roland 54, 87, 99, 128 measureless 2, 11, 16, 133^4, 139 (see also immarginable) Mercury 27 (see also Hermes) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 75 Milesi, Laurent 25^6, 144n.13, 147n.16 Mink, Louis 104 montage 66, 136^8, 150n.3 mourning 9, 104^10, 112, 122, 124^5, 128, 148n.4 multiplicity 3, 29, 32, 38, 44, 49, 52^3, 67, 68, 71^2, 74, 77, 96, 127 Murphy, Timothy 143n.10, 143n.8

159

narcissism 56^7, 60, 74 Narcissus 60, 62, 144n.20 neologism 2, 32, 92 Nietzsche Friedrich 12, 40 Norris, Margot 7, 9, 24, 84 now 3^4, 18, 29, 30, 35, 39, 48, 52, 124, 129 as distinguished from the present 30, 48, 140 O'Neill, John 113 Otte, George 43, 144n.10 Palmer, Barton 137 Paris, Jean 65^6, 93, 146n.3, 148n.21 paronomasia 64, 82, 85, 110^11, 149n.11 passing 4, 15^17, 33, 37, 39, 48, 51^4, 140 passivity 73, 109^12, 120, 124, 129, 135, 139, 148n.7 pastness 31, 133, 135, 141 Patoec­ka, Jan 78^9, 96 Penelope 13^18, 36, 51, 84, 142n.6 portmanteau 64^71, 73^75, 81, 85, 91^3, 98^9, 136 posthuman 14^16, 32, 36, 141 Pound, Ezra 40, 143n.7 prehuman 14^16, 32, 36, 124 Protevi, John 142n.2 Proust, Marcel 43 A la Recherche du Temps Perdu 42, 67 providence 8, 13, 17^20, 22^4, 28, 31^2, 44, 86, 93^4, 106, 115^18, 132 (see also foresight) pun 35, 64^70, 76, 85, 99, 122, 137, 143n.3, 144n.13, 146n.2 Purdy, Strother B. 22^3, 143n.6 Rabate¨, Jean-Michel 14, 23, 24, 26^7, 46^7, 69, 121, 126, 128, 130, 144n.9, 145n.22, 149n.9, 150n.19 Rapaport, Herman 30, 148n.4, 149n.11 Rickard, John 40^41, 101^2, 122 Ricoeur, Paul 11 Rimmon Kenan, Shlomith 146n.4 Sailer, Susan Shaw Sallis, John 75 Senn, Fritz 5^6

68^9

160

Index

Shaun (character in FW) 34, 42^6, 48, 53, 127, 143n.2, 144n.9, 145n.18 Shem (character in FW) 34, 42, 45^6, 48, 51, 53, 74, 80, 122, 127, 143n.2, 143n.5 Slote, Sam 23, 81, 84^5, 142n.7, 144n.17 Solomon, Margaret 35, 40 Stein, Gertrude 43 Stephens, James 126^7 Svevo, Italo 59, 145n.19 Swift, Jonathan 88 symptom 43, 80, 106,120^26, 129^30 syntax 18, 23, 32, 48, 63, 64, 67, 70, 76, 77, 81^3, 96, 100, 114, 129, 137 Theall, Donald 150n.1 Thwaites, Tony 14^15, 17, 28, 41, 80, 147n.13 Tindall, William York 5, 6, 45, 136 Torok, Maria 107, 124^5 translation 24, 26^30, 59, 65^6, 74, 86, 88, 89, 95, 97^9, 128, 141, 146n.2, 150n.17 Treip, Andrew 148n.1

unforeseeable 17, 28, 30, 34, 39, 55, 58, 95, 100, 109, 136, 140, 146n.7 Van Boheemen-Saaf, Christine 123 ventriloquism 41^3, 106, 127 Verene, Donald Phillip 117 Vico, Giambattista 3, 5^8, 10^11, 18^28, 31, 40, 88^92, 94, 106, 112^18, 121, 131^2, 134^5, 141, 143n.10, 149n.12, 149n.13, 149n.14, 150n.17, 150n.19 virtuality 38, 72^73, 136, 139^40 waste 13, 53, 556, 59^60, 62^3, 70, 74, 99, 101^2, 122, 132, 134, 138, 140, 144n.17 Watt, Ian 9 Weaver, Harriet Shaw 14, 139 weaving, unweaving 5, 15^16, 21, 51, 82, 84, 91, 120, 130, 135 Weir, Lorraine 25, 26, 146n.5, 149n.14