The depth ofFinnegans Wake is partly a function of showing how any answer or interpretation to the riddle of the text is anti-climatic in a
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
Constructing a Replacement for the Soul - Bourbon
This might be called a language of
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
130
conversion, where conversion becomes the determining change o f what we experience as time, or a language of confession
Faced with "Som's wholed, all's parted" (FW563. 30) we ask ourselves or our book "what does it mean? ". The sentence does not seem to be about anything exactly, and any interpretation offered must simultaneously construct an interpretive frame. In whatever particular story or character elements one extracts from a sentence or a fragment of the Wake, it is possible to trace two intentional strands: the language points 1) to an absent sleeper, an intentional object that exists as a negative point, an impossible beyond, and(2)simultaneouslytothe Wakeitself,aself-reflectionorversionoftheentiretext: where each sentence functions as a justifying aesthetic for the whole and as an example of this aesthetic: an exemplar, a representative representation. In both cases the intentional dimension of language has been lost, we cannot grasp either the sleeper or the Wake itself; the intentional drive of any particular string of words points but not at anything understandable. The effect ofthis is not to undermine the intentionality, the aboutness of language, but rather serves to expose the mechanisms of intentionality through which language functions, or rather we, as readers, become the mechanisms o f intentionality, continually adjudicating between sense and nonsense as a way o f figuring our relation to
any particular set of words or phrases.
Failed or vanishing intentionality calls forward the demand and need for
justification, but not the epistemological justification of a true belief, nor even of acting or action: the demand is whether to count the World as Mind or to count myself within a world. 7 Finnegans Wake highlights intentionality not as a logical or even a linguistic
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
131
problem, but as a problem of confession. Finnegans Wake is a confession in which both who confesses, what is confessed, who the confession is being directed to, who actually does hear the confession, and what the moral consequences o f and response to the confessionareblank. Thisblankness(theabsenceofintentionaltargets)enactsthe grammar of Wittgenstein's remark that '"You can't hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed'. --That is a grammatical remark" (? 717). This follows not simply from a definition of God, but from the way in which human language configures its own boundaries.
Bretano, in his Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint, describes the intentional as what constitutes our mental experience (partly as a counter to Cartesian dualism):
Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence o f an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as an object within itself, although they do not always do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, injudgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. (88)
TobeaboutXseemstorequirearelationbetweenthinkingorathoughtandX. Any relation would, however, require another relation to relate it to X. And thus if intentionality is understood as a relation one would require an infinite number of
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
132
relations. (R) The verbs 'refer', 'symbolize', 'suggest', 'point' are all black boxes to capture this ineffable intentional relation. If, however, the object does not actually exist (as in 'I hope to build the tallest building in the world'), the problem has shifted to the status of this object. Brentano uses the model o f the imaginary object as pattern for describing all o f our mental stances toward the world. The aboutness o f our language is immanent within our attitudes and statements. In many ways this is simply to replace the mystery of the aboutness o f our language with the mystery o f the immanence o f the world in our statements. Itcannotserveasanexplanation(acausalmodel)butonlyasadescriptionof our mental experience (and this is, o f course, how phenomenologists normally understand it).
The status o f such language as description and not as explanatory (in a causal sense) is what Wittgenstein means when he says "The criteria for the truth of the confession that I thought such-and-such are not the criteria for a true description of a process" (PI? 222). The meaning of the confession lies in what can be understood as a consequence ofthe truth that is "guaranteed the special criteria oftruthfulness" (PI? 222). If statements about my mental content are understood as confessions they form a particular language game whose grammar (terms, claims, possibilities, application, usage, scope) allows me to speak, as it were, in my voice. Confessions in this sense are like dreams (as Wittgenstein suggests). We do not know that we at night actually experienced the dreams we remember and report. I am using 'actually' here as part o f a pseudo- scientific language game. What would be a non-actual experience? An experience is an experience. Unlike my conscious experience my experience o f a dream cannot be ?
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
133
divorced from my telling it. I may be deceived about my dreams but I have no way of determining this. The question in telling my dreams, like expressing my intentions and making confessions, is about my truthfulness but not about the truth of my claims. You can only determine their truth by judging my truthfulness:
The question whether the dreamer's memory deceives him when he reports the dream after waking cannot arise, unless indeed we introduce a completely new criterion for the report's 'agreeing' with the dream, a criterion which gives us a concept o f 'truth' as distinct from 'truthfulness' here. (PI p. 222-23)
In Investigations, the 'immanent objectivity' described by Brentano has been displaced into the normative structures ordering and determining our language use, marking the relation between sense and nonsense. Intentionality, broadly speaking, should be understood in Wittgenstein as grammar. The intentionality of our language is not attached to the world, but rather intentional statements (I wish that x; I expect y; I have a suspicion about z) are matched by statements that describe their fulfillment, verification, denial, failure, etc. (see ? ? 136, 429, 458):
"An order is own execution. " So it knows its execution, then even before it is there? --But that was a grammatical proposition and it means: If an order runs "Do such-and-such" then executing the order is called "doing such-and-such". (PI? 458)
Such a picture while it makes our mental content accessible to others reduces aboutness to agreement and usage. Approaching one kind of poetic voice approaches nonsense, when the rules or grammar organizing intentionality in our ordinary language are excluded in
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
134
poetic language such that nothing can satisfy as either a description o f fulfillment (of intentionality) or as an adequate interpretation oftruth-value, reference, intentionality, meaning. This changing o f the language into the non-intentional (which is sometimes described as non-functional language) does not dissolve language but redirects intentionality toward us such that we describe (in our reading and in our person) the fulfillment oflanguage. The consequence ofthis picture is that intentionality becomes a mode o f interpretation. People, texts, artifacts, and machines have an intentionality if they agree with the normative criteria for fulfilling an intention or for acting (or thinking or
believing) towards something. 9
The Wake pictures intentionality as a theological problem, or rather as our
theological dwelling in the world where all of our words, or rather where "[e]very letter is a godsend" (FW269. 17): "Plunger words what paddled verbed. Mere man's mime: God has jest" (FW486. 09-10). Humans attach themselves to the world through representation (mime) while God attaches himselfthroughjest. What is the nature of God'sjest? What is a God-joke (besides the created world and life itself)? There could be no other joke for God. Finnegans Wake describes such a world, a world that is a misrepresentation of God or ofa dreamer or ofa body or ofa brain, mind, world or ofsome beyond: it is at every level o f organization, what Wittgenstein calls, a grammatical joke:
The problems arising through a misrepresentation of our forms of language have the character o f depth. They are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms o f our language and their significance is as great as the importance of
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
135
our language, -- Let us ask ourselves: why do we fell a grammatical joke to be
deep! (And that is what the depth of philosophy is. ) (PI? 111)
What are examples o f grammatical jokes? 'Time passes (like a log). ' I might explain how time can pass in this way by saying that 'time flows like a river'. There is a sense to this kind of talk, but it is not sense about time (but rather about our involvement in language). I will recover this sense in chapter 11. The nonsense o f this time-talk is various. I first picture time passing as if it were a thing passing by on a river; this is an picture o f the present. Ithenexplainthispicturebysayingtimeflowsliketheriveronwhichthelog passes; this is an image o f past, present and future. Instead o f seeing that time cannot be both ofthese, we might imaginethat this is part ofa complex picture oftime flowing (we could add boats and call them words; and mention refuse against the riverbank and call
these memories). Anna Livia Plurabelle forms just such a picture o f time as a river. I f she is understood as a theory, then we have hypostasized a complex analogy (that again has sense as an enactment o f our involvement and confusion within language and the world, and is not a picture of either us or the world).
Grammatical jokes describe limits. This is one o f the best grammatical jokes in Investigations: "In what circumstances should I say that a tribe had a chief? And the chief must surely have consciousness. Surely we can't have a chief without consciousness? " (PI? 419) I am tempted to to describe an anatomy o f limits and boundaries, but such an anatomy would tend toward a theory of limits. And a theory of limits is exactly what is not needed. The picture of limits I am sketching is meant to describe our invovlment within language through the shifting limits that determine sense and nonsense as
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
136
enactments o f models o f mind (animate/ inanimate, consciousness/ unconscious, and so on)andkindsoftime. Thisinvolvmentisplastic. Themeaningofourinvolvment, therefore, can describe both a moral education (a configuration of ourselves as human) and an ontology (what is real). The distance between these two meanings is one way o f describing what I am calling the distance between the soul and the mind. This distance, or difference, does not describe, however, an epistemology or the limits o f reason (as in Kant).
Kant argues that our experience never determines a boundary but moves "from the conditioned to some other equally conditioned thing" (Prolegomena, 59). In Kant, the metaphysical limit of experience, which "must lie quite without it," describe something akin to Wittgensteinian grammar, but here understood as grounded in reason, "by which it is neither confined within the sensible nor strays beyond the sensible, but only limits itself, as befits the knowledge o f a boundary, to the relation between what lies beyond it and what is contained in it" (Prolegomena, 59). The phrase "as befits the knowledge o f a boundary" is a definition of boundary (a requirement not a description). While such a boundary marks a limit to what we can know (for beyond it is "an empty space"), we can knowthenatureofsuchaboundary. Thedistinctionbetweenknowableandunknowable, however, presumes criteria that can apply to what is beyond the boundary o f the knowable
constitutingitasunknowable. Suchaboundary,tobemetaphysical,wouldsetitselfas the negation ofthe ground ofbeing: a kind ofnothing. This does not make such a boundary absolute, but the formulation of such boundaries discovers the limits of the humanrelationtothepossibilitiesofbeing. If'thepossibilitiesofbeing"issenseless,orif
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
137
any category cannot mark or determine its own boundaries, the effect is not to dissolve the concept of limit or boundary, but to leave nothing but such limits and boundaries, shifting under the pressures our involvement and application o f the concepts (knowing, being, thinking, caring, and so on) puts on these markers. But "to leave nothing but" is itself a description of a limit, and at first blush seems to follow Kant's discussion of natural
theology, which "being constrained to look beyond this boundary [of human reason] to the idea of a Supreme Being. . . in order to guide the use of reason within the world of sense according to principles o f the greatest possible unity" (Prolegomena, 59). My claim here, however, is that the instability o f boundaries and limits pressures our involvment in language (our understanding, interpretations, even reasoning) into disunity that is not organized into time as either a metaphysical ground of experience or by consciousness (a transcendentalapperception)butasagrammar(timeisasymbolicgrammar). Thisisnot meant as a theory oftime, but as a stance within our language that configures the world as meaningfulinaparticularway. Iamtryingtobringoutthismeaning. Thus,when Wittgenstein describes the grammar of our use of "game" as a way of describing how we inhabit the limits of our human form(s) of life, he is not describing the unified concept of 'human being':
The rales of grammar may be called "arbitrary", if that is to mean that the aim o f the grammar is nothing but that o f the language.
If someone says "If our language had not this grammar, it could not express these facts" --it should be asked what "could" means here. (PI? 497)
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
The limits o f being human describe jokes; these jokes punctuate our involvment in language as different kinds o f time and as different versions o f redemption. In this picture or description o f time and language there is no transcendent anything: "As things are I can, for example, invent a game that is never played by anyone. --But would the following be possible too: mankind has never played any games: once, however, someone invented a game--which no one ever played? " (PI? 204).
The different versions ofthe first riddle ofthe universe inFinnegans Wake are all grammatical jokes. "The first riddle of the universe" is called forth in the chapter VII portrait o f Shem the penman as part o f the continual battle between the artist and prankster Shem and his moralizing brother Shaun. The opposition between the two brothers,asbetween"allears"and"all. . ",betweenShemtimeandShaunspace, collapses not only into two aspects o f the universe, but into different kinds o f language. This is the first version o f the riddle:
"dictited to of all his little brothron and sweestureens the first riddle of the u niverse: asking, when is a man not a man? : telling them to take their time, yungfries, and wait till the tide stops (for from the first his day was a fortnight) and offering the prize of a bittersweet crab, a little present from the past, for their copper age was yet unminted, to the winner.
(FW170. 03-09; boldface added)
P. McCarthy argues that this riddle begins the dramatization that will continue for the rest of the book of "the struggle of the guilty mind toward renewal" (79). Whatever we think about the nature of human guilt, the Wake is certainly concerned with our education; our
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
139
soul-making. This concern for our soul, however, is the same as a concern for our pleasures and our commitments and our body that can be figured as a concern about what
we imagine an education entails: "Is the Co-Education o f Animus and Anima Wholly Desirable? "(307. 03-04).
As McCarthy notes various forms ofthe first riddle ofthe universe appear seven times, and in this at least offers a week o f questions, all o f which are versions o f the
Wake:
1) the first riddle o f the universe: asking, when is a man not a man? . . . --all give
up? --; when he is a --yours till the rending o f the rocks,--Sham. (170. 3-24)
2 ) . . . to where was a hovel not a havel (the first rattle o f his juniverse) with a tintumtingling and a next, next and next. . . while itch ish shome. (231. 1-4)
3) When is a Pun not a Pun? (307. 2-3)
4 ) . . . the farst wriggle from the ubivence, whereom is man, that old offender, nother man, wheile he is asmae. (356. 2-14)
5) . . when is a maid nought a maid he would go to anyposs length for her! (495. 6-7).
6) Here is a homelet not a hothel. (586. 18)
7) The first and last rittlerattle ofthe anniverse; when is a nam nought a nam
whenas it is a. Watch! (607. 10-12)
These riddles are pictures o f fragments. Fragments are structured like riddles, and thus their integration o f completion and incompletion, o f particular and totality (system), o f act and continuity require the same double vision required to recognize when a pun is and is
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
140
not a pun. Fragments, as I suggested earlier, are forms o f ironic self-reflection o f exactly the sort described by "When is a Pun not a Pun? " (307. 02-04). A pun is only a pun when we laugh, or only when we recognize, hear or see, (at least) one word in another. This doublness(orindeterminacy)ofmeaningmakespunsaspeciesofirony. Readingthe Wake does not mean one understands the answer to these riddles (that might be part o f a higher level interpretation). Instead, I think, reading should consist in asking these question as if they were your own questions. This kind o f interrogation constitutes the self-reflexivestructureofthe Wakeasinterrogativefragments.
Ithinkthesecanallbecalledriddlesofrecognition. Theoperateinexactlythe kind of confusion that allows Kant to imagine that the application of moral obligation proceeds through the formal recognition o f when a human being is a human being; he asks when is a moral a moral? Such questions are akin to asking when is a citizen a person? or imagining that it makes sense to understand as a riddle the question 'when is a person a citizen? ' (and thus assuming that it is not a question that can be answered except maybe with always or never; these might be ways of answering the riddle within one picture of democracyorofmonarchy. Atleastforademocracyriddlesmaybethenecessaryformof our political engagement: are all people created equal? ).
These riddles, as points of structural clarity relative to the method of the text itself, set a riddle for the reader; if every phrase is a riddle that requires interpretation, but no interpretation can provide an adequate answer, then what does it mean to recognize the text as riddled, as a riddle, as riddles?
The depth ofFinnegans Wake is partly a function of showing how any answer or interpretation to the riddle of the text is anti-climatic in a
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
141
way that makes the answer seem trivial and thus requires us to find a further riddle that involvesusmorefullyintheriddleofthetext. Thisprocessofgoingoncannotend. Therefore, it is not the answer to the riddles that provides meaning, but it is how we continue asking questions that constitutes reading.
How do we "hear the riddles between the robot and his dress circular and the gagster in the rogues' gallery" (FW219. 22-23)? The distance between the mind, as a mind factory, and thus as a robot and the dress of intentionality and appearance that makes it seem human, and the soul as 'the gagster in the rogues' gallery" articulates two kinds of humor or nonsense: robot dress (the humor o f one thing leading to the next without reason, call this Chaplinesque) and gagster ro-gallery (the humor o f transgression, call this MarxBrothersOperatic). Theidentificationofgagsterwithsoulrequiressomedefense. I
think "gagster" puns on the word "ghoster" used a few sentences earlier on the same page: "With nightly redistribution of parts and players by the puppetry producer and daily dubbing o f ghosters, with the benediction o f the Holy Genesius Archimimus . . . " (FW219. 06-09). This "Archimimus", from G. archimimos, is the chief actor, maybe the puppetry producer, the intentional beyond, the body as the limit of God, or all of the players as the shift through their parts. The humor ofthe gags inFinnegans Wake functions through the confusion of names and words or of phrases and language games where a word and phrase can always mean something else. And thus the soul as the form marking identity (the subsistent soul) and existence (what marks humans as animate and not inanimate) is neither the meaning of a name or word (even organized very broadly into
the categories o f HCE, ALP, Shem, Shaun, and Issy) nor in the grammar o f any particular
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
142
moment of clarity (soul as totality), but is the continuity of shifting between these forms directed toward a vanishing intentionality, in other words, "the gagster in the rogues' gallery". To "hear the riddles between the robot and his dress circular and the gagster in the rogues' gallery" (FW219. 22-23) is to read the Wake itself as either a riddle whose answer is unknowable or as an answer whose riddle is unknowable (this is another way of describing vanishing intentionality).
So another picture of the Wake: "Jests, jokes, jigs and jorums for the Wake lent from the properties ofthe late cemented Mr. T. M. Finnegan R. I. C" (FW221. 26-7). Mr. T. M. Finnegan is not cemented anywhere in the text; so in what sense could we say he, and not some other he, is the sleeper? If he is dissolved, or has lent willingly or unwillingly, his properties (his words, his characteristics, his desires and fears and so on) to the further mutations of the "jests, jokes, jigs, and jorums" of the Wake, or other figments, then in what sense are those properties his? Human beings hold a lot of properties in common, and those that distinguish a particular person as a particular person are apparent as a particular configuration, as a unity of form and matter maybe, that once dissolved cannot mark someone as anyone at all.
This is one way o f configuring the problem o f intentionality as aesthetic (moving outsideofalogicalpictureoflanguage). Butthisisnotanaestheticofrecognition(asin Goodman) where our problem is to recognize the intentional object, existent or not, about whichwespeak. Thereisnothingtorecognizeandnorulesorpracticesorprejudicesthat can apply in a way that makes sense. When something makes temporary sense, we have not recognized a version of the world or an example of meaning or aesthetic expression.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
143
Asking when the Wake makes sense picks out the means we use to make sense of it not the sense o f the Wake.
This allows Joyce to picture the relation between the body and the soul as between the mind and the soul as between divinity and deity. By this I mean the condition o f being between in Finnegans Wake does not hypostatize a betweeness as somehow more actual, but describes our being towards a shifting set of limits whose meaning is enacted in both ourcommitmentstothoselimitsandtheshiftingbetweenthem. Thisshiftingbetween constitutes the grammatical humor o f the Wake. The problem o f intentionality, therefore, describes the distance between the soul and god, both allegorized as the body: "Ah, did you speak, stuffstuff? More poestries form Chickspeer's with gleechoreal music or a
jaculation from the garden o f the soul. O f I be leib in the immoralities? " (FW145. 24-26). 'Whether' (Du of) to "be leib", 'to believe' and 'to be flesh' (G. leib), or to be confused with love (G. lieb[e]), in the "immoralities" (immortals as immoralities) or in immortality (to be flesh in immortality) is the speech o f the body ("stuffstuff'); and yet the poetry (or pastries) of Shakespeare articulate an ode to joy, angels singing, or an ejaculation of (or being cast out from) the garden of the soul. This confusion of soul and body turns language into jest, and thus this confusion is God: the Flesh made Jest.
This picture o f vanishing intentionality can be analogized as unintentional intentionality. "Willed without witting, whorled without aimed. Pappapassos, Mannamanet,warwhetswutandwhowitswhy. "(FW272. 04-06): willuncontrolledby cognition is energy without telos or form, so that the doubleness o f being Father and child (Pappa and pappoose) and Mother (ma; manna) and man as names and descriptions are
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
144
equivalent to the following question(s): what is what? where what is what and who is it? who is why? who thinks (wits) why? how it is why? Wow! it's why? ! and so on. These questions respond to and constitute 'Pappa passes', the dissolution o f identity within the aesthetics ofthe Wake, and 'Mamma remains' (L. manet). Such questioning is a terror: "Terror ofthe noonstruck by day, cryptogram ofeach nightly bridable. But, to speak broken heaventalk, is he? Who is he? Why is he? Howmuch is he? Which is he? When is he? Where is he? How is he? " (FW261. 26-31).
The question "what does a 'sentence' mean? " fails to lead to any answer. If we persist in reading we find ourselves waiting for something to crystallize out of the text into clarity. And thus we begin to ask "when does it mean? "; "If it doesn't mean now, then when? " We always remain in the grip of this question. The book becomes this question. But this question has a curious structure. Strictly speaking it is not a question at all. What would count as an answer? At half-past ten it meant something? or when I read the word "X" or when I read the word "vivlical" (FW183. 13); what criteria or rules describe the text or its use o f words? Every word puns into something else pushing against grammar and syntax, referring to unstable identities within unclear contexts. No answer is adequate
tothetext. "Whendoesitmean? "isariddle. 10
The most comprehensive and forceful attempt to investigate the ontological and
theintentionalstatusofthe Wake'slanguageisJohnBishop'sJoyce'sBookoftheDark. He argues that one cannot force the Wake's verbal linguistic word play into the rational andcomfortablepatternsofconsciousness. ForBishop,Finnegans Wakebecomesavast nocturnal riddle, describing the "'freeley masoned' dreamwork of the night. " One must
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
145
abandon reading the Wake like a linear narrative; for Bishop, as well as for Joyce, "nobody's 'night-life' makes sense as a continuous whole. " Reading Finnegans Wake, for Bishop, does not involve shaping the night-world ofthe Wake into conscious rationality. We must, instead, transform our conscious perspective into one that recognizes the logic andthesignificanceofthenight-world. Critics,includingDongahueandAdamsintheir reviews ofBishop's book, would rather let the world of consciousness and of unconsciousness struggle against each other in the text, as if they were coequal, and betrayed nothing more than a play of perspectives, a play between night and day. 11 As Bishop realizes, however, Joyce has not created an equality between two states of consciousness, rather he describes the transformative chaos of a nocturnal reality in which we can find only the dim memory of consciousness. He understands the Wake as a kind
ofcounter-Freudian psychology.
In making sense o f such a claim I think one must understand the Wake as an
attempt to configure our involvement within language, biology, history, logic, desire, etc. , our form of life, within a complex shifting set of languages, interpretative frames, and states o f being, mind and grammar that do not function allegorically. Even mapping 'sense' and 'nonsense' onto 'consciousness' and 'unconsciousness' misses how we use all o f these words and how we inhabit any o f these worlds.
In such ignorance and chaos, the ordinary is not the world outside the window; the skeptical temptations prompting us to ask 'how does this mean that? ' or 'does this really mean that? ' or 'how do we know that? ' becomes 'How can I still be, or still think, or still experience, since this doesn't mean? '. In not knowing this I do not know myself.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Thisnightworldisfundamentallyasymmetricwithourwakingworld. Thenegationof our knowledge, meaning, identity does not create a context, a world in which further negation leads back to identity, knowledge, or meaning. If it did one should read the Wake as a mistranslated story or description or life, instead of a religious and a theological riddle. In other words, if it is mistranslated then the mistranslation itselfmeans nothing once the meaning has been recovered. But then why the mistranslation? In this sense Joyce is competing with Freud (and paralleling Wittgenstein within temporality), asking if this mistranslation functions within or as our biology, psychology, social world, history, or of physics, and if so then what does the mistranslation in itself mean? What does our distortions of sense mean as a part, a function, a temporary ground, a possibility, and obligation of our form of life? Such distortions describe a limit to what we can understand as meaningful and suggests a condition in which coherence and referentiality mutate or are lost in the "infrarational" o f this transformational grammar, whether it is a mistranslation ofourconsciousorunconsciouslifeorsomethingelse. Thenocturnalworldismorethan our dreams; it is our night-life as the limit of and limited by both our being (conscious or anything) and the world.
Inthisnot-lifewedonotrecognizeidentities. Ifourwakingmemorymeans anything it might suggest how we construct identities, including our own identity: our form of life is not determined by our common sight, nor our falling into confusion because we lose this agreement. This lack of agreement is the condition o f our being at this time. Our own being as something is not continuous, nor is the stability o f our agreement about what exists, for Aquinas, the dimension of being guaranteed by God, opposed to essence
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
or identity, which for Aquinas is variable depending on our perspective within a scale leading towards God. Extracting allegories, character and plot reads toward 'what something is'; reading back toward the ontological and intentional status of Wakean language pursues 'that something is. 'Finnegans Wake articulates and investigates the structural aspects of our own being, our nocturnal life, that finds its home, whose ordinary state is not doubting as such but the actual existing o f our person (whatever that is) within
the continual negation o f possibility and identity and ground, on a scale directed toward the unknowable.
The logic of the Wake, while appearing to be a masque of characters, points always to a single unconsciousness. Once we enter into the associative, non-narrative logic of the dream we find that any paragraph ofFinnegans Wake provides us "with a set of vectors that point to an absent content- 'the presence (of a curpse)' --into the 'eyewitless foggus' o f whose 'trapped head' the process o f reading the Evening World
leads"(315). The(un)consciousnessofour"humbptyhillhead,"our"onestable somebody" "aslip" in the text, as Joyce calls him, becomes the underlying organizational locus (a locus betrayed by absence, however, not presence) around which the text can be understood, and around which it was written.
I think that Bishop's presentation is convincing. All that I require here, however, is the acknowledgment of our inability to offer any interpretation about Finnegans Wake that provides an intentional object (existent or not) and at the same time provides the meaning o f the indeterminacy, nonsense, and mutations o f any particular word, phrase or sentence as essential to that intentional target. Wakean language remains radically
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
148
intentional. This intentionality, however, cannot articulate the content of its aboutness. We are left with the structure of intentionality without its object(s). In other words, the referential targets have been subtracted not only from the 'world' but from language, and leaves only an intentional structure. Freudian dream interpretation replaces these lost targets with a primal allegory. One could organize the intentionality of"nat language" by any number o f allegories. 12
I do not want to provide another allegory, but to continually turn around within the allegorical possibilities marked by 'the distance between mind and soul'. Such a turning around, while it will leave a tale, will not provide a description of the difference between the animate and inanimate (biology can do that), but will subtract the content from this distinction as a way o f highlighting the constituting o f this kind o f distinction as a particular kind o f limit. I do not think that the distinction between mind and body, consciousness and life, mind and soul, soul and God, human and animal, divinity and deity, animateandinanimateareallthesamedistinction. Theyareexamples(andinthisthey describeanaesthetic)ofatheologicalinhabitationoflanguage. Thistheology,inthis
case, however, must emerge from the difficulty o f describing our investments in language,
meaning and interpretation within the nomological boundaries described in science. Finnegans Wake and in a different way Philosophical Investigations correlate the limit between the animate human and the inanimate thing as a limit between sense and nonsense figured as the limits between interpretation, meaning, seeing, knowing, and process (being caused). These limits are not clear, in fact what counts as these limits is exactly what is at issue in building or modeling a mind. To triangulate the grammar of linguistic and
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
149
aesthetic meaning, the logic of the mind, and the theological description of being human cannot begin outside o f the problems o f language, literary texts, philosophies o f mind, or theologies. Theconfusionofdemandsandlogicsofthesepursuitscannotbeavoided,and while the clarity o f engineering is one o f the limits I am trying to approach, the work remains to make such clarity as a limit to being human amidst the claims of language, art, philosophy, science, and theology. There is no reason to think being within any limit of clarity involves being clear, or rather it is not clear what will count as clarity; My goal is
to think within, at and towards the limits ofmind and being articulated through the triangulation o f language, mind, and the enactment o f the totalities o f sentences, persons, worlds, and divinities (or let's say ultimate limits). Finnegans Wake involves exactly this kind oftriangulation. It would be a failure to synthesize the Wakes nonsense into sense or clarity or plots or characters and so on. But neither should we describe nonsense with nonsense. Translation and representation are not the point only because that is not the problem ofFinnegans Wake. The problem is instead the preservation and analysis (as a peculiar kind of self-reflection through the transformation of our reading into a thinking along the Wake) of the question 'why read? ' 'Why read' enacts the philosophical wonder
that anything exists as a choice embodied in our stance toward ourselves toward the world. Thisistheproblemofaestheticjustification.
InFinnegans Wakethetheologicaldemandofthetextisnotjusttoconstructan aesthetics within which it can be recognized as art nor to construct the context for any sentence to make sense. Both context and aesthetic assume that a language game or a set o f criteria or a stance can be constructed in which the text will make sense (or be
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
150
sensible). I think, for example, that this is the case for The Waste Land. Finnegans Wake, while it is not absolute nonsense, generates a theological stance (a kind o f theology without God). The demand is more like one for prayer. Could a prayer cause God to act? If a prayer reconstructs me and not God, opens me up to the possibilities described by our versions o f divinity, then how would I be constructed through a prayer towards the nonsense of the Wake and Investigations! Artificial Intelligence becomes a way of investigating the ways we can remake ourselves toward the ontological limits against which both texts operate (they both expose logical and aesthetic limits as functioning with ontological force).
Neither text defends anything like the assumptions of AI, or ofa computational model o f the mind (far from it in fact). The intentionality o f prayer, the theological demands o f the texts articulate the relation between how we function and why we function: the demand that the application of our ontological resources, as a way of determining how we enter into allegories, interpretations, meanings, and possibilities, the intentionality that they both continually destabilize. This destabilization opens us up to the demands o f the limits within which we live (and commit ourselves), and thus the destabilization (or play) cannot be an end in itself.
IfFinnegans Wake enacts the world ofan absent sleeper, then our failure to read backwards into his or her life or consciousness, into a mind that we would recognize as our own, forces us to place our mind, our life, as the intentional target o f the text. But thiswouldmeanthatwedonotunderstandourselves. Howcouldthisbeournight-life, our dreams, our absence? If we resist this move then why read the text? Before you'
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
151
answer that you will not, consider that in tempting us to stop reading so continually Joyce forces to the surface of every line Conrad's claim that for anything to be art it must justify itself in every line. Intentionality delimits in a negative beyond an absent dreamer, maybe a version of ourselves, through which we recreate ourselves as the target of its language, or thisintentionalitydevolvesintoastructurethatrequiresconstantjustification: intentional structure becomes a self-reflexive aesthetic, and thus an investigation ofmimesis itself, of
the kind o f realism described by Ulysses.
Thegrammarofthe Wake,therefore,functionsasasyntaxatthatextensionless
point that Wittgenstein articulated in the Tractatus as the "metaphysical I", the limit o f the world marked by "the fact that 'the world is my world'". This does not mean that the metaphysics ofthe Tractatus and ofthe Wake are the same. The shifting limits within the
Wake are more like the relation between language games and forms oflife in Philosophical Investigations. The structure o f intentionality in the Wake, however, is akintothekindoflimitdescribedintheTractatus. Themetaphysical'I'describesidentity as a kind of uniqueness or the point of independence that necessarily cannot be described within the world which is its vision. That is, it is shown by its configuration o f the world as its own, but it cannot see itselfonly its effect in how it sees the world. The 'I' cannot be pictured, as Wittgenstein suggests at 5. 6331, not even as the following:
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
152
The ellipse describes the world.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
130
conversion, where conversion becomes the determining change o f what we experience as time, or a language of confession
Faced with "Som's wholed, all's parted" (FW563. 30) we ask ourselves or our book "what does it mean? ". The sentence does not seem to be about anything exactly, and any interpretation offered must simultaneously construct an interpretive frame. In whatever particular story or character elements one extracts from a sentence or a fragment of the Wake, it is possible to trace two intentional strands: the language points 1) to an absent sleeper, an intentional object that exists as a negative point, an impossible beyond, and(2)simultaneouslytothe Wakeitself,aself-reflectionorversionoftheentiretext: where each sentence functions as a justifying aesthetic for the whole and as an example of this aesthetic: an exemplar, a representative representation. In both cases the intentional dimension of language has been lost, we cannot grasp either the sleeper or the Wake itself; the intentional drive of any particular string of words points but not at anything understandable. The effect ofthis is not to undermine the intentionality, the aboutness of language, but rather serves to expose the mechanisms of intentionality through which language functions, or rather we, as readers, become the mechanisms o f intentionality, continually adjudicating between sense and nonsense as a way o f figuring our relation to
any particular set of words or phrases.
Failed or vanishing intentionality calls forward the demand and need for
justification, but not the epistemological justification of a true belief, nor even of acting or action: the demand is whether to count the World as Mind or to count myself within a world. 7 Finnegans Wake highlights intentionality not as a logical or even a linguistic
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
131
problem, but as a problem of confession. Finnegans Wake is a confession in which both who confesses, what is confessed, who the confession is being directed to, who actually does hear the confession, and what the moral consequences o f and response to the confessionareblank. Thisblankness(theabsenceofintentionaltargets)enactsthe grammar of Wittgenstein's remark that '"You can't hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed'. --That is a grammatical remark" (? 717). This follows not simply from a definition of God, but from the way in which human language configures its own boundaries.
Bretano, in his Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint, describes the intentional as what constitutes our mental experience (partly as a counter to Cartesian dualism):
Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence o f an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as an object within itself, although they do not always do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, injudgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. (88)
TobeaboutXseemstorequirearelationbetweenthinkingorathoughtandX. Any relation would, however, require another relation to relate it to X. And thus if intentionality is understood as a relation one would require an infinite number of
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
132
relations. (R) The verbs 'refer', 'symbolize', 'suggest', 'point' are all black boxes to capture this ineffable intentional relation. If, however, the object does not actually exist (as in 'I hope to build the tallest building in the world'), the problem has shifted to the status of this object. Brentano uses the model o f the imaginary object as pattern for describing all o f our mental stances toward the world. The aboutness o f our language is immanent within our attitudes and statements. In many ways this is simply to replace the mystery of the aboutness o f our language with the mystery o f the immanence o f the world in our statements. Itcannotserveasanexplanation(acausalmodel)butonlyasadescriptionof our mental experience (and this is, o f course, how phenomenologists normally understand it).
The status o f such language as description and not as explanatory (in a causal sense) is what Wittgenstein means when he says "The criteria for the truth of the confession that I thought such-and-such are not the criteria for a true description of a process" (PI? 222). The meaning of the confession lies in what can be understood as a consequence ofthe truth that is "guaranteed the special criteria oftruthfulness" (PI? 222). If statements about my mental content are understood as confessions they form a particular language game whose grammar (terms, claims, possibilities, application, usage, scope) allows me to speak, as it were, in my voice. Confessions in this sense are like dreams (as Wittgenstein suggests). We do not know that we at night actually experienced the dreams we remember and report. I am using 'actually' here as part o f a pseudo- scientific language game. What would be a non-actual experience? An experience is an experience. Unlike my conscious experience my experience o f a dream cannot be ?
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
133
divorced from my telling it. I may be deceived about my dreams but I have no way of determining this. The question in telling my dreams, like expressing my intentions and making confessions, is about my truthfulness but not about the truth of my claims. You can only determine their truth by judging my truthfulness:
The question whether the dreamer's memory deceives him when he reports the dream after waking cannot arise, unless indeed we introduce a completely new criterion for the report's 'agreeing' with the dream, a criterion which gives us a concept o f 'truth' as distinct from 'truthfulness' here. (PI p. 222-23)
In Investigations, the 'immanent objectivity' described by Brentano has been displaced into the normative structures ordering and determining our language use, marking the relation between sense and nonsense. Intentionality, broadly speaking, should be understood in Wittgenstein as grammar. The intentionality of our language is not attached to the world, but rather intentional statements (I wish that x; I expect y; I have a suspicion about z) are matched by statements that describe their fulfillment, verification, denial, failure, etc. (see ? ? 136, 429, 458):
"An order is own execution. " So it knows its execution, then even before it is there? --But that was a grammatical proposition and it means: If an order runs "Do such-and-such" then executing the order is called "doing such-and-such". (PI? 458)
Such a picture while it makes our mental content accessible to others reduces aboutness to agreement and usage. Approaching one kind of poetic voice approaches nonsense, when the rules or grammar organizing intentionality in our ordinary language are excluded in
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
134
poetic language such that nothing can satisfy as either a description o f fulfillment (of intentionality) or as an adequate interpretation oftruth-value, reference, intentionality, meaning. This changing o f the language into the non-intentional (which is sometimes described as non-functional language) does not dissolve language but redirects intentionality toward us such that we describe (in our reading and in our person) the fulfillment oflanguage. The consequence ofthis picture is that intentionality becomes a mode o f interpretation. People, texts, artifacts, and machines have an intentionality if they agree with the normative criteria for fulfilling an intention or for acting (or thinking or
believing) towards something. 9
The Wake pictures intentionality as a theological problem, or rather as our
theological dwelling in the world where all of our words, or rather where "[e]very letter is a godsend" (FW269. 17): "Plunger words what paddled verbed. Mere man's mime: God has jest" (FW486. 09-10). Humans attach themselves to the world through representation (mime) while God attaches himselfthroughjest. What is the nature of God'sjest? What is a God-joke (besides the created world and life itself)? There could be no other joke for God. Finnegans Wake describes such a world, a world that is a misrepresentation of God or ofa dreamer or ofa body or ofa brain, mind, world or ofsome beyond: it is at every level o f organization, what Wittgenstein calls, a grammatical joke:
The problems arising through a misrepresentation of our forms of language have the character o f depth. They are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms o f our language and their significance is as great as the importance of
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
135
our language, -- Let us ask ourselves: why do we fell a grammatical joke to be
deep! (And that is what the depth of philosophy is. ) (PI? 111)
What are examples o f grammatical jokes? 'Time passes (like a log). ' I might explain how time can pass in this way by saying that 'time flows like a river'. There is a sense to this kind of talk, but it is not sense about time (but rather about our involvement in language). I will recover this sense in chapter 11. The nonsense o f this time-talk is various. I first picture time passing as if it were a thing passing by on a river; this is an picture o f the present. Ithenexplainthispicturebysayingtimeflowsliketheriveronwhichthelog passes; this is an image o f past, present and future. Instead o f seeing that time cannot be both ofthese, we might imaginethat this is part ofa complex picture oftime flowing (we could add boats and call them words; and mention refuse against the riverbank and call
these memories). Anna Livia Plurabelle forms just such a picture o f time as a river. I f she is understood as a theory, then we have hypostasized a complex analogy (that again has sense as an enactment o f our involvement and confusion within language and the world, and is not a picture of either us or the world).
Grammatical jokes describe limits. This is one o f the best grammatical jokes in Investigations: "In what circumstances should I say that a tribe had a chief? And the chief must surely have consciousness. Surely we can't have a chief without consciousness? " (PI? 419) I am tempted to to describe an anatomy o f limits and boundaries, but such an anatomy would tend toward a theory of limits. And a theory of limits is exactly what is not needed. The picture of limits I am sketching is meant to describe our invovlment within language through the shifting limits that determine sense and nonsense as
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
136
enactments o f models o f mind (animate/ inanimate, consciousness/ unconscious, and so on)andkindsoftime. Thisinvolvmentisplastic. Themeaningofourinvolvment, therefore, can describe both a moral education (a configuration of ourselves as human) and an ontology (what is real). The distance between these two meanings is one way o f describing what I am calling the distance between the soul and the mind. This distance, or difference, does not describe, however, an epistemology or the limits o f reason (as in Kant).
Kant argues that our experience never determines a boundary but moves "from the conditioned to some other equally conditioned thing" (Prolegomena, 59). In Kant, the metaphysical limit of experience, which "must lie quite without it," describe something akin to Wittgensteinian grammar, but here understood as grounded in reason, "by which it is neither confined within the sensible nor strays beyond the sensible, but only limits itself, as befits the knowledge o f a boundary, to the relation between what lies beyond it and what is contained in it" (Prolegomena, 59). The phrase "as befits the knowledge o f a boundary" is a definition of boundary (a requirement not a description). While such a boundary marks a limit to what we can know (for beyond it is "an empty space"), we can knowthenatureofsuchaboundary. Thedistinctionbetweenknowableandunknowable, however, presumes criteria that can apply to what is beyond the boundary o f the knowable
constitutingitasunknowable. Suchaboundary,tobemetaphysical,wouldsetitselfas the negation ofthe ground ofbeing: a kind ofnothing. This does not make such a boundary absolute, but the formulation of such boundaries discovers the limits of the humanrelationtothepossibilitiesofbeing. If'thepossibilitiesofbeing"issenseless,orif
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
137
any category cannot mark or determine its own boundaries, the effect is not to dissolve the concept of limit or boundary, but to leave nothing but such limits and boundaries, shifting under the pressures our involvement and application o f the concepts (knowing, being, thinking, caring, and so on) puts on these markers. But "to leave nothing but" is itself a description of a limit, and at first blush seems to follow Kant's discussion of natural
theology, which "being constrained to look beyond this boundary [of human reason] to the idea of a Supreme Being. . . in order to guide the use of reason within the world of sense according to principles o f the greatest possible unity" (Prolegomena, 59). My claim here, however, is that the instability o f boundaries and limits pressures our involvment in language (our understanding, interpretations, even reasoning) into disunity that is not organized into time as either a metaphysical ground of experience or by consciousness (a transcendentalapperception)butasagrammar(timeisasymbolicgrammar). Thisisnot meant as a theory oftime, but as a stance within our language that configures the world as meaningfulinaparticularway. Iamtryingtobringoutthismeaning. Thus,when Wittgenstein describes the grammar of our use of "game" as a way of describing how we inhabit the limits of our human form(s) of life, he is not describing the unified concept of 'human being':
The rales of grammar may be called "arbitrary", if that is to mean that the aim o f the grammar is nothing but that o f the language.
If someone says "If our language had not this grammar, it could not express these facts" --it should be asked what "could" means here. (PI? 497)
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
The limits o f being human describe jokes; these jokes punctuate our involvment in language as different kinds o f time and as different versions o f redemption. In this picture or description o f time and language there is no transcendent anything: "As things are I can, for example, invent a game that is never played by anyone. --But would the following be possible too: mankind has never played any games: once, however, someone invented a game--which no one ever played? " (PI? 204).
The different versions ofthe first riddle ofthe universe inFinnegans Wake are all grammatical jokes. "The first riddle of the universe" is called forth in the chapter VII portrait o f Shem the penman as part o f the continual battle between the artist and prankster Shem and his moralizing brother Shaun. The opposition between the two brothers,asbetween"allears"and"all. . ",betweenShemtimeandShaunspace, collapses not only into two aspects o f the universe, but into different kinds o f language. This is the first version o f the riddle:
"dictited to of all his little brothron and sweestureens the first riddle of the u niverse: asking, when is a man not a man? : telling them to take their time, yungfries, and wait till the tide stops (for from the first his day was a fortnight) and offering the prize of a bittersweet crab, a little present from the past, for their copper age was yet unminted, to the winner.
(FW170. 03-09; boldface added)
P. McCarthy argues that this riddle begins the dramatization that will continue for the rest of the book of "the struggle of the guilty mind toward renewal" (79). Whatever we think about the nature of human guilt, the Wake is certainly concerned with our education; our
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
139
soul-making. This concern for our soul, however, is the same as a concern for our pleasures and our commitments and our body that can be figured as a concern about what
we imagine an education entails: "Is the Co-Education o f Animus and Anima Wholly Desirable? "(307. 03-04).
As McCarthy notes various forms ofthe first riddle ofthe universe appear seven times, and in this at least offers a week o f questions, all o f which are versions o f the
Wake:
1) the first riddle o f the universe: asking, when is a man not a man? . . . --all give
up? --; when he is a --yours till the rending o f the rocks,--Sham. (170. 3-24)
2 ) . . . to where was a hovel not a havel (the first rattle o f his juniverse) with a tintumtingling and a next, next and next. . . while itch ish shome. (231. 1-4)
3) When is a Pun not a Pun? (307. 2-3)
4 ) . . . the farst wriggle from the ubivence, whereom is man, that old offender, nother man, wheile he is asmae. (356. 2-14)
5) . . when is a maid nought a maid he would go to anyposs length for her! (495. 6-7).
6) Here is a homelet not a hothel. (586. 18)
7) The first and last rittlerattle ofthe anniverse; when is a nam nought a nam
whenas it is a. Watch! (607. 10-12)
These riddles are pictures o f fragments. Fragments are structured like riddles, and thus their integration o f completion and incompletion, o f particular and totality (system), o f act and continuity require the same double vision required to recognize when a pun is and is
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
140
not a pun. Fragments, as I suggested earlier, are forms o f ironic self-reflection o f exactly the sort described by "When is a Pun not a Pun? " (307. 02-04). A pun is only a pun when we laugh, or only when we recognize, hear or see, (at least) one word in another. This doublness(orindeterminacy)ofmeaningmakespunsaspeciesofirony. Readingthe Wake does not mean one understands the answer to these riddles (that might be part o f a higher level interpretation). Instead, I think, reading should consist in asking these question as if they were your own questions. This kind o f interrogation constitutes the self-reflexivestructureofthe Wakeasinterrogativefragments.
Ithinkthesecanallbecalledriddlesofrecognition. Theoperateinexactlythe kind of confusion that allows Kant to imagine that the application of moral obligation proceeds through the formal recognition o f when a human being is a human being; he asks when is a moral a moral? Such questions are akin to asking when is a citizen a person? or imagining that it makes sense to understand as a riddle the question 'when is a person a citizen? ' (and thus assuming that it is not a question that can be answered except maybe with always or never; these might be ways of answering the riddle within one picture of democracyorofmonarchy. Atleastforademocracyriddlesmaybethenecessaryformof our political engagement: are all people created equal? ).
These riddles, as points of structural clarity relative to the method of the text itself, set a riddle for the reader; if every phrase is a riddle that requires interpretation, but no interpretation can provide an adequate answer, then what does it mean to recognize the text as riddled, as a riddle, as riddles?
The depth ofFinnegans Wake is partly a function of showing how any answer or interpretation to the riddle of the text is anti-climatic in a
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
141
way that makes the answer seem trivial and thus requires us to find a further riddle that involvesusmorefullyintheriddleofthetext. Thisprocessofgoingoncannotend. Therefore, it is not the answer to the riddles that provides meaning, but it is how we continue asking questions that constitutes reading.
How do we "hear the riddles between the robot and his dress circular and the gagster in the rogues' gallery" (FW219. 22-23)? The distance between the mind, as a mind factory, and thus as a robot and the dress of intentionality and appearance that makes it seem human, and the soul as 'the gagster in the rogues' gallery" articulates two kinds of humor or nonsense: robot dress (the humor o f one thing leading to the next without reason, call this Chaplinesque) and gagster ro-gallery (the humor o f transgression, call this MarxBrothersOperatic). Theidentificationofgagsterwithsoulrequiressomedefense. I
think "gagster" puns on the word "ghoster" used a few sentences earlier on the same page: "With nightly redistribution of parts and players by the puppetry producer and daily dubbing o f ghosters, with the benediction o f the Holy Genesius Archimimus . . . " (FW219. 06-09). This "Archimimus", from G. archimimos, is the chief actor, maybe the puppetry producer, the intentional beyond, the body as the limit of God, or all of the players as the shift through their parts. The humor ofthe gags inFinnegans Wake functions through the confusion of names and words or of phrases and language games where a word and phrase can always mean something else. And thus the soul as the form marking identity (the subsistent soul) and existence (what marks humans as animate and not inanimate) is neither the meaning of a name or word (even organized very broadly into
the categories o f HCE, ALP, Shem, Shaun, and Issy) nor in the grammar o f any particular
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
142
moment of clarity (soul as totality), but is the continuity of shifting between these forms directed toward a vanishing intentionality, in other words, "the gagster in the rogues' gallery". To "hear the riddles between the robot and his dress circular and the gagster in the rogues' gallery" (FW219. 22-23) is to read the Wake itself as either a riddle whose answer is unknowable or as an answer whose riddle is unknowable (this is another way of describing vanishing intentionality).
So another picture of the Wake: "Jests, jokes, jigs and jorums for the Wake lent from the properties ofthe late cemented Mr. T. M. Finnegan R. I. C" (FW221. 26-7). Mr. T. M. Finnegan is not cemented anywhere in the text; so in what sense could we say he, and not some other he, is the sleeper? If he is dissolved, or has lent willingly or unwillingly, his properties (his words, his characteristics, his desires and fears and so on) to the further mutations of the "jests, jokes, jigs, and jorums" of the Wake, or other figments, then in what sense are those properties his? Human beings hold a lot of properties in common, and those that distinguish a particular person as a particular person are apparent as a particular configuration, as a unity of form and matter maybe, that once dissolved cannot mark someone as anyone at all.
This is one way o f configuring the problem o f intentionality as aesthetic (moving outsideofalogicalpictureoflanguage). Butthisisnotanaestheticofrecognition(asin Goodman) where our problem is to recognize the intentional object, existent or not, about whichwespeak. Thereisnothingtorecognizeandnorulesorpracticesorprejudicesthat can apply in a way that makes sense. When something makes temporary sense, we have not recognized a version of the world or an example of meaning or aesthetic expression.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
143
Asking when the Wake makes sense picks out the means we use to make sense of it not the sense o f the Wake.
This allows Joyce to picture the relation between the body and the soul as between the mind and the soul as between divinity and deity. By this I mean the condition o f being between in Finnegans Wake does not hypostatize a betweeness as somehow more actual, but describes our being towards a shifting set of limits whose meaning is enacted in both ourcommitmentstothoselimitsandtheshiftingbetweenthem. Thisshiftingbetween constitutes the grammatical humor o f the Wake. The problem o f intentionality, therefore, describes the distance between the soul and god, both allegorized as the body: "Ah, did you speak, stuffstuff? More poestries form Chickspeer's with gleechoreal music or a
jaculation from the garden o f the soul. O f I be leib in the immoralities? " (FW145. 24-26). 'Whether' (Du of) to "be leib", 'to believe' and 'to be flesh' (G. leib), or to be confused with love (G. lieb[e]), in the "immoralities" (immortals as immoralities) or in immortality (to be flesh in immortality) is the speech o f the body ("stuffstuff'); and yet the poetry (or pastries) of Shakespeare articulate an ode to joy, angels singing, or an ejaculation of (or being cast out from) the garden of the soul. This confusion of soul and body turns language into jest, and thus this confusion is God: the Flesh made Jest.
This picture o f vanishing intentionality can be analogized as unintentional intentionality. "Willed without witting, whorled without aimed. Pappapassos, Mannamanet,warwhetswutandwhowitswhy. "(FW272. 04-06): willuncontrolledby cognition is energy without telos or form, so that the doubleness o f being Father and child (Pappa and pappoose) and Mother (ma; manna) and man as names and descriptions are
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
144
equivalent to the following question(s): what is what? where what is what and who is it? who is why? who thinks (wits) why? how it is why? Wow! it's why? ! and so on. These questions respond to and constitute 'Pappa passes', the dissolution o f identity within the aesthetics ofthe Wake, and 'Mamma remains' (L. manet). Such questioning is a terror: "Terror ofthe noonstruck by day, cryptogram ofeach nightly bridable. But, to speak broken heaventalk, is he? Who is he? Why is he? Howmuch is he? Which is he? When is he? Where is he? How is he? " (FW261. 26-31).
The question "what does a 'sentence' mean? " fails to lead to any answer. If we persist in reading we find ourselves waiting for something to crystallize out of the text into clarity. And thus we begin to ask "when does it mean? "; "If it doesn't mean now, then when? " We always remain in the grip of this question. The book becomes this question. But this question has a curious structure. Strictly speaking it is not a question at all. What would count as an answer? At half-past ten it meant something? or when I read the word "X" or when I read the word "vivlical" (FW183. 13); what criteria or rules describe the text or its use o f words? Every word puns into something else pushing against grammar and syntax, referring to unstable identities within unclear contexts. No answer is adequate
tothetext. "Whendoesitmean? "isariddle. 10
The most comprehensive and forceful attempt to investigate the ontological and
theintentionalstatusofthe Wake'slanguageisJohnBishop'sJoyce'sBookoftheDark. He argues that one cannot force the Wake's verbal linguistic word play into the rational andcomfortablepatternsofconsciousness. ForBishop,Finnegans Wakebecomesavast nocturnal riddle, describing the "'freeley masoned' dreamwork of the night. " One must
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
145
abandon reading the Wake like a linear narrative; for Bishop, as well as for Joyce, "nobody's 'night-life' makes sense as a continuous whole. " Reading Finnegans Wake, for Bishop, does not involve shaping the night-world ofthe Wake into conscious rationality. We must, instead, transform our conscious perspective into one that recognizes the logic andthesignificanceofthenight-world. Critics,includingDongahueandAdamsintheir reviews ofBishop's book, would rather let the world of consciousness and of unconsciousness struggle against each other in the text, as if they were coequal, and betrayed nothing more than a play of perspectives, a play between night and day. 11 As Bishop realizes, however, Joyce has not created an equality between two states of consciousness, rather he describes the transformative chaos of a nocturnal reality in which we can find only the dim memory of consciousness. He understands the Wake as a kind
ofcounter-Freudian psychology.
In making sense o f such a claim I think one must understand the Wake as an
attempt to configure our involvement within language, biology, history, logic, desire, etc. , our form of life, within a complex shifting set of languages, interpretative frames, and states o f being, mind and grammar that do not function allegorically. Even mapping 'sense' and 'nonsense' onto 'consciousness' and 'unconsciousness' misses how we use all o f these words and how we inhabit any o f these worlds.
In such ignorance and chaos, the ordinary is not the world outside the window; the skeptical temptations prompting us to ask 'how does this mean that? ' or 'does this really mean that? ' or 'how do we know that? ' becomes 'How can I still be, or still think, or still experience, since this doesn't mean? '. In not knowing this I do not know myself.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Thisnightworldisfundamentallyasymmetricwithourwakingworld. Thenegationof our knowledge, meaning, identity does not create a context, a world in which further negation leads back to identity, knowledge, or meaning. If it did one should read the Wake as a mistranslated story or description or life, instead of a religious and a theological riddle. In other words, if it is mistranslated then the mistranslation itselfmeans nothing once the meaning has been recovered. But then why the mistranslation? In this sense Joyce is competing with Freud (and paralleling Wittgenstein within temporality), asking if this mistranslation functions within or as our biology, psychology, social world, history, or of physics, and if so then what does the mistranslation in itself mean? What does our distortions of sense mean as a part, a function, a temporary ground, a possibility, and obligation of our form of life? Such distortions describe a limit to what we can understand as meaningful and suggests a condition in which coherence and referentiality mutate or are lost in the "infrarational" o f this transformational grammar, whether it is a mistranslation ofourconsciousorunconsciouslifeorsomethingelse. Thenocturnalworldismorethan our dreams; it is our night-life as the limit of and limited by both our being (conscious or anything) and the world.
Inthisnot-lifewedonotrecognizeidentities. Ifourwakingmemorymeans anything it might suggest how we construct identities, including our own identity: our form of life is not determined by our common sight, nor our falling into confusion because we lose this agreement. This lack of agreement is the condition o f our being at this time. Our own being as something is not continuous, nor is the stability o f our agreement about what exists, for Aquinas, the dimension of being guaranteed by God, opposed to essence
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
or identity, which for Aquinas is variable depending on our perspective within a scale leading towards God. Extracting allegories, character and plot reads toward 'what something is'; reading back toward the ontological and intentional status of Wakean language pursues 'that something is. 'Finnegans Wake articulates and investigates the structural aspects of our own being, our nocturnal life, that finds its home, whose ordinary state is not doubting as such but the actual existing o f our person (whatever that is) within
the continual negation o f possibility and identity and ground, on a scale directed toward the unknowable.
The logic of the Wake, while appearing to be a masque of characters, points always to a single unconsciousness. Once we enter into the associative, non-narrative logic of the dream we find that any paragraph ofFinnegans Wake provides us "with a set of vectors that point to an absent content- 'the presence (of a curpse)' --into the 'eyewitless foggus' o f whose 'trapped head' the process o f reading the Evening World
leads"(315). The(un)consciousnessofour"humbptyhillhead,"our"onestable somebody" "aslip" in the text, as Joyce calls him, becomes the underlying organizational locus (a locus betrayed by absence, however, not presence) around which the text can be understood, and around which it was written.
I think that Bishop's presentation is convincing. All that I require here, however, is the acknowledgment of our inability to offer any interpretation about Finnegans Wake that provides an intentional object (existent or not) and at the same time provides the meaning o f the indeterminacy, nonsense, and mutations o f any particular word, phrase or sentence as essential to that intentional target. Wakean language remains radically
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
148
intentional. This intentionality, however, cannot articulate the content of its aboutness. We are left with the structure of intentionality without its object(s). In other words, the referential targets have been subtracted not only from the 'world' but from language, and leaves only an intentional structure. Freudian dream interpretation replaces these lost targets with a primal allegory. One could organize the intentionality of"nat language" by any number o f allegories. 12
I do not want to provide another allegory, but to continually turn around within the allegorical possibilities marked by 'the distance between mind and soul'. Such a turning around, while it will leave a tale, will not provide a description of the difference between the animate and inanimate (biology can do that), but will subtract the content from this distinction as a way o f highlighting the constituting o f this kind o f distinction as a particular kind o f limit. I do not think that the distinction between mind and body, consciousness and life, mind and soul, soul and God, human and animal, divinity and deity, animateandinanimateareallthesamedistinction. Theyareexamples(andinthisthey describeanaesthetic)ofatheologicalinhabitationoflanguage. Thistheology,inthis
case, however, must emerge from the difficulty o f describing our investments in language,
meaning and interpretation within the nomological boundaries described in science. Finnegans Wake and in a different way Philosophical Investigations correlate the limit between the animate human and the inanimate thing as a limit between sense and nonsense figured as the limits between interpretation, meaning, seeing, knowing, and process (being caused). These limits are not clear, in fact what counts as these limits is exactly what is at issue in building or modeling a mind. To triangulate the grammar of linguistic and
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
149
aesthetic meaning, the logic of the mind, and the theological description of being human cannot begin outside o f the problems o f language, literary texts, philosophies o f mind, or theologies. Theconfusionofdemandsandlogicsofthesepursuitscannotbeavoided,and while the clarity o f engineering is one o f the limits I am trying to approach, the work remains to make such clarity as a limit to being human amidst the claims of language, art, philosophy, science, and theology. There is no reason to think being within any limit of clarity involves being clear, or rather it is not clear what will count as clarity; My goal is
to think within, at and towards the limits ofmind and being articulated through the triangulation o f language, mind, and the enactment o f the totalities o f sentences, persons, worlds, and divinities (or let's say ultimate limits). Finnegans Wake involves exactly this kind oftriangulation. It would be a failure to synthesize the Wakes nonsense into sense or clarity or plots or characters and so on. But neither should we describe nonsense with nonsense. Translation and representation are not the point only because that is not the problem ofFinnegans Wake. The problem is instead the preservation and analysis (as a peculiar kind of self-reflection through the transformation of our reading into a thinking along the Wake) of the question 'why read? ' 'Why read' enacts the philosophical wonder
that anything exists as a choice embodied in our stance toward ourselves toward the world. Thisistheproblemofaestheticjustification.
InFinnegans Wakethetheologicaldemandofthetextisnotjusttoconstructan aesthetics within which it can be recognized as art nor to construct the context for any sentence to make sense. Both context and aesthetic assume that a language game or a set o f criteria or a stance can be constructed in which the text will make sense (or be
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
150
sensible). I think, for example, that this is the case for The Waste Land. Finnegans Wake, while it is not absolute nonsense, generates a theological stance (a kind o f theology without God). The demand is more like one for prayer. Could a prayer cause God to act? If a prayer reconstructs me and not God, opens me up to the possibilities described by our versions o f divinity, then how would I be constructed through a prayer towards the nonsense of the Wake and Investigations! Artificial Intelligence becomes a way of investigating the ways we can remake ourselves toward the ontological limits against which both texts operate (they both expose logical and aesthetic limits as functioning with ontological force).
Neither text defends anything like the assumptions of AI, or ofa computational model o f the mind (far from it in fact). The intentionality o f prayer, the theological demands o f the texts articulate the relation between how we function and why we function: the demand that the application of our ontological resources, as a way of determining how we enter into allegories, interpretations, meanings, and possibilities, the intentionality that they both continually destabilize. This destabilization opens us up to the demands o f the limits within which we live (and commit ourselves), and thus the destabilization (or play) cannot be an end in itself.
IfFinnegans Wake enacts the world ofan absent sleeper, then our failure to read backwards into his or her life or consciousness, into a mind that we would recognize as our own, forces us to place our mind, our life, as the intentional target o f the text. But thiswouldmeanthatwedonotunderstandourselves. Howcouldthisbeournight-life, our dreams, our absence? If we resist this move then why read the text? Before you'
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
151
answer that you will not, consider that in tempting us to stop reading so continually Joyce forces to the surface of every line Conrad's claim that for anything to be art it must justify itself in every line. Intentionality delimits in a negative beyond an absent dreamer, maybe a version of ourselves, through which we recreate ourselves as the target of its language, or thisintentionalitydevolvesintoastructurethatrequiresconstantjustification: intentional structure becomes a self-reflexive aesthetic, and thus an investigation ofmimesis itself, of
the kind o f realism described by Ulysses.
Thegrammarofthe Wake,therefore,functionsasasyntaxatthatextensionless
point that Wittgenstein articulated in the Tractatus as the "metaphysical I", the limit o f the world marked by "the fact that 'the world is my world'". This does not mean that the metaphysics ofthe Tractatus and ofthe Wake are the same. The shifting limits within the
Wake are more like the relation between language games and forms oflife in Philosophical Investigations. The structure o f intentionality in the Wake, however, is akintothekindoflimitdescribedintheTractatus. Themetaphysical'I'describesidentity as a kind of uniqueness or the point of independence that necessarily cannot be described within the world which is its vision. That is, it is shown by its configuration o f the world as its own, but it cannot see itselfonly its effect in how it sees the world. The 'I' cannot be pictured, as Wittgenstein suggests at 5. 6331, not even as the following:
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
152
The ellipse describes the world.
