Withinsleepwe lose our ability to posit
ourselves
as subjects (Gilson's role for being as existence), and thus we are submerged in an ontology, a universe whose opposing limit is the reality of consciousness.
Brett Bourbon - 1996 - Constructing a Replacement for the Soul
How can an emotional (or a social or historical) crisis take the
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? formoftheontologicalriddles: "Whatisreal? "or"AmIalive? " Insuchconfusion,ifwe all took notice o f what has passed, we might all be surprised that "death had undone so many" as if we had been surprised by someone turning on the lights.
The narrator asks, "Shall I at least set my lands in order? ", and then a voice concludes-* these ruins shore my ruins into a shore on which I sit asking shall I at least set my lands in order? What would it mean to set one's lands in order? In the third to last line o f the poem Eliot recalls Kyd's Spanish Tragedy as a fragment "shored against my ruins" : "Why then De fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe. " Eliot invests himself in these fragments as Hieronymo does when he pretends madness in order to avenge his son's murder. Hieronymowritesaplayinwhich,whileperformingoneoftheparts,hekillsthe murderer. If we must write a play, create an extraordinary context in order that we may act with a kind ofjustice (but if this is our play how can it be a justice for others? ), then morality, even o f a demented sort, requires the creation o f a supporting world, an ontology. If words are not binding then neither is the World; "These are the letters that all men refuse" in Karl Shapiro's moral "Alphabet". If one's fellow human beings seem not
to understand this alphabet, one might speak to God; Augustine asks, in his Confessions, "allow me to speak before your mercy, though I am but dust and ashes (Gen. 18: 27). Allow me to speak: for I am addressing your mercy, not a man who would laugh at me. Perhaps even you deride me (cf. Ps. 2: 4), but you will turn and have mercy on me (Jer. 12: 15)" [I. vi (9)]. Eliot reconstitutes this conversation through organizing his fragments around forms of authority--but the demand that leads to his response is not simply his gripe or his failure. The ontological riddles "what is real? " and "Am I alive? " act as the
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? demands of language to act as prayer, or as the way through which we might act or will or judge or entail obligation, speak our commitment, or be entitled or enabled through
language.
In Finnegans Wake Augustine's conversation with God is replaced with a
conversation with the missing matter ofa sleeping body and ofthe world (whose? ), and with a missing consciousness and meaning (again whose? ). 2 These two axes are something like Aquinas' division o f our mind into intellect and will. The night world reveals the telos ofthese two axes to be beyond, something like what K. Rahner calls in The Foundations ofChristian Faith a "holy Mystery", the 'asymptotic term' that "presents itselfto us in the mode ofwithdrawal, ofsilence, ofdistance, ofbeing always inexpressible, so that speaking of it, if it is to make sense, always requires listening to its silence"(69, 64). But again these 'asymptotic term[s]" are always directed simultaneously towards oneself and towards the world. I think these two directions should be expressed respectively as Augustinian and
Thomist theological descriptions of the intentionality of our language. For my purposes, here and now, I will only sketch these theological descriptions as seemingly opposing limits that Joyce twists into a new proximity, a new geometry crystallized out of "soundsense"(121. 15)or"sinse"(83. 12)or"sinns"(330. 18). InAugustinewefindan allegorical distension ofthe everyday into himselfand towards God, a collapse of metaphysics into confession. Aquinas inverts the implosive force of Augustine's formulation of the relation between the human and the divine into a hierarchy of shifting sets of ontological relations and identities moving toward Absolute Actuality. Finnegans
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? W ake writes out our ordinary experience o f the night as between these two points: "Is this space o f our couple o f hours too dimensional for you, temporiser? " (154. 25-26).
The Wake's syntax of nonsense, therefore, is, mirroring Ashberry's description of the temporal articulation of how we are:
"Only out of such 'perfectly useless concentration' can emerge the one thing that is useful for us" our coming to know ourselves as the necessarily inaccurate transcribers o f the life that is always on the point o f coming into being. " (67)3
The temporal physics of the Wake, the logic of succession organizing its words and grammars and stories, "under articles thirtynine ofthe reconstitution" (596. 09) (a remaking o f the world by remaking our language), under the pressure o f "sublumbunat[ion]" (607. 21) becomes metaphysics: we ask and are asked "Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? Its the same told of all. Many. " (18. 18- 20). This question can be retranslated into, How is that which exists put together such that it is, and such that it exists within the possibility that it can mean something, or how can we read anything least o f all what we all know or tell ourselves. "Its world" is the same as "the logos of somewome [women; womb] to that base anything" (298. 20), where "base anything" suggests a logarithmic base of infinite possibility (an inversion of Aquinas' Aristotelian vision of God as Absolute Act).
The Wake, the sleeper, Joyce, and any reader still awake are all the "simpletop dumbfool". . . holy mooxed and gaping up the wrong phace as if you was seeheeing the gheist that stays foreneast" (299. 13-16). This "wrong phace," very likely the sleeper's and our own, as part of a "Theoatre" (587. 08), pursues both the "Theoccupant that
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? RueandredfulandthewholeinhibitanceofNeuilands"(348. 14-16). ThepresenceofGod in his own dreadful script, recalling Augustine, that writes the inhabitants and inhibitions and repressions into whole new islands, New Ireland, new world, New Jerusalem. Such a pursuit places us all in "theoperil" (223. 28) "phac[ing]" with "[n]either a soul to be saved our a body to kicked" (298. 36) "the howtosayto itiswhatis hemustwhomust worden schall"(223. 27-28), the Wakean version o f God's "I am what I am. " Excavating this "fimdementiaUy theosophagusted" (610. 01) as a mind, the fundament o f its world, a "self- exiled in upon his ego" (189. 06), both god-like and god disgusted exposes the totality of what is through our moral stance toward the world, an investment in the relation between whatweareandwhatis. Thesubstanceofthistheology,however,isasmucha fundament than a foundation, the litterings of events, identities, phrases, desires, expectations etc. "matters that fall under the ban of our infrarational senses" (19. 36-20. 1). In this excavation I will limit myselfto "[e]xpatiat[ing] then how much times we live in" (55. 04), to exploring what is at stake in such a theology through how the possibilities of being anything are enacted through the Wakecm grammar distorting the relation between
before and after.
Augustine in his Confessions examines his soul, as that which is "aware of intervals
of time", in order to determine the measure of the present. He reduces, in a kind of infinite regression, one hundred years to a year, a year to a month, a month to a day, a day to an hour, an hour to a durationless moment no longer "divisible into past and future. " Time can only be constituted as existing as a form o f being (as real) in the present, and yet this present cannot be measured or understood through an analogy with space: "the
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? present occupies no space. " Augustine has reduced what McTaggert called a B-series, a timeline o f befores and afters, to something like his A-series, or rather the existential condition o f the "now" characterized as a form o f being (and thus a durationless point). Each series constitutes different language games What do we measure when we think we are measuring or comparing longer and shorter times past, or imagining times that will be? We are on the edge of subliming our language into metaphysics. Augustine, however, follows this reasoning into the soul to reach something like Plotinus' definition o f time "as the Life ofthe Soul in movement as it passes from one stage ofact or experience to another"[3. 7. 11], If we reimagine the soul as our form of life and expand experience into the complex interactions between language games this is not unlike how time is exposed in
Wittgenstein's PhilosophicalInvestigations. Because ofhis separation between the grammatical and the psychological, however, time is not hypostasized into a metaphysical category. 4 For Augustine, if time is the measure o f "the present consciousness, not the stream of past events which have caused it" (Xl. xxix [39]), then the way in and through which we articulate time in our everyday practices constructs our relation with the world and its passing as our conscious mind.
Time gets broken into complex distensions of expectation, attention and remembrance. This distension, a version of which is at work in the interaction between language games in Investigations, fragments the mind, so that Augustine is always faced with losing himself:
. . . I am scattered in times whose order I do not understand. The storms of incoherent events tear to pieces my thoughts, the inmost entrails of my soul, until
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? that day when, purified and molten by the fire ofyour love, I flow together to
merge into you. (XI. xxxi [41])
Joyce transforms and inverts this plea to God for integration into a riddle o f being and remaining in what he calls "sollemn nupitalism". "Sollemn" contains the roots "Soil" and "Sol", which mean respectively to make foul, defile, and the sun united as the foul and the sublime as the everyday 'soul'. What Augustine calls the "terror and love" of God's word and the distension o f the self as time becomes for Joyce the "Pluralbilities" o f "the one subtrance o f a streamsbecoming" (FW597. 07-08). Thus we can enter into Joyce's construction of our moral and existential disintegration as and mapped into the night through two versions of what he calls "the first riddle of the universe":
the first riddle ofthe universe: asking, when is a man not a man? . . --all give up? ; when he is a . . . Sham (170. 3-24).
The first and last rittlerattle o f the anniverse; when is a nam nought a nam whenas it is a. Watch! (607. 10-12).
"Whenas",notwhereas, this"nam",aninvertedman,aname,an"Iamnot"inarchaic English, a sin in Cornish, "time" ("an am") and "life" or "soul" ("anam") in Irish, is a watch, ticking away this last rittlerattle of "anniverse". The soul and time are not only a watch, in this both a rhythm and a dumbshow, but the negation and fragmentation o f our being human into versions of ourselves, of ourselves a sham (originally a fraudulent trick, and therefore an imposture cognate with shame, both related to the Gothic ga-hamon, to dress [to cover oneself]). This is as if someone becomes themselves a whim, (Old Norse) "to let one's eyes wander" from oneself. Finnegans Wake makes sham and whim cognate,
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? or rather they both mark the distensions of "a nam" along a single axis in two directions. One becomes a whim as part o f a whole, from the perspective o f God, as one becomes ones own writing, and thus read as if without depth, or a sham in the interactions with others and with oneself--one's other shams.
The Wake's deconstruction of reality is the simultaneous destruction of identity and the connections between "things," in a reality which is "moving and changing every part of the time"(l 18. 22). The words o f the Wake lose their source and their end, and exist as constant becomings of meaning, which never coalesce into a determinate identity of meaning. Thus,
-Which was said by whem to whom?
--It wham. But whim I can't remember. --Fantsy! funtasyonfantasy,amnaesfintasies! (493. 16-18)
The first question begins by asking for the identity of a particular word: it asks "which," implying a single word among many. The next part o f the question, "by whem," is derived from "when" and the German "wem," meaning 'whom". Thus, "by whem to whom" asks for the identity of the speaker and the person spoken to, and for the time at which the word was spoken. This Word lacks any relationship to time or being, for the word is only fantasy,fancy. Oritis"Vanitas,vanitasvanitatum,omnisvanitias. " Asitisemptyof meaning and identity, it has no actuality ofbeing. Yet in the river, L. amnis, in which it swims, [by whem (by swim) it wham (swam) but whim (swim)] it exists as fintasy, a wake on the water, caused by the fin of the empty word. This is the word as fish, another
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? version o f Christ, transposed into (w)hem (him) whom (wh)am (wh)im-- or "him whom am I'm", "I am who I am": self-reflection, as a question (whom? ) and a statement ("It wham"--i[']m), as the surface of language. This statement moves from an "I am" transposed into third person (it), the voice o f the world, answered by "but whim, and thereforeoutsideofknowing,representation,memory,possession: "ButwhimIcan't remember. " "It wham . . . But [by] whim" is being in the world without possessing the world as one's own, but not being possessed by it either. Even if we deny any transitive force in this statement, it merges the existential use o f "to be" with predication. This confusion constructs a subject: what exists, what swam or wham? The subject we discover is already asking, "Am I an it or an I, a him or a me? " Person becomes as unclear as verb. Do we ask "It wham when? yesterday? , or where? to the store? with what? its fins? , etc. "? Nothing, let alone no one, can answer. Without any possibility of answering, by the very force o f nonsense the observation or exclamation o f "It wham" can not be determined to be either transitive or intransitive. We read the intentional force o f the language but without picking out a target, without attaching it to a subject. This intentional force moves forward within another register, the register o f whim, that picks outourdemandformeaningascomical. Butthefinalexclamationof"fintasies"is followed by "And there is nihil nuder under the clothing moon. " We cannot escape being
the butt o f the joke, we cannot remain neutral or grammatically indefinite (And there is nothing neuter). And yet there is nothing under the clothing, no essence that can be graspedoutsideofourgrammar. Allofourlanguagebecomes"whim"inwhichwe construct the sentences, through "Fantsy" or imagination, in which any version of any
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? word will have meaning. How our intentionality attaches to the world functions through the demand that there be a world, and thus that there be a world which can be lost: a God dies everynight and continually within our language.
This disengaged intentionality describes the economy between consciousness and unconsciousnessinsleep: anoldstoryabouthowwegetoutsideofourselves. M. Marcovich, in his article on Heraclitus in Realencyclopadie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, reconstructs a fragment found in Clement's Stromateis (3. 21. 1) as "Death is what we see when awake, and what we see when asleep is waking reality (urtap). "5 The allegorical shifting and borrowing between 'death', 'sleep', 'being awake', and 'waking reality' played out in Finnegans Wake works according to a distorted logic of opposition similar to that organizing this fragment. Perception is determined by the limit of the state one is in, either awake or asleep. These states are asymmetric: death, not sleep, marks the limit of consciousness, which is identified as what we possess as ourselves. Sleep, however, is limited not by wakefulness itself (how would we know the
difference? ), but by the relatively more ordered ontology excluded as the world presenting itselfto (and through) consciousness. The asymmetry between wakefulness and sleep implies that sleep derives from wakefulness, presupposes the state of being awake in a way that being conscious does not imply or derive from being asleep. Seemingly it is death, as thelimitofconsciousness,thatimpliesorderivesfromconsciousness.
Withinsleepwe lose our ability to posit ourselves as subjects (Gilson's role for being as existence), and thus we are submerged in an ontology, a universe whose opposing limit is the reality of consciousness.
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? Awake we gain the world because we can posit it as real and find ourselves within it, as ours to be lost, and thus threatened by death. Sleep functions as both an analogy for our waking state (it is our experience) but also as an image or mock experience of death. Heraclitus in order to show how sleep becomes a way into death shifts our mode of inhabiting the night from seeing (opeopev) to touching, affecting (owtxsxai):
A person in [the] night kindles (owtxexai) a light for himself, since his vision has been extinguished. In his sleep he touches (artxsxai) that which is dead, though [himself] alive, [and] when awake touches (artxexai) that which sleeps. 6
We have shifted from the mind to the body, looking for how we are limited as substance, as stuff and such. The first fragment writes us as a limit of death, wakefulness is more fully a ground for our being, and thus its limit is not sleep, but death; here death is written as thelimitofourbeingawakeandasleep. Thesymmetryofthisformulationdescribesthe limits o f what we are as something more like the grammatical limits Wittgenstein invokes in the Tractatus: "The limits of my language means the limits of my world" (5. 6). My language and my world limit me, I do not limit them. Rather I enact and embody them as mine. Thesymmetrybetweenlanguageandworld,betweendeathand/orsleepandour living can only be maintained if we ignore the way they posit us as subjects determined by theselimits. Theselimitsare,however,alwayslimitsorganizedaroundan'I',asaformal limitwithoutcontent. ThisT,aswhatisatstakebothwithinandastheselimits, constructs a fundamental asymmetry between all posited states o f being.
Thetheologyofdeath,forexample, inTheEgyptianBookoftheDead, becomes following this analogy in the Wake, a theology of sleep, where HCE, the erstwhile male
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? hero, "the first pharaoh Humpheres Cheops Exarchas . . . subjected to the horrors of the premier terror of Errorland" and its "nekropolitan nights" (62. 21-25). When we are lost to the world we are limited by that very loss; when we regain the world we find that we have actually regained ourselves as that which is to be limited or lost. To fall asleep is thus to become a metaphysician: we learn every night that the application o f criteria determines what counts as real, and that these criteria as they construct an ontology construct ourselves as real. What is made real here? Not a 'thing' at all, but consciousness, mind, unconsciousness, meaning, or whatever other vague term or description of the mental stances that allow the intentionality of our language to pick out both something in the 'world' and 'ourselves'. The limits of our states of consciousness are thus death and waking reality; sleep lies twisted behind these, limited by the others but not limiting them.
The relationship between these limits expresses itself through what we sometimes call time. If we explain these relations as a function of changes between states, we find ourselveswithsomethinglikeAristotle'scharacterizationoftimeinthePhysics. Aristotle argues that time requires a stable substratum in relation to which change can become apparent: [time is seen to exist only as an effect]. This stability is built into the physics of existence by defining time as "not number with which we count but the number o f things which are counted"(Phys. 220h. 8). Finnegans Wake is a kind of commentary on this hypostatizing o f identity as the criterion o f being within time. This commentary constructs a non-representational metaphysics in order to embed minding "in the Nichtian glossery
which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues this is nat language at any sinse of
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? the world . . . in the lexinction oflife. . . this daylit dielate night ofnights" (83. 10-27). How does one become oneself, let alone into the world or into marriage or friendship, if time takes it all away? Aristotle says,
In time all things come into being and pass away; for which reason some called it the wisest o f all things, but the Pythagorean Paron called it the most stupid, because in it we also forget; and his was the truer view. It is clear then that it must be in itself. . . the condition ofdestruction rather than ofcoming into being (for change, in itself makes things depart from their former condition), and only incidentally o f coming into being, and o f being. (Pfrys. 222b. 17-23)
Before this time peal we lie "lossassinated by summan" (241. 02), adding someman or something into someman(thing), "in the search for love of knowledge through the comprehension o f the unity in altruism through stupefaction"(604. 33), a search, the first on a list, ending with "death and life are these" (605. 03). One cannot escape either counting or summan or stupe/acrion (is this the state o f being dead to the world or being defined as a fact? ): what do the 'facts' in our sleep point to?
Finnegans Wake attempts to rediscover the wisdom o f time without forgetting our losses, turn counting into becoming, "for if we look at it verbally perhaps there is no true noun in active nature where every bally being-please read this mufto--is becoming in its owntowneyeball"(523. 10-12). ConvertingAristotleintothe"sinseoftheworld" means converting Aristotle into Augustine and Aquinas and then both of them into Anna Livia
Plurabellae (ALP) and ALP into her mate H. C. Earwicker (HCE) and HCE into his sons Shem the penman into Shaun the spaceman and into their sister Issy (whatever she might
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? seeasherself)andsoonintoathousandandonevisages,etc. Thesevoicesand authorities, however, do not organize a Waste Land. What we count as our becoming must include our investment in language as under threat of nonsense, of our own loss and becoming through language: "Why, wonder o f wenchalows, what o szeszame opem, v doer s t doing? " (333. 01-02): why would meaning get mapped onto sex? and throughout it all our world waxed and waned. This language is a provocation to ask and an invocation in asking how to invest, embody, represent, describe, express, call, inhabit, project, exchange, determine oneself in language? What limit is there to these verbs?
10. 2 "aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues"
The "lexinction o f life" at night and in ourselves and the logical grammar providing its purchase on ourselves and the world will seem in the Wake a picture of
every person, place and thing in the chaosmos o f Alle anyway connected with the gobblydumped turkey as moving and changing every part of the time: the travelling inkhom (possibly pot), the hare and turtle pen and paper, the continually more and less intermisunderstanding minds ofthe anticollaborators, the as time went on as it will variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changably meaning vocable scriptsigns. (118. 21-28; underline added).
The darkened world ofthe Wake blurs the meanings ofwords into "three score and ten toptypsical readiongs" (20. 15), and in so doing fades the defined limits o f meaning associated with a particular identity. The primal, undifferentiated darkness of the unconscious rises up and clouds the "glosses" (304. F3) of reason, of knowledge and of
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? definition: "mayhisforeheadbedarkenedwithmudwhowouldsunder! ",andinthis divide into identities (20. 16). Time as number counts as reading, except when both we and language fall asleep, when what we mean to ourselves falls out of any functional unity (consciousness) and into a riddle (not even a question mark).
The riddle setting the world into "chaosmos" is between the "hare and the turtle pen" racing across the paper, the substratum in relation to which change, or rather the words become visible. The between, the beginning and the end, from which and toward which the hare and turtle whirl along describes an infinite regress as the words or the meaning before us "wham. . . [b]ut whim", an interpretive gap, a "fantsy", between us and the text that frustrates any seemingly ordinary understanding of a sentence or the book.
The force ofZeno's paradox ofthe hare and rabbit running themselves into infinities is not simply logical (for the paradoxes can be made to disappear). The paradox embodies our necessary commitment to forms of differentiated identity (or grammatical distinctions), which we understand as descriptions of the forms determining our experience, our very real sense oftime as loss and thus as unwisdom, that marks the emotional, social, and metaphysical boundaries between land and sea, ourselves and others, and the past and present articulated in The Waste Land. In that world the question of time can be posed as How does a moment and an identityjump from itself into being something else? The gap between two moments, between two identities, must be built in
the substanceless action of becoming, through which being reaches beyond itself. Within the Christian pattern o f creation being generates becoming in order to conserve identity as the fundamental ontological unit. In the Wake Joyce inverts this relationship, such that
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? being, the substance of one's own identity, one's own body, "by its corrosive sublimation" becomes "one continuous present tense integument" (185-86. 36-01): being sublimed into the ordinary, into the body lost in sleep which is the mind lost in time. Joyce immersed himself in the intangible "now," in which all things take place. This "now" is the gap between identities; it is the night time "hole affair" ofFinnegans Wake: the "lapses lequou asousiated with the royal gorge"( 151. 28-9). One o f the central mysteries within this "seemetary" of the night is not only how the "trapped head" pulls himselfinto the world of consciousness, but analogously how and why identities are created within this flux o f the present; what is the mechanism of movement from identity to identity, the movement, which Aristotle defines as time, from before to after? In this other people offer themselves not only as limits to our own desires, power, identity, but as versions of our own unconscious.
In the face o f this loss, this "noughttime", Finnegans Wake demands from us a theology,asifthenothingnessdemandedofGodcreation. Theologicalexegesisis predicated on defining what are essentially ontological relationships, the most fundamental ofwhich is the relationship between being and becoming inscribed within conceptions of creation. Change within these conceptions, to the degree that they can be translated into something like Zeno's paradoxes, functions through the transformation o f one moment, one identity, into another. Matter within the Wake becomes "Sure, what is it on the whole only holes tied together. . (434. 21). Matter as a set ofpoints or identities is negated in its substance but not in its form. Why only this? The logic of negation configures matter,
waking life, as the limit of our noughttime experience, a kind of double negative that
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? foregrounds form over matter or content. This is a way o f etching time into language: "Signs are on o f a mere by token that wills still to be becoming upon this there once a here was world" (608. 26; underline added). This sign (what sign? ) is written on and out o f a whim ("are on of a mere": contingent, accidental), by God I want to say, but only by another token, a sign, "by token". "Signs . . . by tokens" will becoming still: the hypostasis o f a moment that we all can now share, point to as "this there" that was once a "here",aworld. Onecancallthistheproblemofself-reflection,representation,or presence. But how do these signs "will"? These "signs", 'by token" defined, seem animate, or rather conscious of choices which one can will. Their will is directed against the loss o f a world: a recognition that the contingency o f here, not simply in Hegel's sense ofa vanishing incompleteness, but in our continuous possession of"a here" that shape signs not as representations, but as forms and modes o f willing. Will in this sense is not ours, but always a world's, or let's say an instantiation of possession or investment within an ontologic in which we find ourselves--our world.
This is in many ways Augustine's insight, that the metaphysical import o f Christian theology, through the identity and creative power of God, does not articulate 'what is' as being of the sort that can be represented, as things or planets or people, but as being as a kind o f willing. When Joyce rewrites signs as forms o f a will (whose will remains a question), he links the deontic (obligation and entitlement) with the alethic (necessary and the possible) aspects oflanguage (as all forms ofwilling, being willed, requiring or allowing willing) with the "mere. . . here", the ordinary shams or whims ofour being not ourselves and the world not being the world (of at least a moment ago). Whose to say
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? whether this is an allegory of our waking life or our sleeping life? The rhyming "mere . . . there . . . here" enacts both how a mirror makes here or there a there o r here and the "soundsense"ofthesea,orsomethinglike"Oed'undleerdasMeer". Thesemeanings describe a boundary (arch, mere), a margin between land and water, drawing its own signs on itself. But what have we gained by marking the "here" as a "mere", a part, a sham, "by token," built or reflected as a will as and on the flowing ocean? To talk of being as becoming has little force to shape our understanding unless we can commit ourselves to such a mere (mirror) metaphysical fantasy, as if this fantasy functions as an expression of what exists for us and as ourselves in the way that Gilson argues that the primary function o f "to be" is to act as an existential verb asserting "X exists, is real" :
Que Ton dise il est, il existe, ou il y a, le sens reste le meme. Toutes ces formules signifient Taction premiere que puisse exercer un sujet. Premiere, elle Test en eflfet, puisque, sans elle, il n'y' aurait pas de sujet. (L 'etre et I'essence, 275).
What does Finnegans Wake pose as its subject? Whose or what will is articulated as its signs?
One can claim with some justice that Finnegans Wake describes not a subject, but 'the creative becoming o f being as a continuous becoming', and yet such a claim does not mean anything to us. If this claim is true, it cannot be true in this form, it cannot mean as anything within the grammar of what we mean when we say "I'll see you tomorrow. " The differenceliesinhowweinvestourselvesinthesetwostatements. Wecannotinvest ourselves at all in a claim about the Wake's metaphysics unless we recognize it as something like our world. And yet everything in the text resists such a recognition. When
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? we enter Finnegans Wake we enter the limit of how things and words matter to us, both in their substance and significance: "propounded for cyclological, is, studding sail once more, jibsheets and royals, in the semblance of the substance for the membrance of the umbrance" (220. 30). The "cyclology" describes Vico's cyclic model of history that Joyce uses to structure the Wake. This cyclic history wedded to logic and the following "is" reduces the circle into a tautology, where the beginning is the end. The "semblance of substance" that confronts us in our dreaming heads articulates as real our memory o f the shadows (umbrance) o f the past cycling into the future. Our nocturnal states expose our existing but not as ourselves, not as or in relation to substance, but within fantasies and nothings. The non-existent past and future, one could even call them memories and desires, constitute the durationless insubstantial present that opens up the possibility of substanceinourconsciousworld. Thus,the'cyclological"turningsofourmindfollow "heliotropically noughttime" (349. 7), "a slip of the time between a date and a ghostmark" [473. 8], "seeking spoor through the deep timefield" (475. 24) in order that "we may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we're presurely destined to be odd's without ends" (455. 16).
Entering into our mind, which is most fully done when asleep, dissolves matter, and mattering, into the possibility "[ifs"] of matter and mattering within time, both experienced and measured, as the trace limits of"odd's without ends: "Odd's", or odd is as odd does, or marked out as unique, as a singular identity, but without ends. Being "without ends" is what Joyce calls elsewhen in the Wake "Art: the imperfect subjunctive", a future constructed our of an unfinished past, but, therefore, not in relation
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? toobjects,whichdonotexistwithinthefuturenow. Thusourverybeingisconstructed out of and as a future, at this point, a collection of "ifs" marking out a unique moment. Odd is without ends is also odd without evens, a way of counting to infinity with half a deck, and in this an imperfect subjunctive. This counting o f number is what Aristotle called time (Phys. 4. 14). Numbers cannot be understood to be odd separate from the concept of even. The odd numbers, however, measure the absent even. One might call this a music, counting silences as Augustine does: "What happens when we measure silences and say that a given silence lasted as long as a given sound? " (Conf. Xl. xxix [39]). How can we compare nothing to something? Both Joyce and Augustine pursue this seeming nothing in and as Soul, something like a confession of sin in order to find
goodness. Such oddness without end describes the interpretative "cyclologic" animating the Wake and any reading of it or any phrase within it. How to recognize our being "without ends" when we "phace", face and phase into, nothingness in sleep and in death, and even the temptations to both the blankness o f nonsense and the "tootoological" emptiness of sense, is another way of answering a riddle in which one finds oneself strung out as both a sham and a whim.
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? formoftheontologicalriddles: "Whatisreal? "or"AmIalive? " Insuchconfusion,ifwe all took notice o f what has passed, we might all be surprised that "death had undone so many" as if we had been surprised by someone turning on the lights.
The narrator asks, "Shall I at least set my lands in order? ", and then a voice concludes-* these ruins shore my ruins into a shore on which I sit asking shall I at least set my lands in order? What would it mean to set one's lands in order? In the third to last line o f the poem Eliot recalls Kyd's Spanish Tragedy as a fragment "shored against my ruins" : "Why then De fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe. " Eliot invests himself in these fragments as Hieronymo does when he pretends madness in order to avenge his son's murder. Hieronymowritesaplayinwhich,whileperformingoneoftheparts,hekillsthe murderer. If we must write a play, create an extraordinary context in order that we may act with a kind ofjustice (but if this is our play how can it be a justice for others? ), then morality, even o f a demented sort, requires the creation o f a supporting world, an ontology. If words are not binding then neither is the World; "These are the letters that all men refuse" in Karl Shapiro's moral "Alphabet". If one's fellow human beings seem not
to understand this alphabet, one might speak to God; Augustine asks, in his Confessions, "allow me to speak before your mercy, though I am but dust and ashes (Gen. 18: 27). Allow me to speak: for I am addressing your mercy, not a man who would laugh at me. Perhaps even you deride me (cf. Ps. 2: 4), but you will turn and have mercy on me (Jer. 12: 15)" [I. vi (9)]. Eliot reconstitutes this conversation through organizing his fragments around forms of authority--but the demand that leads to his response is not simply his gripe or his failure. The ontological riddles "what is real? " and "Am I alive? " act as the
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? demands of language to act as prayer, or as the way through which we might act or will or judge or entail obligation, speak our commitment, or be entitled or enabled through
language.
In Finnegans Wake Augustine's conversation with God is replaced with a
conversation with the missing matter ofa sleeping body and ofthe world (whose? ), and with a missing consciousness and meaning (again whose? ). 2 These two axes are something like Aquinas' division o f our mind into intellect and will. The night world reveals the telos ofthese two axes to be beyond, something like what K. Rahner calls in The Foundations ofChristian Faith a "holy Mystery", the 'asymptotic term' that "presents itselfto us in the mode ofwithdrawal, ofsilence, ofdistance, ofbeing always inexpressible, so that speaking of it, if it is to make sense, always requires listening to its silence"(69, 64). But again these 'asymptotic term[s]" are always directed simultaneously towards oneself and towards the world. I think these two directions should be expressed respectively as Augustinian and
Thomist theological descriptions of the intentionality of our language. For my purposes, here and now, I will only sketch these theological descriptions as seemingly opposing limits that Joyce twists into a new proximity, a new geometry crystallized out of "soundsense"(121. 15)or"sinse"(83. 12)or"sinns"(330. 18). InAugustinewefindan allegorical distension ofthe everyday into himselfand towards God, a collapse of metaphysics into confession. Aquinas inverts the implosive force of Augustine's formulation of the relation between the human and the divine into a hierarchy of shifting sets of ontological relations and identities moving toward Absolute Actuality. Finnegans
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? W ake writes out our ordinary experience o f the night as between these two points: "Is this space o f our couple o f hours too dimensional for you, temporiser? " (154. 25-26).
The Wake's syntax of nonsense, therefore, is, mirroring Ashberry's description of the temporal articulation of how we are:
"Only out of such 'perfectly useless concentration' can emerge the one thing that is useful for us" our coming to know ourselves as the necessarily inaccurate transcribers o f the life that is always on the point o f coming into being. " (67)3
The temporal physics of the Wake, the logic of succession organizing its words and grammars and stories, "under articles thirtynine ofthe reconstitution" (596. 09) (a remaking o f the world by remaking our language), under the pressure o f "sublumbunat[ion]" (607. 21) becomes metaphysics: we ask and are asked "Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? Its the same told of all. Many. " (18. 18- 20). This question can be retranslated into, How is that which exists put together such that it is, and such that it exists within the possibility that it can mean something, or how can we read anything least o f all what we all know or tell ourselves. "Its world" is the same as "the logos of somewome [women; womb] to that base anything" (298. 20), where "base anything" suggests a logarithmic base of infinite possibility (an inversion of Aquinas' Aristotelian vision of God as Absolute Act).
The Wake, the sleeper, Joyce, and any reader still awake are all the "simpletop dumbfool". . . holy mooxed and gaping up the wrong phace as if you was seeheeing the gheist that stays foreneast" (299. 13-16). This "wrong phace," very likely the sleeper's and our own, as part of a "Theoatre" (587. 08), pursues both the "Theoccupant that
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? RueandredfulandthewholeinhibitanceofNeuilands"(348. 14-16). ThepresenceofGod in his own dreadful script, recalling Augustine, that writes the inhabitants and inhibitions and repressions into whole new islands, New Ireland, new world, New Jerusalem. Such a pursuit places us all in "theoperil" (223. 28) "phac[ing]" with "[n]either a soul to be saved our a body to kicked" (298. 36) "the howtosayto itiswhatis hemustwhomust worden schall"(223. 27-28), the Wakean version o f God's "I am what I am. " Excavating this "fimdementiaUy theosophagusted" (610. 01) as a mind, the fundament o f its world, a "self- exiled in upon his ego" (189. 06), both god-like and god disgusted exposes the totality of what is through our moral stance toward the world, an investment in the relation between whatweareandwhatis. Thesubstanceofthistheology,however,isasmucha fundament than a foundation, the litterings of events, identities, phrases, desires, expectations etc. "matters that fall under the ban of our infrarational senses" (19. 36-20. 1). In this excavation I will limit myselfto "[e]xpatiat[ing] then how much times we live in" (55. 04), to exploring what is at stake in such a theology through how the possibilities of being anything are enacted through the Wakecm grammar distorting the relation between
before and after.
Augustine in his Confessions examines his soul, as that which is "aware of intervals
of time", in order to determine the measure of the present. He reduces, in a kind of infinite regression, one hundred years to a year, a year to a month, a month to a day, a day to an hour, an hour to a durationless moment no longer "divisible into past and future. " Time can only be constituted as existing as a form o f being (as real) in the present, and yet this present cannot be measured or understood through an analogy with space: "the
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? present occupies no space. " Augustine has reduced what McTaggert called a B-series, a timeline o f befores and afters, to something like his A-series, or rather the existential condition o f the "now" characterized as a form o f being (and thus a durationless point). Each series constitutes different language games What do we measure when we think we are measuring or comparing longer and shorter times past, or imagining times that will be? We are on the edge of subliming our language into metaphysics. Augustine, however, follows this reasoning into the soul to reach something like Plotinus' definition o f time "as the Life ofthe Soul in movement as it passes from one stage ofact or experience to another"[3. 7. 11], If we reimagine the soul as our form of life and expand experience into the complex interactions between language games this is not unlike how time is exposed in
Wittgenstein's PhilosophicalInvestigations. Because ofhis separation between the grammatical and the psychological, however, time is not hypostasized into a metaphysical category. 4 For Augustine, if time is the measure o f "the present consciousness, not the stream of past events which have caused it" (Xl. xxix [39]), then the way in and through which we articulate time in our everyday practices constructs our relation with the world and its passing as our conscious mind.
Time gets broken into complex distensions of expectation, attention and remembrance. This distension, a version of which is at work in the interaction between language games in Investigations, fragments the mind, so that Augustine is always faced with losing himself:
. . . I am scattered in times whose order I do not understand. The storms of incoherent events tear to pieces my thoughts, the inmost entrails of my soul, until
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? that day when, purified and molten by the fire ofyour love, I flow together to
merge into you. (XI. xxxi [41])
Joyce transforms and inverts this plea to God for integration into a riddle o f being and remaining in what he calls "sollemn nupitalism". "Sollemn" contains the roots "Soil" and "Sol", which mean respectively to make foul, defile, and the sun united as the foul and the sublime as the everyday 'soul'. What Augustine calls the "terror and love" of God's word and the distension o f the self as time becomes for Joyce the "Pluralbilities" o f "the one subtrance o f a streamsbecoming" (FW597. 07-08). Thus we can enter into Joyce's construction of our moral and existential disintegration as and mapped into the night through two versions of what he calls "the first riddle of the universe":
the first riddle ofthe universe: asking, when is a man not a man? . . --all give up? ; when he is a . . . Sham (170. 3-24).
The first and last rittlerattle o f the anniverse; when is a nam nought a nam whenas it is a. Watch! (607. 10-12).
"Whenas",notwhereas, this"nam",aninvertedman,aname,an"Iamnot"inarchaic English, a sin in Cornish, "time" ("an am") and "life" or "soul" ("anam") in Irish, is a watch, ticking away this last rittlerattle of "anniverse". The soul and time are not only a watch, in this both a rhythm and a dumbshow, but the negation and fragmentation o f our being human into versions of ourselves, of ourselves a sham (originally a fraudulent trick, and therefore an imposture cognate with shame, both related to the Gothic ga-hamon, to dress [to cover oneself]). This is as if someone becomes themselves a whim, (Old Norse) "to let one's eyes wander" from oneself. Finnegans Wake makes sham and whim cognate,
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? or rather they both mark the distensions of "a nam" along a single axis in two directions. One becomes a whim as part o f a whole, from the perspective o f God, as one becomes ones own writing, and thus read as if without depth, or a sham in the interactions with others and with oneself--one's other shams.
The Wake's deconstruction of reality is the simultaneous destruction of identity and the connections between "things," in a reality which is "moving and changing every part of the time"(l 18. 22). The words o f the Wake lose their source and their end, and exist as constant becomings of meaning, which never coalesce into a determinate identity of meaning. Thus,
-Which was said by whem to whom?
--It wham. But whim I can't remember. --Fantsy! funtasyonfantasy,amnaesfintasies! (493. 16-18)
The first question begins by asking for the identity of a particular word: it asks "which," implying a single word among many. The next part o f the question, "by whem," is derived from "when" and the German "wem," meaning 'whom". Thus, "by whem to whom" asks for the identity of the speaker and the person spoken to, and for the time at which the word was spoken. This Word lacks any relationship to time or being, for the word is only fantasy,fancy. Oritis"Vanitas,vanitasvanitatum,omnisvanitias. " Asitisemptyof meaning and identity, it has no actuality ofbeing. Yet in the river, L. amnis, in which it swims, [by whem (by swim) it wham (swam) but whim (swim)] it exists as fintasy, a wake on the water, caused by the fin of the empty word. This is the word as fish, another
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? version o f Christ, transposed into (w)hem (him) whom (wh)am (wh)im-- or "him whom am I'm", "I am who I am": self-reflection, as a question (whom? ) and a statement ("It wham"--i[']m), as the surface of language. This statement moves from an "I am" transposed into third person (it), the voice o f the world, answered by "but whim, and thereforeoutsideofknowing,representation,memory,possession: "ButwhimIcan't remember. " "It wham . . . But [by] whim" is being in the world without possessing the world as one's own, but not being possessed by it either. Even if we deny any transitive force in this statement, it merges the existential use o f "to be" with predication. This confusion constructs a subject: what exists, what swam or wham? The subject we discover is already asking, "Am I an it or an I, a him or a me? " Person becomes as unclear as verb. Do we ask "It wham when? yesterday? , or where? to the store? with what? its fins? , etc. "? Nothing, let alone no one, can answer. Without any possibility of answering, by the very force o f nonsense the observation or exclamation o f "It wham" can not be determined to be either transitive or intransitive. We read the intentional force o f the language but without picking out a target, without attaching it to a subject. This intentional force moves forward within another register, the register o f whim, that picks outourdemandformeaningascomical. Butthefinalexclamationof"fintasies"is followed by "And there is nihil nuder under the clothing moon. " We cannot escape being
the butt o f the joke, we cannot remain neutral or grammatically indefinite (And there is nothing neuter). And yet there is nothing under the clothing, no essence that can be graspedoutsideofourgrammar. Allofourlanguagebecomes"whim"inwhichwe construct the sentences, through "Fantsy" or imagination, in which any version of any
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? word will have meaning. How our intentionality attaches to the world functions through the demand that there be a world, and thus that there be a world which can be lost: a God dies everynight and continually within our language.
This disengaged intentionality describes the economy between consciousness and unconsciousnessinsleep: anoldstoryabouthowwegetoutsideofourselves. M. Marcovich, in his article on Heraclitus in Realencyclopadie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, reconstructs a fragment found in Clement's Stromateis (3. 21. 1) as "Death is what we see when awake, and what we see when asleep is waking reality (urtap). "5 The allegorical shifting and borrowing between 'death', 'sleep', 'being awake', and 'waking reality' played out in Finnegans Wake works according to a distorted logic of opposition similar to that organizing this fragment. Perception is determined by the limit of the state one is in, either awake or asleep. These states are asymmetric: death, not sleep, marks the limit of consciousness, which is identified as what we possess as ourselves. Sleep, however, is limited not by wakefulness itself (how would we know the
difference? ), but by the relatively more ordered ontology excluded as the world presenting itselfto (and through) consciousness. The asymmetry between wakefulness and sleep implies that sleep derives from wakefulness, presupposes the state of being awake in a way that being conscious does not imply or derive from being asleep. Seemingly it is death, as thelimitofconsciousness,thatimpliesorderivesfromconsciousness.
Withinsleepwe lose our ability to posit ourselves as subjects (Gilson's role for being as existence), and thus we are submerged in an ontology, a universe whose opposing limit is the reality of consciousness.
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? Awake we gain the world because we can posit it as real and find ourselves within it, as ours to be lost, and thus threatened by death. Sleep functions as both an analogy for our waking state (it is our experience) but also as an image or mock experience of death. Heraclitus in order to show how sleep becomes a way into death shifts our mode of inhabiting the night from seeing (opeopev) to touching, affecting (owtxsxai):
A person in [the] night kindles (owtxexai) a light for himself, since his vision has been extinguished. In his sleep he touches (artxsxai) that which is dead, though [himself] alive, [and] when awake touches (artxexai) that which sleeps. 6
We have shifted from the mind to the body, looking for how we are limited as substance, as stuff and such. The first fragment writes us as a limit of death, wakefulness is more fully a ground for our being, and thus its limit is not sleep, but death; here death is written as thelimitofourbeingawakeandasleep. Thesymmetryofthisformulationdescribesthe limits o f what we are as something more like the grammatical limits Wittgenstein invokes in the Tractatus: "The limits of my language means the limits of my world" (5. 6). My language and my world limit me, I do not limit them. Rather I enact and embody them as mine. Thesymmetrybetweenlanguageandworld,betweendeathand/orsleepandour living can only be maintained if we ignore the way they posit us as subjects determined by theselimits. Theselimitsare,however,alwayslimitsorganizedaroundan'I',asaformal limitwithoutcontent. ThisT,aswhatisatstakebothwithinandastheselimits, constructs a fundamental asymmetry between all posited states o f being.
Thetheologyofdeath,forexample, inTheEgyptianBookoftheDead, becomes following this analogy in the Wake, a theology of sleep, where HCE, the erstwhile male
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? hero, "the first pharaoh Humpheres Cheops Exarchas . . . subjected to the horrors of the premier terror of Errorland" and its "nekropolitan nights" (62. 21-25). When we are lost to the world we are limited by that very loss; when we regain the world we find that we have actually regained ourselves as that which is to be limited or lost. To fall asleep is thus to become a metaphysician: we learn every night that the application o f criteria determines what counts as real, and that these criteria as they construct an ontology construct ourselves as real. What is made real here? Not a 'thing' at all, but consciousness, mind, unconsciousness, meaning, or whatever other vague term or description of the mental stances that allow the intentionality of our language to pick out both something in the 'world' and 'ourselves'. The limits of our states of consciousness are thus death and waking reality; sleep lies twisted behind these, limited by the others but not limiting them.
The relationship between these limits expresses itself through what we sometimes call time. If we explain these relations as a function of changes between states, we find ourselveswithsomethinglikeAristotle'scharacterizationoftimeinthePhysics. Aristotle argues that time requires a stable substratum in relation to which change can become apparent: [time is seen to exist only as an effect]. This stability is built into the physics of existence by defining time as "not number with which we count but the number o f things which are counted"(Phys. 220h. 8). Finnegans Wake is a kind of commentary on this hypostatizing o f identity as the criterion o f being within time. This commentary constructs a non-representational metaphysics in order to embed minding "in the Nichtian glossery
which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues this is nat language at any sinse of
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? the world . . . in the lexinction oflife. . . this daylit dielate night ofnights" (83. 10-27). How does one become oneself, let alone into the world or into marriage or friendship, if time takes it all away? Aristotle says,
In time all things come into being and pass away; for which reason some called it the wisest o f all things, but the Pythagorean Paron called it the most stupid, because in it we also forget; and his was the truer view. It is clear then that it must be in itself. . . the condition ofdestruction rather than ofcoming into being (for change, in itself makes things depart from their former condition), and only incidentally o f coming into being, and o f being. (Pfrys. 222b. 17-23)
Before this time peal we lie "lossassinated by summan" (241. 02), adding someman or something into someman(thing), "in the search for love of knowledge through the comprehension o f the unity in altruism through stupefaction"(604. 33), a search, the first on a list, ending with "death and life are these" (605. 03). One cannot escape either counting or summan or stupe/acrion (is this the state o f being dead to the world or being defined as a fact? ): what do the 'facts' in our sleep point to?
Finnegans Wake attempts to rediscover the wisdom o f time without forgetting our losses, turn counting into becoming, "for if we look at it verbally perhaps there is no true noun in active nature where every bally being-please read this mufto--is becoming in its owntowneyeball"(523. 10-12). ConvertingAristotleintothe"sinseoftheworld" means converting Aristotle into Augustine and Aquinas and then both of them into Anna Livia
Plurabellae (ALP) and ALP into her mate H. C. Earwicker (HCE) and HCE into his sons Shem the penman into Shaun the spaceman and into their sister Issy (whatever she might
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? seeasherself)andsoonintoathousandandonevisages,etc. Thesevoicesand authorities, however, do not organize a Waste Land. What we count as our becoming must include our investment in language as under threat of nonsense, of our own loss and becoming through language: "Why, wonder o f wenchalows, what o szeszame opem, v doer s t doing? " (333. 01-02): why would meaning get mapped onto sex? and throughout it all our world waxed and waned. This language is a provocation to ask and an invocation in asking how to invest, embody, represent, describe, express, call, inhabit, project, exchange, determine oneself in language? What limit is there to these verbs?
10. 2 "aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues"
The "lexinction o f life" at night and in ourselves and the logical grammar providing its purchase on ourselves and the world will seem in the Wake a picture of
every person, place and thing in the chaosmos o f Alle anyway connected with the gobblydumped turkey as moving and changing every part of the time: the travelling inkhom (possibly pot), the hare and turtle pen and paper, the continually more and less intermisunderstanding minds ofthe anticollaborators, the as time went on as it will variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changably meaning vocable scriptsigns. (118. 21-28; underline added).
The darkened world ofthe Wake blurs the meanings ofwords into "three score and ten toptypsical readiongs" (20. 15), and in so doing fades the defined limits o f meaning associated with a particular identity. The primal, undifferentiated darkness of the unconscious rises up and clouds the "glosses" (304. F3) of reason, of knowledge and of
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? definition: "mayhisforeheadbedarkenedwithmudwhowouldsunder! ",andinthis divide into identities (20. 16). Time as number counts as reading, except when both we and language fall asleep, when what we mean to ourselves falls out of any functional unity (consciousness) and into a riddle (not even a question mark).
The riddle setting the world into "chaosmos" is between the "hare and the turtle pen" racing across the paper, the substratum in relation to which change, or rather the words become visible. The between, the beginning and the end, from which and toward which the hare and turtle whirl along describes an infinite regress as the words or the meaning before us "wham. . . [b]ut whim", an interpretive gap, a "fantsy", between us and the text that frustrates any seemingly ordinary understanding of a sentence or the book.
The force ofZeno's paradox ofthe hare and rabbit running themselves into infinities is not simply logical (for the paradoxes can be made to disappear). The paradox embodies our necessary commitment to forms of differentiated identity (or grammatical distinctions), which we understand as descriptions of the forms determining our experience, our very real sense oftime as loss and thus as unwisdom, that marks the emotional, social, and metaphysical boundaries between land and sea, ourselves and others, and the past and present articulated in The Waste Land. In that world the question of time can be posed as How does a moment and an identityjump from itself into being something else? The gap between two moments, between two identities, must be built in
the substanceless action of becoming, through which being reaches beyond itself. Within the Christian pattern o f creation being generates becoming in order to conserve identity as the fundamental ontological unit. In the Wake Joyce inverts this relationship, such that
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? being, the substance of one's own identity, one's own body, "by its corrosive sublimation" becomes "one continuous present tense integument" (185-86. 36-01): being sublimed into the ordinary, into the body lost in sleep which is the mind lost in time. Joyce immersed himself in the intangible "now," in which all things take place. This "now" is the gap between identities; it is the night time "hole affair" ofFinnegans Wake: the "lapses lequou asousiated with the royal gorge"( 151. 28-9). One o f the central mysteries within this "seemetary" of the night is not only how the "trapped head" pulls himselfinto the world of consciousness, but analogously how and why identities are created within this flux o f the present; what is the mechanism of movement from identity to identity, the movement, which Aristotle defines as time, from before to after? In this other people offer themselves not only as limits to our own desires, power, identity, but as versions of our own unconscious.
In the face o f this loss, this "noughttime", Finnegans Wake demands from us a theology,asifthenothingnessdemandedofGodcreation. Theologicalexegesisis predicated on defining what are essentially ontological relationships, the most fundamental ofwhich is the relationship between being and becoming inscribed within conceptions of creation. Change within these conceptions, to the degree that they can be translated into something like Zeno's paradoxes, functions through the transformation o f one moment, one identity, into another. Matter within the Wake becomes "Sure, what is it on the whole only holes tied together. . (434. 21). Matter as a set ofpoints or identities is negated in its substance but not in its form. Why only this? The logic of negation configures matter,
waking life, as the limit of our noughttime experience, a kind of double negative that
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? foregrounds form over matter or content. This is a way o f etching time into language: "Signs are on o f a mere by token that wills still to be becoming upon this there once a here was world" (608. 26; underline added). This sign (what sign? ) is written on and out o f a whim ("are on of a mere": contingent, accidental), by God I want to say, but only by another token, a sign, "by token". "Signs . . . by tokens" will becoming still: the hypostasis o f a moment that we all can now share, point to as "this there" that was once a "here",aworld. Onecancallthistheproblemofself-reflection,representation,or presence. But how do these signs "will"? These "signs", 'by token" defined, seem animate, or rather conscious of choices which one can will. Their will is directed against the loss o f a world: a recognition that the contingency o f here, not simply in Hegel's sense ofa vanishing incompleteness, but in our continuous possession of"a here" that shape signs not as representations, but as forms and modes o f willing. Will in this sense is not ours, but always a world's, or let's say an instantiation of possession or investment within an ontologic in which we find ourselves--our world.
This is in many ways Augustine's insight, that the metaphysical import o f Christian theology, through the identity and creative power of God, does not articulate 'what is' as being of the sort that can be represented, as things or planets or people, but as being as a kind o f willing. When Joyce rewrites signs as forms o f a will (whose will remains a question), he links the deontic (obligation and entitlement) with the alethic (necessary and the possible) aspects oflanguage (as all forms ofwilling, being willed, requiring or allowing willing) with the "mere. . . here", the ordinary shams or whims ofour being not ourselves and the world not being the world (of at least a moment ago). Whose to say
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? whether this is an allegory of our waking life or our sleeping life? The rhyming "mere . . . there . . . here" enacts both how a mirror makes here or there a there o r here and the "soundsense"ofthesea,orsomethinglike"Oed'undleerdasMeer". Thesemeanings describe a boundary (arch, mere), a margin between land and water, drawing its own signs on itself. But what have we gained by marking the "here" as a "mere", a part, a sham, "by token," built or reflected as a will as and on the flowing ocean? To talk of being as becoming has little force to shape our understanding unless we can commit ourselves to such a mere (mirror) metaphysical fantasy, as if this fantasy functions as an expression of what exists for us and as ourselves in the way that Gilson argues that the primary function o f "to be" is to act as an existential verb asserting "X exists, is real" :
Que Ton dise il est, il existe, ou il y a, le sens reste le meme. Toutes ces formules signifient Taction premiere que puisse exercer un sujet. Premiere, elle Test en eflfet, puisque, sans elle, il n'y' aurait pas de sujet. (L 'etre et I'essence, 275).
What does Finnegans Wake pose as its subject? Whose or what will is articulated as its signs?
One can claim with some justice that Finnegans Wake describes not a subject, but 'the creative becoming o f being as a continuous becoming', and yet such a claim does not mean anything to us. If this claim is true, it cannot be true in this form, it cannot mean as anything within the grammar of what we mean when we say "I'll see you tomorrow. " The differenceliesinhowweinvestourselvesinthesetwostatements. Wecannotinvest ourselves at all in a claim about the Wake's metaphysics unless we recognize it as something like our world. And yet everything in the text resists such a recognition. When
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? we enter Finnegans Wake we enter the limit of how things and words matter to us, both in their substance and significance: "propounded for cyclological, is, studding sail once more, jibsheets and royals, in the semblance of the substance for the membrance of the umbrance" (220. 30). The "cyclology" describes Vico's cyclic model of history that Joyce uses to structure the Wake. This cyclic history wedded to logic and the following "is" reduces the circle into a tautology, where the beginning is the end. The "semblance of substance" that confronts us in our dreaming heads articulates as real our memory o f the shadows (umbrance) o f the past cycling into the future. Our nocturnal states expose our existing but not as ourselves, not as or in relation to substance, but within fantasies and nothings. The non-existent past and future, one could even call them memories and desires, constitute the durationless insubstantial present that opens up the possibility of substanceinourconsciousworld. Thus,the'cyclological"turningsofourmindfollow "heliotropically noughttime" (349. 7), "a slip of the time between a date and a ghostmark" [473. 8], "seeking spoor through the deep timefield" (475. 24) in order that "we may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we're presurely destined to be odd's without ends" (455. 16).
Entering into our mind, which is most fully done when asleep, dissolves matter, and mattering, into the possibility "[ifs"] of matter and mattering within time, both experienced and measured, as the trace limits of"odd's without ends: "Odd's", or odd is as odd does, or marked out as unique, as a singular identity, but without ends. Being "without ends" is what Joyce calls elsewhen in the Wake "Art: the imperfect subjunctive", a future constructed our of an unfinished past, but, therefore, not in relation
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? toobjects,whichdonotexistwithinthefuturenow. Thusourverybeingisconstructed out of and as a future, at this point, a collection of "ifs" marking out a unique moment. Odd is without ends is also odd without evens, a way of counting to infinity with half a deck, and in this an imperfect subjunctive. This counting o f number is what Aristotle called time (Phys. 4. 14). Numbers cannot be understood to be odd separate from the concept of even. The odd numbers, however, measure the absent even. One might call this a music, counting silences as Augustine does: "What happens when we measure silences and say that a given silence lasted as long as a given sound? " (Conf. Xl. xxix [39]). How can we compare nothing to something? Both Joyce and Augustine pursue this seeming nothing in and as Soul, something like a confession of sin in order to find
goodness. Such oddness without end describes the interpretative "cyclologic" animating the Wake and any reading of it or any phrase within it. How to recognize our being "without ends" when we "phace", face and phase into, nothingness in sleep and in death, and even the temptations to both the blankness o f nonsense and the "tootoological" emptiness of sense, is another way of answering a riddle in which one finds oneself strung out as both a sham and a whim.
