His condition ofmoral and theological confusion is exposed through self-attention, or, as he says, "a
profound
self-examination .
Bourbon - "Twitterlitter" of Nonsense- "Askesis" at "Finnegans Wake"
University of Tulsa
The "Twitterlitter" of Nonsense: "Askesis" at "Finnegans Wake" Author(s): Brett Bourbon
Source: James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter, 2002), pp. 217-232 Published by: University of Tulsa
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? ? Finnegans
By a
The "Twitterlitter"
Askesis at Finnegans Wake
Brett Bourbon Stanford University
I
Wake is not a work of art but a work of theology.
work of theology, Imean that theWake demands to be read as what Pierre Hadot calls, in describing ancient Greek and Roman
philosophy, a spiritual exercise (askesis)} In ancient philosophy, according toHadot, these spiritual exercises "have as their goal the transformation of our vision of the world, and the metamorphosis of our being" (127). While Socrates remains the exemplar of such spiri
as he calls it in the Theaetetus, PMlo of Alexandria formal description of what these exercises entail:
things. "2
askesis develops from this philosophical askesis, which, under the
increasing authority of the Bible, takes the form of exegesis. Reading oneself in relation to the words of God became the primary way in
which the self-attention (prosoche) prescribed by Philo could be
expressed through the disciplines o? sacra doctrina (holy or sacred doc trine). Reading, as Saint Augustine claims at the end of his discussion
of Genesis in the Confessions, becomes a form of prayer: "the exercise of that joyful charity which comes of at last finding God and seeks to
find him in his works. "3 Similarly, St. John Cassian, a contemporary
of Augustine, in his Conferences, a collection of dialogues attributed to fifteen Egyptian church fathers, imagines that reading scripture, like
loneliness, fasts, vigils, work, and nakedness, is part of amonastic combat that strives towin a purity of heart (puritas cordis). 4 The sub sequent history of Christian exegesis retains this sense of reading as a form of self-reflection.
It is easy to lose the sense of "self-attention" expressed by prosoche, partly because there is a strong modern tendency to think of such
attention as directed toward something called "the self. " The transla tion of prosoche as "self-attention" ismeant to capture the sense of
217
tual midwifery, gives a more
research
(zetesis),
(akroasis), self-attention (prosoche), self-mastery (enkrateia), and "indif ference to indifferent Hadot demonstrates that Christian
of Nonsense:
investigation (skepsis), reading (anagnosis), listening
? This content downloaded from 128. 135. 12. 127 on Sun, 16 Nov 2014 05:34:21 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
? ? attention to how one lives and to the whole of one's life. Prosoche is part of the ethical work one does to answer the fundamental ethical
question for the ancient world: how ought I to live? 5 A slightly differ ent ethical sense is expressed by Aristotle's use of eudaimonia, com
translated as "human flourishing. "6 That which flourishes and the flourishing itself constitute a good life, and it is this life that
would be the subject of prosoche? In this essay, I am restricting "self attention" even further. Imean the "self" in "self-reflection" or "self
attention" to describe that toward which reflection or attention is
directed, that which is picked out when I use the first person. I leave what is attended to in this case open and vague, partly because it is
our difficulty inplacing any thing or any non-thing in this position that constitutes the importance of prosoche forme.
The centrality of self-attention in Christian theological reading has been lost in Jean-Michel Rabat? 's claim that "[p]erhaps more than any writer of this century, Joyce has forced criticism to acknowledge its
theological nature. "8 With some tension and hesitation, Rabat? fol lows Jacques Derrida in defining the "theological nature" of criticism
as consisting of our reading always behind the text, reading belated ly that Joyce is always ahead of us, so that we read always "in mem
monly
ory of him" (l). 9 Rabat? argues that this kind of theological
reading must become "aperverted theology" (185), replicating and undoing
this memory through reading (through a kind of submissiveness to
and over-mastery of the text): "Finnegans Wake proposes an evolu tionary book that has to be reshaped by every reader who will learn
tomaster its idiolect, to inhabit its pages, to live with or within its uni verse" (189). I invoke Rabat? and Derrida, however, not in order to begin a critique but in order tomark the difference between any the ological reading that reads under the authority of Finnegans Wake and
what Imean by reading as a spiritual exercise. Iwill require a differ
ent kind of self-reflection
pursued by either Rabat? or Derrida, When one is reading the "nat
language" of theWake (FW 83. 12), the self-reflexive reading demand
ed by Christian exegesis takes the form of continually asking how to
Robert Polhemus
(prosoche) and meditation (melete) than that
read it and why. It is through these questions,
how these questions have a claim on us, that Finnegans Wake emerges
as something for anyone to read.
What Imean by spiritual exercises, therefore, is closer to what
world exposed in theWake. The Wake's night lessons aremeant to alter
indicates when he speaks of the Wake as a comic gospel. 10 Polhemus shows how one could find away through the Wake and ground one's life on a kind of comic stance toward the
one's fundamental stance toward oneself, others,
What Imean by "stance" here is akin towhat Aristotle calls ethos, the
218
through investigating
and the world.
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? ? character that is the source of one's behavior, but also to hexis, the state or disposition we take toward others and theworld. One might
also think of Martin
Heidegger's use of "Verhaltung," which is nor
mally stance
"fundamental others, and the world" in order to point not to
translated as toward oneself,
"comportment. "11 But I am using
the particulars of character or comportment but to the fact that we inhabit such stances. Describing what we are in this way is to point at
how what we are (an ontological question) can be expressed mean ingfully in our behavior, thoughts, and usage of words such as
"ethos," "hexis" "verhaltung," or "stance. " Attempts to speak about
the relation between what is and what is
meaningful (especially attempts to equate being with meaning) Iunderstand as theology.
comprehending Finnegans Wake as having something to teach
Thus,
(where its night lessons concern how we should take Wakean lan
guage as ours or not ours, and hence take itsworld as congruent or
alien to ours) means understanding it as a theological lesson.
The appeal to theology, however, cannot help but sound anachro
nistic. The melodramatic cast to the phrase "transformation of one's
being" ismore likely to be understood psychologically than spiritual
ly. Certainly, the spirit in "spiritual exercises" has been under pres sure from modern philosophy and science, so that it is not clear what
"spirit" can mean anymore. In addition, many of the rhetorical activ ities that constituted askesis forHellenic philosophers, formany of the
church fathers, and, in a different way, for St. Ignatius of Loyola have been formalized and distorted by that broad set of habits and prac
tices developed and expressed through literary criticism, and it is not clear any more what reading as part of such "exercises" can mean.
The exemplar for Christian spiritual exercises remains Saint
Augustine. His re-reading of himself inhis Confessions works through a complicated interleaving of reading, attention, listening, and telling.
This complicated stance allows Augustine to express and think through three narrative strands that are already particular stances toward God and his own humanness: 1) he lives and has lived a life
already embedded within the grace of God, as do we all; 2) through his living, he falls from and strives toward a conscious commitment
to God and his grace and word; and 3) through his Confessions, he reinterprets both of the preceding narrative stances as away of fur
ther placing and understanding himself within a greater stability and comprehension of his and our entanglement within human fallenness and God's grace and being. These complicated strands all center on
two fundamental premises: 1) that God is "deeply hidden yet most intimately present" (I. iv. 4)? thus any move toward God is caused by
that all that is is both near and far from God; and 2) thatwe speak from out of our "dead
219
God's
grace (see, especially, VIII. xi. 25)? and
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? ? condition . . . a trough of corruption" (IX. i. l), so that the question "what are you [God] tome? " is tied to the question "What am I to you
[God]? " (Lv. 5).
Augustine's narrative stance, which I am calling here his reading,
attention, listening, and telling, follows from these premises. One can see themovement of his narrative through these complicated stances and in relation to these premises in the conversion scene in book VIII.
His condition ofmoral and theological confusion is exposed through self-attention, or, as he says, "a profound self-examination . . .
dredged up a heap of all my misery and set it 'in the sight of my heart'" (VDI. xii. 28). His listening within this condition through faith allows him to hear in the voice of a child a command from God to
"'pick up and read'" (VIII. xii. 29) and, by following this command through his own faith, he reads a randomly chosen passage from scriptures that he understands as specifically directed towards his own condition. This moment of reading provides an insight into his relation toGod, but it is also an act of conversion. Reading the scrip tures is itself a figure for the self-attention and reading of his life
toward and through God's grace in the Confessions. Such attention
and reading is not an attempt to discover any depth of person or mind but is, rather, a calling upon God (I. i. l), a calling that is an attempt to understand and situate oneself within the stability of
God's grace in the face of human fallenness (the two premises above).
The reading of his life, theworld, and the holy text that Augustine
pursues in Confessions is fundamentally a form of Christian
that lies beyond the reading process," as Brian Stock notes, requires
self-atten tion. Reading, for Augustine, in order "to ascend to a type of truth
the organizing presence of God as the transcendent
which we see our fallenness. 12 Augustine writes in his Confessions:
"Butwhile he is speaking, Lord, you turned my attention back to myself. You took me up from behind, my own back where I had
placed myself (Ps. 20. 13) and you setme before my face (Ps. 49. 2. 1) so that I could see how vile Iwas, how twisted and filthy, covered with
sores and ulcers" (VIILvii. 16). Augustine's summary of his self-reflec tion describes a hermeneutic education that remakes our human
stance toward the world and God by reconstituting the linguistic forms within which we configure both this stance and the reality of
ourselves in relation to theworld
selves within our language and practices.
and God. We discover God and our
A fundamental
word, theWord of God, and human language, a distance that is part
ly breached by our interpretative practices. This distance, however,
also establishes a kind of indeterminacy within human language that
marks the
incommensurability
between the inner word and our ordi
220
distance remains between what he calls the inner
limit against
? This content downloaded from 128. 135. 12. 127 on Sun, 16 Nov 2014 05:34:21 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
? ? This
nary language.
human language is countered by an allegorical similarity, inwhich, as
Augustine describes it, "the sound [of aword] is a body, but the sig nificance is, so to speak, the soul of the sound. "13 This is the distance
between humanity and divinity14
An important continuity exists between the Reformers,
Martin Luther, and Augustine. Augustine pictured human
radically dependent on God, highlighting the fallenness and empti
ness of human life that Luther would
develop
justifies human beings through His grace alone (an interpretation of
Romans 1. 17). Self-reflection as a spiritual exercise in Philo's sense of
askesis, however, cannot help but be transformed, in Luther's under
standing of God's making humans just through grace, by the sense that we do not discover theWord of God but that theWord discovers
us. This transformation marks an important fracture in the history that leads to Finnegans Wake and its peculiar use of language. Once
interpretation is simplified into a Christological expression of grace, God's word can be more fully present in human language.
incommensurability
between inner word and
the tension between God's inner word and human
Consequently,
language dissolves, and, according to Luther, the divinity of Christ is
disguised beneath the forms of language, asHe iswithin the form of human flesh. 15 From this, it follows that theology is, as Isaiah Berlin describes it, "nothing but grammar concerned with the words of the
Holy Ghost. "16
The diminishment of allegory in Protestant readings of the Bible
was compensated for by the greater Christological significance assigned to all language. While this encouraged an increased literal
ism in reading holy writ, it also discouraged the presumption that Biblical language has meaning by virtue of allegorical reference. From
such a theological shift, Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder developed more or less secular theories of language suggest
ing that language bears the full possibilities of meaning in its very form. 17 For Hamann, this means that words bear an emotional con
tent in themselves and that neither the world nor language has a priv
relative to the other; furthermore, reason and intu ition, or perception, are fully and inextricably confused with and
ileged position
In other words, we cannot get underneath either or the world to view the other, nor can we think except
through language.
language
through the grammar of our language. 18 What Ihave called Finnegans
Wake's theological lesson exposes this same kind of entanglement of world, reason, and language. The Wake's theological lesson, unlike
Luther's, shows that it is not Christ that we find in our language but ourselves threatened by nonsense, sleep, and death.
How do or can we see ourselves in Finnegans Wake in this way? Or 221
into the claim that God
especially beings as
? This content downloaded from 128. 135. 12. 127 on Sun, 16 Nov 2014 05:34:21 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
? ? kind of self-reflection or Luther's tracing of divinity in the words of the Holy Spirit be
rather, how can either Augustine's
grammatical
enacted without God? What kind of moral self-reflection
Finnegans Wake to be a response to the predicament prompting these questions, the predicament that would motivate writing such a text and the one that would motivate our reading it. What has replaced God in theWake are particular kinds of nonsense that, like Luther's God, are within language itself: it is against this limit that we are
forced to reflect and see ourselves.
Ifwe enter into theWake through the indeterminacy that accompa nies the words "spiritual" and "exercises," then we are faced with two questions. The first is a question about "exercises," about read
ing: "What kind of meaningfulness is left if one no longer knows or understands how the words in Finnegans Wake are about something
or anything? " This is a question concerning the aboutness or inten tionality of language. The second question is amodem descendant of
the query "what is the soul? " and follows from the previous question:
is reading Finnegans Wake a human activity?
These two queries, however, are not really questions at all. It is not
clearwhat would count as answers to either of them. Consequently, it would be more accurate to call them riddles. In order to respond to
these riddles, we are required to read outside the bounds of interpre tative propriety with what can look like eclecticism but is really an attempt to construct oneself and one's understanding within a theo logical stance or rather to determine what will count as this kind of stance. This means undoing, as the Wake undoes, the historical and
duce or inhabit when the limits of the world
flicting set of fragments of science, technology, social anachronistic religion, psychological fantasy, and so on? Iunderstand
frames from within which we are trained to think.
interpretative
There are, of course, limits, but we have no way of determining what
these limits will and should be. This does not mean one should read without limits, by free association. In fact, the inability of any inter
pretative frame to control the Wakean "chaosmos . . . moving and
changing every part of the time" (FW 118. 21-23) means that reading requires thinking about what can and should count as a limit to our
reading.
II
The language of Finnegans Wake where "Som's wholed, all's part ed" is "[b]inomeans to be comprendered" (FW 563. 32, 285. 27-28). So why read it? Not surprisingly, there is a long-standing tradition that assumes that this question can best be answered by answering the
222
are constructed
can we pro as a con
prejudice,
?
His condition ofmoral and theological confusion is exposed through self-attention, or, as he says, "a profound self-examination . . .
dredged up a heap of all my misery and set it 'in the sight of my heart'" (VDI. xii. 28). His listening within this condition through faith allows him to hear in the voice of a child a command from God to
"'pick up and read'" (VIII. xii. 29) and, by following this command through his own faith, he reads a randomly chosen passage from scriptures that he understands as specifically directed towards his own condition. This moment of reading provides an insight into his relation toGod, but it is also an act of conversion. Reading the scrip tures is itself a figure for the self-attention and reading of his life
toward and through God's grace in the Confessions. Such attention
and reading is not an attempt to discover any depth of person or mind but is, rather, a calling upon God (I. i. l), a calling that is an attempt to understand and situate oneself within the stability of
God's grace in the face of human fallenness (the two premises above).
The reading of his life, theworld, and the holy text that Augustine
pursues in Confessions is fundamentally a form of Christian
that lies beyond the reading process," as Brian Stock notes, requires
self-atten tion. Reading, for Augustine, in order "to ascend to a type of truth
the organizing presence of God as the transcendent
which we see our fallenness. 12 Augustine writes in his Confessions:
"Butwhile he is speaking, Lord, you turned my attention back to myself. You took me up from behind, my own back where I had
placed myself (Ps. 20. 13) and you setme before my face (Ps. 49. 2. 1) so that I could see how vile Iwas, how twisted and filthy, covered with
sores and ulcers" (VIILvii. 16). Augustine's summary of his self-reflec tion describes a hermeneutic education that remakes our human
stance toward the world and God by reconstituting the linguistic forms within which we configure both this stance and the reality of
ourselves in relation to theworld
selves within our language and practices.
and God. We discover God and our
A fundamental
word, theWord of God, and human language, a distance that is part
ly breached by our interpretative practices. This distance, however,
also establishes a kind of indeterminacy within human language that
marks the
incommensurability
between the inner word and our ordi
220
distance remains between what he calls the inner
limit against
? This content downloaded from 128. 135. 12. 127 on Sun, 16 Nov 2014 05:34:21 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
? ? This
nary language.
human language is countered by an allegorical similarity, inwhich, as
Augustine describes it, "the sound [of aword] is a body, but the sig nificance is, so to speak, the soul of the sound. "13 This is the distance
between humanity and divinity14
An important continuity exists between the Reformers,
Martin Luther, and Augustine. Augustine pictured human
radically dependent on God, highlighting the fallenness and empti
ness of human life that Luther would
develop
justifies human beings through His grace alone (an interpretation of
Romans 1. 17). Self-reflection as a spiritual exercise in Philo's sense of
askesis, however, cannot help but be transformed, in Luther's under
standing of God's making humans just through grace, by the sense that we do not discover theWord of God but that theWord discovers
us. This transformation marks an important fracture in the history that leads to Finnegans Wake and its peculiar use of language. Once
interpretation is simplified into a Christological expression of grace, God's word can be more fully present in human language.
incommensurability
between inner word and
the tension between God's inner word and human
Consequently,
language dissolves, and, according to Luther, the divinity of Christ is
disguised beneath the forms of language, asHe iswithin the form of human flesh. 15 From this, it follows that theology is, as Isaiah Berlin describes it, "nothing but grammar concerned with the words of the
Holy Ghost. "16
The diminishment of allegory in Protestant readings of the Bible
was compensated for by the greater Christological significance assigned to all language. While this encouraged an increased literal
ism in reading holy writ, it also discouraged the presumption that Biblical language has meaning by virtue of allegorical reference. From
such a theological shift, Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder developed more or less secular theories of language suggest
ing that language bears the full possibilities of meaning in its very form. 17 For Hamann, this means that words bear an emotional con
tent in themselves and that neither the world nor language has a priv
relative to the other; furthermore, reason and intu ition, or perception, are fully and inextricably confused with and
ileged position
In other words, we cannot get underneath either or the world to view the other, nor can we think except
through language.
language
through the grammar of our language. 18 What Ihave called Finnegans
Wake's theological lesson exposes this same kind of entanglement of world, reason, and language. The Wake's theological lesson, unlike
Luther's, shows that it is not Christ that we find in our language but ourselves threatened by nonsense, sleep, and death.
How do or can we see ourselves in Finnegans Wake in this way? Or 221
into the claim that God
especially beings as
? This content downloaded from 128. 135. 12. 127 on Sun, 16 Nov 2014 05:34:21 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
? ? kind of self-reflection or Luther's tracing of divinity in the words of the Holy Spirit be
rather, how can either Augustine's
grammatical
enacted without God? What kind of moral self-reflection
Finnegans Wake to be a response to the predicament prompting these questions, the predicament that would motivate writing such a text and the one that would motivate our reading it. What has replaced God in theWake are particular kinds of nonsense that, like Luther's God, are within language itself: it is against this limit that we are
forced to reflect and see ourselves.
Ifwe enter into theWake through the indeterminacy that accompa nies the words "spiritual" and "exercises," then we are faced with two questions. The first is a question about "exercises," about read
ing: "What kind of meaningfulness is left if one no longer knows or understands how the words in Finnegans Wake are about something
or anything? " This is a question concerning the aboutness or inten tionality of language. The second question is amodem descendant of
the query "what is the soul? " and follows from the previous question:
is reading Finnegans Wake a human activity?
These two queries, however, are not really questions at all. It is not
clearwhat would count as answers to either of them. Consequently, it would be more accurate to call them riddles. In order to respond to
these riddles, we are required to read outside the bounds of interpre tative propriety with what can look like eclecticism but is really an attempt to construct oneself and one's understanding within a theo logical stance or rather to determine what will count as this kind of stance. This means undoing, as the Wake undoes, the historical and
duce or inhabit when the limits of the world
flicting set of fragments of science, technology, social anachronistic religion, psychological fantasy, and so on? Iunderstand
frames from within which we are trained to think.
interpretative
There are, of course, limits, but we have no way of determining what
these limits will and should be. This does not mean one should read without limits, by free association. In fact, the inability of any inter
pretative frame to control the Wakean "chaosmos . . . moving and
changing every part of the time" (FW 118. 21-23) means that reading requires thinking about what can and should count as a limit to our
reading.
II
The language of Finnegans Wake where "Som's wholed, all's part ed" is "[b]inomeans to be comprendered" (FW 563. 32, 285. 27-28). So why read it? Not surprisingly, there is a long-standing tradition that assumes that this question can best be answered by answering the
222
are constructed
can we pro as a con
prejudice,
? This content downloaded from 128. 135. 12. 127 on Sun, 16 Nov 2014 05:34:21 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
? ? "what is Finnegans Wake about? " James S. Atherton, in The Books at the "Wake," suggests that this is the fundamental question for critics. 19
In response to the demand to determine what the book is about,
critics often delineate some interpretative domain within which the
Wake gains a subject matter. Thus, it is about language, according to Ronald E. Buckalew, about culture (Christine Froula), about our psy
chology (Margot Norris), or about themind (Sheldon Brivic)? and so
question
on. 20 Such arguments, while
cannot help but take the form of special pleading or even of an apolo
getics for away of interpreting, sanctioned by the radical indetermi nacy of the text.
Such interpretative answers to the question "what is the Wake about? " are encouraged because it is not clear how the language of
theWake could be about anything, with two possible exceptions. They are exceptions only because their objects require only aminimum
interpretative frame. Inwriting Finnegans Wake, Joyce claimed that he was attempting to describe our night life, and in so doing he had to
put English to sleep (in the double sense of this phrase). Consequently, as John Bishop, in Joyce's Book of theDark, has shown rather convincingly, the Wake is literally a re-description of the night
life of amissing individual. 21 Because, however, this person "aslip" in the text ismissing (FW 377. 26,597. 12), he or she could be everyone or
anyone. The other object readily available for interpretation is the Wake itself. There are numerous versions of this, usually embedded in
other kinds of interpretations- A book about itself, however, pressures "about" in such away that not only is the text animated with a kind of intention, but it is difficult not simply to translate "about" into re
description. A Wakean sentence can be seen as a re-description of
itself as awhole and in parts. This need not be paradoxical. I can say,
"This is a story about telling a story. " It is not clear, however, how a sentence can be a re-description of itself. We can use a sentence to re describe a sentence or a story, but that isnot the same thing as trans
lating meaning into re-description. Thus, the Wake, if construed as a
producing interesting interpretations,
of itself, would be a re-description of a re-description. This is close to nonsensical22 One might call these literal interpreta
tions in order to capture the obviousness and general intelligibility of
their objects.
I do not want to criticize these two ways of reading (indeed, Iwant
to protect them). In both cases, however, the coherence of reading requires a sense of aboutness that the text cannot provide. How can theWake be about anything when even these objects, an absent sleep er and the Wake itself, unravel the intentionality of language? This
does not only mean that we should provide a reason for why a par 223
re-description
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? ? ticular sentence is formed in the way it is (Bishop provides excellent explanations and justifications for this), but we must also ask how
can be lost.
What does itmean for language to be about something or any
thing? The late nineteenth-century German philosopher Franz Brentano, in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, argues that
the intentional (aboutness) constitutes our mental experience:
Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of theMiddle Ages called the intentional (ormental) inexistence of an
object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously ref erence to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be under
stood 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, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved,
in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. 23
To be about X seems to require a relation between a thought and X. 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 relations. 24 In this passage, the verbs
"refer," "symbolize," "suggest," and "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
the problem has shifted from the relation between language and object to the status of this object, which in this case is imaginary. Brentano uses the model of the imaginary object as a pattern for describing all of our mental stances toward the world. The aboutness
of our language is immanent within our attitudes and statements. In
intentionality
world"),
this is simply to replace themystery of the aboutness of our language with themystery of the immanence of the world in our statements.
Brentano's description of intentionality attempts to translate onto logical distinctions (claims about the world) into psychological or
many ways,
phenomenological distinctions (claims about our
Ludwig Wittgenstein, on the other hand, attempts to dissolve these
psychological
and
phenomenological
distinctions into the intersub
jective coherence of language. The intentionality of our language is not dependent on the attachment of language to the world. Rather,
according toWittgenstein, intentional statements (Iwish that x; I expect y; I have a suspicion about z) are matched by statements that describe their fulfillment, verification, denial, failure, and so forth. 25
Such a description of intentionality, while itmakes our mental con tent accessible to others, reduces aboutness to an agreement between,
224
experience).
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? ? for example, an order and the description of its fulfillment. Thus, the
intentionality of language is determined by the way we figure kinds of sentences in relation to each other. Ihave to simplify here, but if
intentionality is reduced to an agreement
in language, then the problem of the relation between language and the world is replaced by the problem of how we inhabit language. We
are left with the question "how do we find ourselves within lan guage? " The short answer is, I think, through nonsense.
What an utterance is about, its intentional targets, are formulated
through language, so that the way language
by an agreement between language and a thing in the world but by an agreement within language between two related statements. The
intentional targets are within language, which iswhy, by deforming language into nonsense, we can lose the way the world becomes vis ible to us as something to talk about. Once a language cannot be used to articulate agreement between, for example, an expectation and its fulfillment, it cannot be about anything anymore. This suggests that
all interpretations of Finnegans Wake are not about theWake at all; they
are simply about themselves as interpretations.
Should we then abandon interpretation, claim it is senseless to
speak about what Wakean language is about? Endless and endlessly
replaceable interpretations would seem to serve little point. Ifwe abandon interpretation, however, what is left? Wakean language does not have any recognizable criteria of application to the world. Ifwe
cannot apply this language to the world, we must find the world within it: "[b]etween his voyous and her consinnantes" (FW 485. 10
11). The agreement in the Wake between world and statement is not
intentional but punning. There is agreement among world, language, and an "I" or a "we" in nonsense.
If Finnegans Wake enacts the world of an absent sleeper, as Bishop
then our failure to read backwards into his or her life or con
every sentence Joseph Conrad's claim that for anything to be art it
must justify itself in every line. 26What any sentence means collapses
into how we justify the particularity of the sentence, that is, how we
justify the nonsense of any particular sentence. Such justification means that we reflect upon ourselves (prosoche), our reading, our
making sense and not making sense of the Wake, through the very nonsense of the text. We must read ourselves into the text, just as we must read sense into nonsense. How can one do this? One way is to
ask the riddle-question: "Is reading Finnegans Wake a human activi 225
argues, sciousness,
into amind that we would recognize as our own, forces us to place our minds as the intentional target of the text. But this would mean that we do not understand ourselves. How could this be our night life, our dreams, our absence? Joyce forces to the surface of
between descriptions with
is about something is not
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? ? ty? "
What I am suggesting here is that Finnegans Wake separates reading
er, is about ourselves. But what does the Wake say about ourselves,
which would mean, in the context ofmy discussion of intentionality, what kind of thing arewe that can be talked about through nonsense?
"Ourselves" ismeant here as "us human beings. " This might suggest
a kind of test where only someone who asks the question about
whether reading the Wake is a human activity is a human being. I remain an agnostic about the answer to this. A question remains,
from interpreting. An interpretation
but about itself as an interpretation; our reading of the Wakef howev
arewe that we can be that which the Wake could be about? " or "what arewe that we can be targeted by the need for the kind of justification the Wake demands? "
Ill
Although Finnegans Wake can be interpreted in any number of ways, Ihave been arguing that it cannot be read as being about any
thing. The nonsense of the text separates reading from interpretation. Ihave suggested that this shifts the site of intentionality towards us,
as readers. This does not mean simply that our interpretations betray us, as if they were slips of the tongue or Rorschach tests. Any argu
ment about themeaning of our interpretations would simply allego rize one interpretation into another. Ifwe refuse to equate our inter
pretations with reading, with claims about what the text means, then we can no longer properly ask questions like "what does this sen
tence, passage, textmean? " Instead, we have to begin from the under standing that our reading confesses our being within and against lan
guage.
In Finnegans Wake, Augustine's conversation with God is replaced
with a conversation with nonsense, generating a theological crisis or
what Joyce calls a "theoperil" (FW 223. 28). The divine threat in Finnegans Wake emerges as the threat of nonsense that ismeant to
trace the limits of our language and of ourselves as human beings. Both language and the nonsense in the Wake are a dreaming into the world, not into ourselves. T. S. Eliot writes in his essay on Dante, "We
have nothing but dreams, and we have forgotten that seeing visions? a practice now relegated to the aberrant and uneducated?
was once a more significant, interesting, and disciplined kind of dreaming.
The "Twitterlitter" of Nonsense: "Askesis" at "Finnegans Wake" Author(s): Brett Bourbon
Source: James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter, 2002), pp. 217-232 Published by: University of Tulsa
Stable URL: http://www. jstor. org/stable/25477866 .
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? ? Finnegans
By a
The "Twitterlitter"
Askesis at Finnegans Wake
Brett Bourbon Stanford University
I
Wake is not a work of art but a work of theology.
work of theology, Imean that theWake demands to be read as what Pierre Hadot calls, in describing ancient Greek and Roman
philosophy, a spiritual exercise (askesis)} In ancient philosophy, according toHadot, these spiritual exercises "have as their goal the transformation of our vision of the world, and the metamorphosis of our being" (127). While Socrates remains the exemplar of such spiri
as he calls it in the Theaetetus, PMlo of Alexandria formal description of what these exercises entail:
things. "2
askesis develops from this philosophical askesis, which, under the
increasing authority of the Bible, takes the form of exegesis. Reading oneself in relation to the words of God became the primary way in
which the self-attention (prosoche) prescribed by Philo could be
expressed through the disciplines o? sacra doctrina (holy or sacred doc trine). Reading, as Saint Augustine claims at the end of his discussion
of Genesis in the Confessions, becomes a form of prayer: "the exercise of that joyful charity which comes of at last finding God and seeks to
find him in his works. "3 Similarly, St. John Cassian, a contemporary
of Augustine, in his Conferences, a collection of dialogues attributed to fifteen Egyptian church fathers, imagines that reading scripture, like
loneliness, fasts, vigils, work, and nakedness, is part of amonastic combat that strives towin a purity of heart (puritas cordis). 4 The sub sequent history of Christian exegesis retains this sense of reading as a form of self-reflection.
It is easy to lose the sense of "self-attention" expressed by prosoche, partly because there is a strong modern tendency to think of such
attention as directed toward something called "the self. " The transla tion of prosoche as "self-attention" ismeant to capture the sense of
217
tual midwifery, gives a more
research
(zetesis),
(akroasis), self-attention (prosoche), self-mastery (enkrateia), and "indif ference to indifferent Hadot demonstrates that Christian
of Nonsense:
investigation (skepsis), reading (anagnosis), listening
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? ? attention to how one lives and to the whole of one's life. Prosoche is part of the ethical work one does to answer the fundamental ethical
question for the ancient world: how ought I to live? 5 A slightly differ ent ethical sense is expressed by Aristotle's use of eudaimonia, com
translated as "human flourishing. "6 That which flourishes and the flourishing itself constitute a good life, and it is this life that
would be the subject of prosoche? In this essay, I am restricting "self attention" even further. Imean the "self" in "self-reflection" or "self
attention" to describe that toward which reflection or attention is
directed, that which is picked out when I use the first person. I leave what is attended to in this case open and vague, partly because it is
our difficulty inplacing any thing or any non-thing in this position that constitutes the importance of prosoche forme.
The centrality of self-attention in Christian theological reading has been lost in Jean-Michel Rabat? 's claim that "[p]erhaps more than any writer of this century, Joyce has forced criticism to acknowledge its
theological nature. "8 With some tension and hesitation, Rabat? fol lows Jacques Derrida in defining the "theological nature" of criticism
as consisting of our reading always behind the text, reading belated ly that Joyce is always ahead of us, so that we read always "in mem
monly
ory of him" (l). 9 Rabat? argues that this kind of theological
reading must become "aperverted theology" (185), replicating and undoing
this memory through reading (through a kind of submissiveness to
and over-mastery of the text): "Finnegans Wake proposes an evolu tionary book that has to be reshaped by every reader who will learn
tomaster its idiolect, to inhabit its pages, to live with or within its uni verse" (189). I invoke Rabat? and Derrida, however, not in order to begin a critique but in order tomark the difference between any the ological reading that reads under the authority of Finnegans Wake and
what Imean by reading as a spiritual exercise. Iwill require a differ
ent kind of self-reflection
pursued by either Rabat? or Derrida, When one is reading the "nat
language" of theWake (FW 83. 12), the self-reflexive reading demand
ed by Christian exegesis takes the form of continually asking how to
Robert Polhemus
(prosoche) and meditation (melete) than that
read it and why. It is through these questions,
how these questions have a claim on us, that Finnegans Wake emerges
as something for anyone to read.
What Imean by spiritual exercises, therefore, is closer to what
world exposed in theWake. The Wake's night lessons aremeant to alter
indicates when he speaks of the Wake as a comic gospel. 10 Polhemus shows how one could find away through the Wake and ground one's life on a kind of comic stance toward the
one's fundamental stance toward oneself, others,
What Imean by "stance" here is akin towhat Aristotle calls ethos, the
218
through investigating
and the world.
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? ? character that is the source of one's behavior, but also to hexis, the state or disposition we take toward others and theworld. One might
also think of Martin
Heidegger's use of "Verhaltung," which is nor
mally stance
"fundamental others, and the world" in order to point not to
translated as toward oneself,
"comportment. "11 But I am using
the particulars of character or comportment but to the fact that we inhabit such stances. Describing what we are in this way is to point at
how what we are (an ontological question) can be expressed mean ingfully in our behavior, thoughts, and usage of words such as
"ethos," "hexis" "verhaltung," or "stance. " Attempts to speak about
the relation between what is and what is
meaningful (especially attempts to equate being with meaning) Iunderstand as theology.
comprehending Finnegans Wake as having something to teach
Thus,
(where its night lessons concern how we should take Wakean lan
guage as ours or not ours, and hence take itsworld as congruent or
alien to ours) means understanding it as a theological lesson.
The appeal to theology, however, cannot help but sound anachro
nistic. The melodramatic cast to the phrase "transformation of one's
being" ismore likely to be understood psychologically than spiritual
ly. Certainly, the spirit in "spiritual exercises" has been under pres sure from modern philosophy and science, so that it is not clear what
"spirit" can mean anymore. In addition, many of the rhetorical activ ities that constituted askesis forHellenic philosophers, formany of the
church fathers, and, in a different way, for St. Ignatius of Loyola have been formalized and distorted by that broad set of habits and prac
tices developed and expressed through literary criticism, and it is not clear any more what reading as part of such "exercises" can mean.
The exemplar for Christian spiritual exercises remains Saint
Augustine. His re-reading of himself inhis Confessions works through a complicated interleaving of reading, attention, listening, and telling.
This complicated stance allows Augustine to express and think through three narrative strands that are already particular stances toward God and his own humanness: 1) he lives and has lived a life
already embedded within the grace of God, as do we all; 2) through his living, he falls from and strives toward a conscious commitment
to God and his grace and word; and 3) through his Confessions, he reinterprets both of the preceding narrative stances as away of fur
ther placing and understanding himself within a greater stability and comprehension of his and our entanglement within human fallenness and God's grace and being. These complicated strands all center on
two fundamental premises: 1) that God is "deeply hidden yet most intimately present" (I. iv. 4)? thus any move toward God is caused by
that all that is is both near and far from God; and 2) thatwe speak from out of our "dead
219
God's
grace (see, especially, VIII. xi. 25)? and
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? ? condition . . . a trough of corruption" (IX. i. l), so that the question "what are you [God] tome? " is tied to the question "What am I to you
[God]? " (Lv. 5).
Augustine's narrative stance, which I am calling here his reading,
attention, listening, and telling, follows from these premises. One can see themovement of his narrative through these complicated stances and in relation to these premises in the conversion scene in book VIII.
His condition ofmoral and theological confusion is exposed through self-attention, or, as he says, "a profound self-examination . . .
dredged up a heap of all my misery and set it 'in the sight of my heart'" (VDI. xii. 28). His listening within this condition through faith allows him to hear in the voice of a child a command from God to
"'pick up and read'" (VIII. xii. 29) and, by following this command through his own faith, he reads a randomly chosen passage from scriptures that he understands as specifically directed towards his own condition. This moment of reading provides an insight into his relation toGod, but it is also an act of conversion. Reading the scrip tures is itself a figure for the self-attention and reading of his life
toward and through God's grace in the Confessions. Such attention
and reading is not an attempt to discover any depth of person or mind but is, rather, a calling upon God (I. i. l), a calling that is an attempt to understand and situate oneself within the stability of
God's grace in the face of human fallenness (the two premises above).
The reading of his life, theworld, and the holy text that Augustine
pursues in Confessions is fundamentally a form of Christian
that lies beyond the reading process," as Brian Stock notes, requires
self-atten tion. Reading, for Augustine, in order "to ascend to a type of truth
the organizing presence of God as the transcendent
which we see our fallenness. 12 Augustine writes in his Confessions:
"Butwhile he is speaking, Lord, you turned my attention back to myself. You took me up from behind, my own back where I had
placed myself (Ps. 20. 13) and you setme before my face (Ps. 49. 2. 1) so that I could see how vile Iwas, how twisted and filthy, covered with
sores and ulcers" (VIILvii. 16). Augustine's summary of his self-reflec tion describes a hermeneutic education that remakes our human
stance toward the world and God by reconstituting the linguistic forms within which we configure both this stance and the reality of
ourselves in relation to theworld
selves within our language and practices.
and God. We discover God and our
A fundamental
word, theWord of God, and human language, a distance that is part
ly breached by our interpretative practices. This distance, however,
also establishes a kind of indeterminacy within human language that
marks the
incommensurability
between the inner word and our ordi
220
distance remains between what he calls the inner
limit against
? This content downloaded from 128. 135. 12. 127 on Sun, 16 Nov 2014 05:34:21 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
? ? This
nary language.
human language is countered by an allegorical similarity, inwhich, as
Augustine describes it, "the sound [of aword] is a body, but the sig nificance is, so to speak, the soul of the sound. "13 This is the distance
between humanity and divinity14
An important continuity exists between the Reformers,
Martin Luther, and Augustine. Augustine pictured human
radically dependent on God, highlighting the fallenness and empti
ness of human life that Luther would
develop
justifies human beings through His grace alone (an interpretation of
Romans 1. 17). Self-reflection as a spiritual exercise in Philo's sense of
askesis, however, cannot help but be transformed, in Luther's under
standing of God's making humans just through grace, by the sense that we do not discover theWord of God but that theWord discovers
us. This transformation marks an important fracture in the history that leads to Finnegans Wake and its peculiar use of language. Once
interpretation is simplified into a Christological expression of grace, God's word can be more fully present in human language.
incommensurability
between inner word and
the tension between God's inner word and human
Consequently,
language dissolves, and, according to Luther, the divinity of Christ is
disguised beneath the forms of language, asHe iswithin the form of human flesh. 15 From this, it follows that theology is, as Isaiah Berlin describes it, "nothing but grammar concerned with the words of the
Holy Ghost. "16
The diminishment of allegory in Protestant readings of the Bible
was compensated for by the greater Christological significance assigned to all language. While this encouraged an increased literal
ism in reading holy writ, it also discouraged the presumption that Biblical language has meaning by virtue of allegorical reference. From
such a theological shift, Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder developed more or less secular theories of language suggest
ing that language bears the full possibilities of meaning in its very form. 17 For Hamann, this means that words bear an emotional con
tent in themselves and that neither the world nor language has a priv
relative to the other; furthermore, reason and intu ition, or perception, are fully and inextricably confused with and
ileged position
In other words, we cannot get underneath either or the world to view the other, nor can we think except
through language.
language
through the grammar of our language. 18 What Ihave called Finnegans
Wake's theological lesson exposes this same kind of entanglement of world, reason, and language. The Wake's theological lesson, unlike
Luther's, shows that it is not Christ that we find in our language but ourselves threatened by nonsense, sleep, and death.
How do or can we see ourselves in Finnegans Wake in this way? Or 221
into the claim that God
especially beings as
? This content downloaded from 128. 135. 12. 127 on Sun, 16 Nov 2014 05:34:21 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
? ? kind of self-reflection or Luther's tracing of divinity in the words of the Holy Spirit be
rather, how can either Augustine's
grammatical
enacted without God? What kind of moral self-reflection
Finnegans Wake to be a response to the predicament prompting these questions, the predicament that would motivate writing such a text and the one that would motivate our reading it. What has replaced God in theWake are particular kinds of nonsense that, like Luther's God, are within language itself: it is against this limit that we are
forced to reflect and see ourselves.
Ifwe enter into theWake through the indeterminacy that accompa nies the words "spiritual" and "exercises," then we are faced with two questions. The first is a question about "exercises," about read
ing: "What kind of meaningfulness is left if one no longer knows or understands how the words in Finnegans Wake are about something
or anything? " This is a question concerning the aboutness or inten tionality of language. The second question is amodem descendant of
the query "what is the soul? " and follows from the previous question:
is reading Finnegans Wake a human activity?
These two queries, however, are not really questions at all. It is not
clearwhat would count as answers to either of them. Consequently, it would be more accurate to call them riddles. In order to respond to
these riddles, we are required to read outside the bounds of interpre tative propriety with what can look like eclecticism but is really an attempt to construct oneself and one's understanding within a theo logical stance or rather to determine what will count as this kind of stance. This means undoing, as the Wake undoes, the historical and
duce or inhabit when the limits of the world
flicting set of fragments of science, technology, social anachronistic religion, psychological fantasy, and so on? Iunderstand
frames from within which we are trained to think.
interpretative
There are, of course, limits, but we have no way of determining what
these limits will and should be. This does not mean one should read without limits, by free association. In fact, the inability of any inter
pretative frame to control the Wakean "chaosmos . . . moving and
changing every part of the time" (FW 118. 21-23) means that reading requires thinking about what can and should count as a limit to our
reading.
II
The language of Finnegans Wake where "Som's wholed, all's part ed" is "[b]inomeans to be comprendered" (FW 563. 32, 285. 27-28). So why read it? Not surprisingly, there is a long-standing tradition that assumes that this question can best be answered by answering the
222
are constructed
can we pro as a con
prejudice,
?
His condition ofmoral and theological confusion is exposed through self-attention, or, as he says, "a profound self-examination . . .
dredged up a heap of all my misery and set it 'in the sight of my heart'" (VDI. xii. 28). His listening within this condition through faith allows him to hear in the voice of a child a command from God to
"'pick up and read'" (VIII. xii. 29) and, by following this command through his own faith, he reads a randomly chosen passage from scriptures that he understands as specifically directed towards his own condition. This moment of reading provides an insight into his relation toGod, but it is also an act of conversion. Reading the scrip tures is itself a figure for the self-attention and reading of his life
toward and through God's grace in the Confessions. Such attention
and reading is not an attempt to discover any depth of person or mind but is, rather, a calling upon God (I. i. l), a calling that is an attempt to understand and situate oneself within the stability of
God's grace in the face of human fallenness (the two premises above).
The reading of his life, theworld, and the holy text that Augustine
pursues in Confessions is fundamentally a form of Christian
that lies beyond the reading process," as Brian Stock notes, requires
self-atten tion. Reading, for Augustine, in order "to ascend to a type of truth
the organizing presence of God as the transcendent
which we see our fallenness. 12 Augustine writes in his Confessions:
"Butwhile he is speaking, Lord, you turned my attention back to myself. You took me up from behind, my own back where I had
placed myself (Ps. 20. 13) and you setme before my face (Ps. 49. 2. 1) so that I could see how vile Iwas, how twisted and filthy, covered with
sores and ulcers" (VIILvii. 16). Augustine's summary of his self-reflec tion describes a hermeneutic education that remakes our human
stance toward the world and God by reconstituting the linguistic forms within which we configure both this stance and the reality of
ourselves in relation to theworld
selves within our language and practices.
and God. We discover God and our
A fundamental
word, theWord of God, and human language, a distance that is part
ly breached by our interpretative practices. This distance, however,
also establishes a kind of indeterminacy within human language that
marks the
incommensurability
between the inner word and our ordi
220
distance remains between what he calls the inner
limit against
? This content downloaded from 128. 135. 12. 127 on Sun, 16 Nov 2014 05:34:21 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
? ? This
nary language.
human language is countered by an allegorical similarity, inwhich, as
Augustine describes it, "the sound [of aword] is a body, but the sig nificance is, so to speak, the soul of the sound. "13 This is the distance
between humanity and divinity14
An important continuity exists between the Reformers,
Martin Luther, and Augustine. Augustine pictured human
radically dependent on God, highlighting the fallenness and empti
ness of human life that Luther would
develop
justifies human beings through His grace alone (an interpretation of
Romans 1. 17). Self-reflection as a spiritual exercise in Philo's sense of
askesis, however, cannot help but be transformed, in Luther's under
standing of God's making humans just through grace, by the sense that we do not discover theWord of God but that theWord discovers
us. This transformation marks an important fracture in the history that leads to Finnegans Wake and its peculiar use of language. Once
interpretation is simplified into a Christological expression of grace, God's word can be more fully present in human language.
incommensurability
between inner word and
the tension between God's inner word and human
Consequently,
language dissolves, and, according to Luther, the divinity of Christ is
disguised beneath the forms of language, asHe iswithin the form of human flesh. 15 From this, it follows that theology is, as Isaiah Berlin describes it, "nothing but grammar concerned with the words of the
Holy Ghost. "16
The diminishment of allegory in Protestant readings of the Bible
was compensated for by the greater Christological significance assigned to all language. While this encouraged an increased literal
ism in reading holy writ, it also discouraged the presumption that Biblical language has meaning by virtue of allegorical reference. From
such a theological shift, Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder developed more or less secular theories of language suggest
ing that language bears the full possibilities of meaning in its very form. 17 For Hamann, this means that words bear an emotional con
tent in themselves and that neither the world nor language has a priv
relative to the other; furthermore, reason and intu ition, or perception, are fully and inextricably confused with and
ileged position
In other words, we cannot get underneath either or the world to view the other, nor can we think except
through language.
language
through the grammar of our language. 18 What Ihave called Finnegans
Wake's theological lesson exposes this same kind of entanglement of world, reason, and language. The Wake's theological lesson, unlike
Luther's, shows that it is not Christ that we find in our language but ourselves threatened by nonsense, sleep, and death.
How do or can we see ourselves in Finnegans Wake in this way? Or 221
into the claim that God
especially beings as
? This content downloaded from 128. 135. 12. 127 on Sun, 16 Nov 2014 05:34:21 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
? ? kind of self-reflection or Luther's tracing of divinity in the words of the Holy Spirit be
rather, how can either Augustine's
grammatical
enacted without God? What kind of moral self-reflection
Finnegans Wake to be a response to the predicament prompting these questions, the predicament that would motivate writing such a text and the one that would motivate our reading it. What has replaced God in theWake are particular kinds of nonsense that, like Luther's God, are within language itself: it is against this limit that we are
forced to reflect and see ourselves.
Ifwe enter into theWake through the indeterminacy that accompa nies the words "spiritual" and "exercises," then we are faced with two questions. The first is a question about "exercises," about read
ing: "What kind of meaningfulness is left if one no longer knows or understands how the words in Finnegans Wake are about something
or anything? " This is a question concerning the aboutness or inten tionality of language. The second question is amodem descendant of
the query "what is the soul? " and follows from the previous question:
is reading Finnegans Wake a human activity?
These two queries, however, are not really questions at all. It is not
clearwhat would count as answers to either of them. Consequently, it would be more accurate to call them riddles. In order to respond to
these riddles, we are required to read outside the bounds of interpre tative propriety with what can look like eclecticism but is really an attempt to construct oneself and one's understanding within a theo logical stance or rather to determine what will count as this kind of stance. This means undoing, as the Wake undoes, the historical and
duce or inhabit when the limits of the world
flicting set of fragments of science, technology, social anachronistic religion, psychological fantasy, and so on? Iunderstand
frames from within which we are trained to think.
interpretative
There are, of course, limits, but we have no way of determining what
these limits will and should be. This does not mean one should read without limits, by free association. In fact, the inability of any inter
pretative frame to control the Wakean "chaosmos . . . moving and
changing every part of the time" (FW 118. 21-23) means that reading requires thinking about what can and should count as a limit to our
reading.
II
The language of Finnegans Wake where "Som's wholed, all's part ed" is "[b]inomeans to be comprendered" (FW 563. 32, 285. 27-28). So why read it? Not surprisingly, there is a long-standing tradition that assumes that this question can best be answered by answering the
222
are constructed
can we pro as a con
prejudice,
? This content downloaded from 128. 135. 12. 127 on Sun, 16 Nov 2014 05:34:21 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
? ? "what is Finnegans Wake about? " James S. Atherton, in The Books at the "Wake," suggests that this is the fundamental question for critics. 19
In response to the demand to determine what the book is about,
critics often delineate some interpretative domain within which the
Wake gains a subject matter. Thus, it is about language, according to Ronald E. Buckalew, about culture (Christine Froula), about our psy
chology (Margot Norris), or about themind (Sheldon Brivic)? and so
question
on. 20 Such arguments, while
cannot help but take the form of special pleading or even of an apolo
getics for away of interpreting, sanctioned by the radical indetermi nacy of the text.
Such interpretative answers to the question "what is the Wake about? " are encouraged because it is not clear how the language of
theWake could be about anything, with two possible exceptions. They are exceptions only because their objects require only aminimum
interpretative frame. Inwriting Finnegans Wake, Joyce claimed that he was attempting to describe our night life, and in so doing he had to
put English to sleep (in the double sense of this phrase). Consequently, as John Bishop, in Joyce's Book of theDark, has shown rather convincingly, the Wake is literally a re-description of the night
life of amissing individual. 21 Because, however, this person "aslip" in the text ismissing (FW 377. 26,597. 12), he or she could be everyone or
anyone. The other object readily available for interpretation is the Wake itself. There are numerous versions of this, usually embedded in
other kinds of interpretations- A book about itself, however, pressures "about" in such away that not only is the text animated with a kind of intention, but it is difficult not simply to translate "about" into re
description. A Wakean sentence can be seen as a re-description of
itself as awhole and in parts. This need not be paradoxical. I can say,
"This is a story about telling a story. " It is not clear, however, how a sentence can be a re-description of itself. We can use a sentence to re describe a sentence or a story, but that isnot the same thing as trans
lating meaning into re-description. Thus, the Wake, if construed as a
producing interesting interpretations,
of itself, would be a re-description of a re-description. This is close to nonsensical22 One might call these literal interpreta
tions in order to capture the obviousness and general intelligibility of
their objects.
I do not want to criticize these two ways of reading (indeed, Iwant
to protect them). In both cases, however, the coherence of reading requires a sense of aboutness that the text cannot provide. How can theWake be about anything when even these objects, an absent sleep er and the Wake itself, unravel the intentionality of language? This
does not only mean that we should provide a reason for why a par 223
re-description
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? ? ticular sentence is formed in the way it is (Bishop provides excellent explanations and justifications for this), but we must also ask how
can be lost.
What does itmean for language to be about something or any
thing? The late nineteenth-century German philosopher Franz Brentano, in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, argues that
the intentional (aboutness) constitutes our mental experience:
Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of theMiddle Ages called the intentional (ormental) inexistence of an
object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously ref erence to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be under
stood 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, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved,
in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. 23
To be about X seems to require a relation between a thought and X. 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 relations. 24 In this passage, the verbs
"refer," "symbolize," "suggest," and "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
the problem has shifted from the relation between language and object to the status of this object, which in this case is imaginary. Brentano uses the model of the imaginary object as a pattern for describing all of our mental stances toward the world. The aboutness
of our language is immanent within our attitudes and statements. In
intentionality
world"),
this is simply to replace themystery of the aboutness of our language with themystery of the immanence of the world in our statements.
Brentano's description of intentionality attempts to translate onto logical distinctions (claims about the world) into psychological or
many ways,
phenomenological distinctions (claims about our
Ludwig Wittgenstein, on the other hand, attempts to dissolve these
psychological
and
phenomenological
distinctions into the intersub
jective coherence of language. The intentionality of our language is not dependent on the attachment of language to the world. Rather,
according toWittgenstein, intentional statements (Iwish that x; I expect y; I have a suspicion about z) are matched by statements that describe their fulfillment, verification, denial, failure, and so forth. 25
Such a description of intentionality, while itmakes our mental con tent accessible to others, reduces aboutness to an agreement between,
224
experience).
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? ? for example, an order and the description of its fulfillment. Thus, the
intentionality of language is determined by the way we figure kinds of sentences in relation to each other. Ihave to simplify here, but if
intentionality is reduced to an agreement
in language, then the problem of the relation between language and the world is replaced by the problem of how we inhabit language. We
are left with the question "how do we find ourselves within lan guage? " The short answer is, I think, through nonsense.
What an utterance is about, its intentional targets, are formulated
through language, so that the way language
by an agreement between language and a thing in the world but by an agreement within language between two related statements. The
intentional targets are within language, which iswhy, by deforming language into nonsense, we can lose the way the world becomes vis ible to us as something to talk about. Once a language cannot be used to articulate agreement between, for example, an expectation and its fulfillment, it cannot be about anything anymore. This suggests that
all interpretations of Finnegans Wake are not about theWake at all; they
are simply about themselves as interpretations.
Should we then abandon interpretation, claim it is senseless to
speak about what Wakean language is about? Endless and endlessly
replaceable interpretations would seem to serve little point. Ifwe abandon interpretation, however, what is left? Wakean language does not have any recognizable criteria of application to the world. Ifwe
cannot apply this language to the world, we must find the world within it: "[b]etween his voyous and her consinnantes" (FW 485. 10
11). The agreement in the Wake between world and statement is not
intentional but punning. There is agreement among world, language, and an "I" or a "we" in nonsense.
If Finnegans Wake enacts the world of an absent sleeper, as Bishop
then our failure to read backwards into his or her life or con
every sentence Joseph Conrad's claim that for anything to be art it
must justify itself in every line. 26What any sentence means collapses
into how we justify the particularity of the sentence, that is, how we
justify the nonsense of any particular sentence. Such justification means that we reflect upon ourselves (prosoche), our reading, our
making sense and not making sense of the Wake, through the very nonsense of the text. We must read ourselves into the text, just as we must read sense into nonsense. How can one do this? One way is to
ask the riddle-question: "Is reading Finnegans Wake a human activi 225
argues, sciousness,
into amind that we would recognize as our own, forces us to place our minds as the intentional target of the text. But this would mean that we do not understand ourselves. How could this be our night life, our dreams, our absence? Joyce forces to the surface of
between descriptions with
is about something is not
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? ? ty? "
What I am suggesting here is that Finnegans Wake separates reading
er, is about ourselves. But what does the Wake say about ourselves,
which would mean, in the context ofmy discussion of intentionality, what kind of thing arewe that can be talked about through nonsense?
"Ourselves" ismeant here as "us human beings. " This might suggest
a kind of test where only someone who asks the question about
whether reading the Wake is a human activity is a human being. I remain an agnostic about the answer to this. A question remains,
from interpreting. An interpretation
but about itself as an interpretation; our reading of the Wakef howev
arewe that we can be that which the Wake could be about? " or "what arewe that we can be targeted by the need for the kind of justification the Wake demands? "
Ill
Although Finnegans Wake can be interpreted in any number of ways, Ihave been arguing that it cannot be read as being about any
thing. The nonsense of the text separates reading from interpretation. Ihave suggested that this shifts the site of intentionality towards us,
as readers. This does not mean simply that our interpretations betray us, as if they were slips of the tongue or Rorschach tests. Any argu
ment about themeaning of our interpretations would simply allego rize one interpretation into another. Ifwe refuse to equate our inter
pretations with reading, with claims about what the text means, then we can no longer properly ask questions like "what does this sen
tence, passage, textmean? " Instead, we have to begin from the under standing that our reading confesses our being within and against lan
guage.
In Finnegans Wake, Augustine's conversation with God is replaced
with a conversation with nonsense, generating a theological crisis or
what Joyce calls a "theoperil" (FW 223. 28). The divine threat in Finnegans Wake emerges as the threat of nonsense that ismeant to
trace the limits of our language and of ourselves as human beings. Both language and the nonsense in the Wake are a dreaming into the world, not into ourselves. T. S. Eliot writes in his essay on Dante, "We
have nothing but dreams, and we have forgotten that seeing visions? a practice now relegated to the aberrant and uneducated?
was once a more significant, interesting, and disciplined kind of dreaming.
