No More Learning

In forcing the question "is reading Finnegans Wake a human activi ty? " the Wake ties our humanness to nonsense. The Wake exerts what
Iwould call a theological pressure. Iuse this phrase because Wakean nonsense shows our relation to the fundamental limits within which we are anything, which is the same as the fundamental shifting limits
between sense and nonsense. This means we should read theWake as a description of how the limits of linguistic sense match the limits in relation to which we understand ourselves as human beings.
This is the effect of Joyce's lists? to place the world enumerated against us and in this offer targets for sense and identification. But once art identification ismade, as a result of an interpretation (for
example, the claim that the Wakean phrase "alphybettyformed
is a version of the Wake? FW 183. 13), the meaning remains unclear. In other words, most uses of "meaning" are not equivalent to
most uses of "interpretation. " Is the meaning of Finnegans Wake the
list?
following
My wud! The warped flooring of the lair and soundconducting walls
verbage"
. . . were
. . . doubtful
literatured . . .
with burst
alphybettyformed ahems and
loveletters, telltale sto
thereof ries,
viasses,
lucifers,,. . counterfeit franks, best intentions,. . . gloss teeth for a tooth, . . . inversions of all this chambermade music one stands, given a grain of goodwill, a fair chance of actually seeing the whirling dervish,
Tumult, son of Thunder, self exiled inupon his ego, anightlong a shak
persianly eggshells,
vivlical ahahs, imeffible tries
dictas, visus
umbique,
at speech unasyllabled, you owe mes, eyoldhyms, fluefoul smut, fallen
ompiter
ing betwixtween white or reddr hawrors, noondayterrorised 227
to skin and
verbage,
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? ? writing themystery of himsel in fur
tive means through which this "him" becomes visible as an "I" to
himself. "Furniture," however, also marks a limit to both the "I," his
particularity, and language, which we designate "matter," or what George Berkeley calls "the furniture of earth. "28 "Furniture" and "lan
as limits are incommensurable domains that are written together by Wakean language and, thus, by a writing that is nonsen
that
replaces the intentional agreement in ordinary language.
What, however, is "the mystery of himsel," the mystery of any "I"?
In this passage, "himsel," an ineluctable phantom, writes while sit ting in furniture with himself a piece of furniture determined and
defined by materiality. This "mystery of himsel in furniture" becomes at the end of theWake, when the sleeper is awakening, the "furnit of heupanepi world" (FW 611. 18). "[F]urnit" contains fuit (Latin for "as
itwas") and furnus (Latin for "oven" or "fireplace") and can be read
simply as "burn it. " "[F]umit" can be translated, also, as "'as itwas' burns and is a furnace. " This burning is established as a thing when "furnit" puns on "the furniture of earth. " Consequently, the being and stability of the past condensed into furniture contains Heraclean
flux. "[H]eupanepi" consists of the Greek eu (good), pan (all), and epi (upon). Thus "furnit of heupanepi world" can be translated as "the furniture of the flux of the good upon all the world burns into a fur
nace. "
This kind of nonsense sentence promises profundity. Before we
accept or reject that promise as something we can understand, as an
expectation about ourselves and the world? in other words, before we say what this promise means? we must discover how it can be about ourselves or theworld. If the puns of Finnegans Wake should be
read through either something like Augustine's self-reflection by way of language towards God or through something like Luther's writing
bone by an ineluctable phantom. . . niture. (FW 183. 08484. 10)
guage"
. . . writing
the
furniture" to describe both "furniture" and language as the constitu
I take "an ineluctable
phantom
mystery
of himsel in
expresses a kind of agreement among
sical. This writing-together
"furniture," "language," and "himsel" within a nonsense
towards the presence of God in the grammar of human
language,
then when we look into Wakean language, there is nothing to find
there but the looking itself. This is not quite circular, except, as Henry
David Thoreau notes, in theway art's delusive promise about looking through another's eyes (to see ourselves) is circular. 29 We have made amistake ifwe believe that seeing through another's eyes, that dis
covering ourselves looking for ourselves in Finnegans Wake, will pro
vide us with new
knowledge
about what we are. Ifwe read with this
228
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? ? kind of goal inmind, we either discover something trivial (we see what we always see) or uninformative (we would no longer be seeing
ourselves, being now something different). In the case of Finnegans Wake, there are no new facts to discover, because its language cannot
be about anything in any intelligible sense of "about. " We are thus presented with three options: 1)We can try to redeem "about" with in the Wakean language game; 2) we can accept this loss of intention
ality, but then itwould be unclear why anyone would read theWake;
3) or we can read ourselves (as the missing
language) against and in relation to this loss of sense. It is this last
option that I am suggesting we attempt. What Finnegans Wake demands is not interpretations but responses.
What would be a way of responding to the "furnit of heupanepi
to "the furniture of the flux of the good upon all the world burns into a furnace"? As the sleeper awakens into consciousness at the end of the Wake, under the sun and in rising color, some "part of it . . . had shown itself . . . unable to absorbere" (FW 611. 17-19). In
other words, as the sleeper seemingly awakens, some part ofwhatev
er he or she is shows itself as unable to absorb light because it is not matter. The "part of it. . . unable to absorbere" is that which is noth
ing more than present, than change, described by the phrase I am
translating as "the furniture of the flux of the good upon all theworld burns into a furnace. " What part of a person is this? What part of a person is not matter? If the Wake is itself a representation of that part,
then itmay be a representation of the soul. The soul, however, is shown to be the shifting limits of sense and nonsense made visible
through our reading (as part of a reflection of our entering and exit ing from Wakean language). "Furnit of heupanepi world" describes
being between things (furniture) and loss (burning), as a limit to them both. One implication of finding ourselves within language as non sense is that one cannot get any more meaning out of our own self
reflection than we can out of this passage in theWake. And themean
ing of this passage is a description of the limit to themeaning of this
world,"
passage.
about us, as human
This iswhat we are, and, thus, Wakean nonsense can be
beings.
"About" in the previous sentence cannot mean what "about" ordi
narily means. Nonsense cannot be about anything. What Ihave sug
therefore, is that we should read against our own interpreta tions of the Wake, in order to re-expose the limits between sense and nonsense that our interpretations hide. The loss of intentionality, the
aboutness of our language, in Finnegans Wake precipitates a version of the same crisis that the theologian Karl Barth describes, in The Epistle to the Romans, as our standing "before an irresistible and all-embrac
ing dissolution of the world, of time and things and me, before a pen 229
gested,
intentional target of its
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? ? etrating and ultimate KRISIS, before the supremacy of a negation by which all existence is rolled up. "30 Finnegans Wake shows that this cri sis threatens less the world or our language than our status within both. The vanishing of any intentional target forWakean language
us out as its target. If the Wake is about us, then we are
it only ifwe can find away tomatch ourselves with how it is nonsen
sical. There is no simple description of this, except to say that any
picks
reading
of theWake is also a description of what we are, so that we can, in reading theWake, describe a fundamental sense of time that is bound tohow we make sense of things and how this sense can be lost
in the vanishing intentionality enacted by our reading of the Wake. Is
reading Finnegans Wake, however, a human activity? It is certainly a question humans are prone to ask.
NOTES
1Pierre Hadot, "Ancient Spiritual Exercises and 'Christian Philosophy/"
Philosophy as a Form of Life (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1993). Further ref erences will be cited parenthetically in the text.
2
See Socrates, Theaetetus, ed. Myles Burnyeat, trans. M. J. Levett (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990), and Philo of Alexandria, Philo, trans. F. H.
Colson (Cambridge:Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), p. 84. While I follow Hadot's transcription of this list, I re-translate prosoche as self-attention to emphasize
description
its
meaning
3
in askesis.
SaintAugustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), XII. xxiii. 32. Further references will be cited parenthetical
ly in the text.
4
St. John Cassian, The Conferences, ed. and trans. Boniface Ramsey (New
York: Paulist Press, 1997). For a further discussion of St. John Cassian, see
Owen Chadwick, Western Asceticism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1958).
For a general discussion of exegesis, see Beryl Smalley, The Study of theBible inthMeiddleAges(NotreDame:Univ. ofNotreDamePress,1964),andHenri
de Lubac, Ex? g? seM? di? vale: Les Quatres Sens de V? criture (Paris: Aubier, 1964).
5
See Plato, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982), 352d; see also, in this regard, The Dialogues of Plato: "Eutkyphro," "Apology," "Crito," "Meno," "Gorgias," "Menexenus," trans. R. E. Allen (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), 487e, 501c, 527c. 6
SeeAristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), book 1. 7
Two classic discussions of ancient ethics that bring out these senses of self can be found in JuliaAnnas's TheMorality ofHappiness (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), and John Cooper's Reason and Human Good in Aristotle
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975),
8
See St. Ignatius of Loyola, Exercitia spiritualia: cum versione literall ex auto graphe Hisp? nico (Rome: Marini et B. Morini, 1847), and see Jean-Michel Rabat? , James Joyce,Authorized Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1984), p. 1. Further references to the Rabat? work will be cited parenthetical 230
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? ? ly in the text.
9 See Jacques Derrida, "Two Words for Joyce/' Post-structuralist Joyce, ed.
Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984),
147.
p.
10Robert Polhemus, "The Comic Gospel of 'Shem,'" Comic Faith (Chicago:
Chicago Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 294-338. 11
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. JohnMacquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: Blackwell Publishers, 1962), pp. 23 (H4), 161 (H124).
12Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knoivledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Harvard: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996), p. 191.
13 De Animae sen Augustine, Quantitate Dialogas
(Philadelphia; Peter Reilly 1924), 32. 66.
Questionum Liber
14See Augustine, De Trinitate (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 1968), 16. 10. 19.
15See Martin Luther, Werke: kritische Gesammtausgabe, Tischreden (Weimar: H. B? hlau, 1912-1921), vol. 15.
16
Johann Georg
Hamann's theories of language? see TheMagus of theNorth: J, G. Hamann and
theOrigins ofModern Irrationalism (London: JohnMurray, 1993).
Hamann read
of Luther's remarks in Johann Albrecht Bengel, Gnomon novi testamenti in quo ex nativa verborum vi simplictas, profunditas, concinnitas, salubritas sensuum coelestium indicatur (Tubingen: Henr. Philippi Schrammii, 1742), preface, sec tion 14, p. [xxiv]? see Bii lO. lff.
17See such representative texts asHamann's Betrachtungun ? ber dieHeilige Schrift (Nuremberg: Lechner, 1816), and Johann Gottfried Herder's Christliche
Schriften (Riga: J. F. Hartknoch, 1794-1798).
18The general outline ofHamann's picture of the relationship between lan
guage and 19
the world
is similar to that of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Isaiah Berlin discusses how this idea resonated with
The Books at the "Wake" Univ. Press, 1959), p. 15.
Southern Illinois
James
S.
Atherton,
(Carbondale:
20See Ronald E. Buckalew, "Night Lessons on Language/Book II, chapter ii,"A Conceptual Guide to "Finnegans Wake" ed. Michael H. Begnal and Fritz
Senn (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1974); Christine Froula, Modernism's Body: Sex, Culture, ana Joyce (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996); Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe of "Finnegans Wake"
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974); and Sheldon Brivic, Joyce the Creator (Madison: Univ. ofWisconsin Press, 1985).
21 Book theDark Univ. ofWisconsin Press, John Bishop, Joyce's of (Madison:
1985).
22This gives us another answer: it is about nonsense, which is to say that
in being a kind of nonsense, and being about itself, itmust be about nonsense. This kind of claim makes nonsense out of themeaning of "about/7 Beyond generating a typology of the kinds of nonsense, it is not clear why this claim is not itself nonsense. Such a claim could, of course, be a part of some theory
of nonsense. Reading Finnegans Wake requires thinking about nonsense and maybe even generating a typology of nonsense, but it isunclear that it could
itself be about nonsense.
23Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. Antos C
231
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? ? Rancurello, D. B, Terrell, and Linda L. McAllister (New York: Humanities
Press, 1973),p. 88.
24A description of our relation to theworld cannot use the concept of rela
tion. This difficulty leads to claims that our relation to theworld is indescrib able. Brentano counters this by arguing that our reference to objects is imma
nent within our intentional stances.
25 York:
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New Macmillan
Publishers, 1953), ? ? 136,429,458.
26
204.
28George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning thePrinciples ofHuman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982), ? 6.
Conrad, Doubleday Publishers,
to The Nigger of the Narcissus (New York: 1914), p. 11.
preface
27T. S. Eliot, SelectedEssays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World,
Joseph
29Henry David Thoreau, "Economy," Waiden, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York:Modem Library, 1992).
30Karl Barth, The Epistle to theRomans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1933), iii. 21.
232
I960), p.
Knowledge
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?