The Waste Land exposes as its own
animating
principle of order or meaning
something like the following conditional: If we are dying, our living is counterfactual.
something like the following conditional: If we are dying, our living is counterfactual.
Brett Bourbon - 1996 - Constructing a Replacement for the Soul
And if I were to rehearse that moment to myself I should assume a particular expression, I think of certain happenings, breathe in a particular way, arouse certain feelings in myself.
I might think up a conversation, a whole scene in which that hatred flared up.
And I might play this scene through
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
? with feelings approximating to those of a real occasion. That I have actually
experienced something ofthe sort will naturally help me to do so. (PI? 642)
This is clear enough for my purposes. It is important to see that the sentence "At that moment I hated him" is a judgment or interpretation. It's meaning is, therefore, part of thatinterpretation(meaningisnotalwayslikethis). Therecognitionofthishatredandthe fact ofthis hatred can be interpreted further: "IfI now become ashamed ofthis incident, I am ashamed of the whole thing: of the words, of the poisonous tone, etc. " (PI? 643). Wittgensteinthenaskshowdoesthisshameattachtothishatred. WhatexactlyamI ashamed of? "I am not ashamed of what I did then, but of the intention which I had. " -- And didn't the intention lie also in what I did? What justifies the shame? The whole historyoftheincident. "(PI? 644;underlineadded). Whatisincludedinthis"whole history" changes and shifts according to how it is embedded in our lives when we remember this incident. Our moral education might be learning how to describe the limits o f our "whole history" as a manifestation o f a set o f values.
Wittgenstein suggests that what we call our intentions are rather interpretations of what we remember o f our "thoughts, feelings, movements, and also connexions with earlier situations" (PI? 645). Learning the correct interpretation not o f our intentions alone but o f how we figure ourselves with intentions, with shames, with hatreds does not entailremakingourlanguage. Itentailsremakingourselveswithinourordinarylanguage figured within organizing limits (for Wittgenstein often normative limits). One might still expect a battle over what these limits are, for example, over what the limits of the ordinary are or over how we learn or use particular language games. This debate (one o f the
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
206
? debates inFinnegans Wake,or rather the pressure deforming language in the Wake, describesalanguagenotyetformedaroundaparticularhumanbeing. Ourreadingofthe Wake puts on these words as ours directed at the limits formed by nonsense, negation, materiality, causation, interpretation, sense, substance, and so on. Seeing the world as consisting o f these limits [and at times as nothing more than these limits] means thinking theologically).
The figure which Milton uses to describe how interpretation and meaning are embedded in each other, how we manifest ourselves in the interpretive histories we use to describe the totalities we inhabit, is animation. Milton animates books: "For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction o f that living intellect that bred them" (720). These books are not to be judged by men, who have invented "new limbos and new hells wherein they might include our bookswithinthenumberofthedamned"(725). Thejustificationofbooks,liketheir meaning, is a function of their use, for even bad books may allow "the judicious reader. . . to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate" (727). Such a use is a justification o f the books and the reader, but a justification different from the judgment about someone'sorsomething'snatureasgoodorbad. SuchjudgmentisreservedforGod. Books are animated through their potential use as manifest inhabitations (a "vial") of our moral stances. Is this a version o f a use by right without justification?
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
207
? Can we find ourselves within a community in which what counts as a justification becomes unclear? I f the Wake continually requires justification, is it the justification like that which James meditated upon for America?
"Oh, yes; we were awfully dear, for what we are and for what we do"-- it was proud, but it was rather rueful; with the odd appearance everywhere as of florid creations waiting, a little bewilderingly, for their justification, waiting for the next clause in the sequence, waiting in short for life, for time, for interest, for character, for identity itselfto come to them, quite as large spread tables or superfluous shops may wait for guests and customers" (American Scene, 90)
James diagnoses this demand for justification as a waiting for completion in which Americans are thingified as spread tables or superfluous shops, which are then animated by their waiting, by an intentionality directed toward this future completion. Justification, itselfj is enacted as "the next clause in the sequence," life, time, interest, character, and identity. This is a kind o f picture o f being-within. The analogic reduction o f justification to the continuation of the linguistic context within which meaning emerges (a model of James' style) is further analogized back into a psycho-philosophical description of a human being bordered by "life" and "identity". The terms connecting these limits o f soul and mind are well chosen. Life, both the principle of animation (something like energy here)
and the totality o f a life, is in the following "time" abstracted and specialized as the form ofthisdynamismandasthelimitonanyparticularlife. Thisdynamismandlimitisrefined in 'interest', an intentional stance expressing value (priorities) and possibility (a moving toward). Thecontentofthispotentialdynamismandvaluationonesuspectsconstitutes
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
208
? character,bothasapsychologicaltermandamoraljudgment. Thispsychologyis stabilized into metaphysics by Identity: I am. This T am' describes the formal limits o f a particular, and is, therefore, in relation to the generality of life stabilized as a mind. In this model justification requires and is constituted by a model of the relation between the limit described by the soul and that described by the mind.
Aestheticjustification means not ajustification ofany particular word, but that each word justifies the whole. Consequently, it is not that each sentence o f the Wake is a microcosm of the Wake, a holographic reflection as are the heterocosoms of romantic art or Schlegels romantic fragments. The appearance ofmimicry is a way ofjustifying the Wake by offering an interpretation of a particular moment, character, or set of words as an interpretation of the entire book (or let's say of an entire life). Projecting forward towards our death means within the logic ofthe Wake projecting ajustification toward that end, the dreamers, ours, or the books. These justifications are all limited and incomplete, but not because of a limit to our knowledge or understanding. The limitation is a function of
justification proceeding through interpretation. Ajustification is never simply an interpretation that simulates the text. W. Wimsatt and M. Beardsley's are wrong when they claim that "judging a poem is likejudging a pudding of a machine. One demands that it work. It is only because an artifact works that we infer the intention o f an artificer" (4). Thispictureassumesapoemworksandexistsasanartifact,asamechanism. Howdoesa poem work separate from its interpretation? What is the output of a poem that can be
judged. Forbothapuddingandamachinewecanclearlyarticulatethecriteriabywhich
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
209
? to judge if its performance is successful or not. No such articulation is possible for a poem.
A text like Firmegans Wake, consisting o f a continuous commentary on itself is nothing but enveloping facts and no text: "Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content o f any document to the sore neglect o f the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is hurtful to sound sense (and let it be added to the truest taste) a s " (FW109. 12-16). What follows from the ellipse is nonsense, so that one can determine in any sensible way what ignoring the enveloping facts would mean. What constitutes these facts is also not clear (nor is the literal or psychological content). A
justification of the Wake must include a version of the Wake but in this it is not the Wake, not only because each interpretation will not be able to include itself as an interpretation, butbecauseinterpretationalwayspointselsewhere. Thedetectivedoesnotsolvethe crime in the same way as the criminal commits it. The detective and the criminal might seemclose,andyetintheirdifferenceliestheentireworldof"envelopingfacts. " Wecan more easily see that the diagnoses o f the disease is different from the disease; but do we imagine a virus as a criminal? The historian writes history, and in this makes history, but not the same history he writes about:
The boxes, if I may break the subject gently, are worth about four pence pourbox but I am inventing a more patent process, foolproof and pryperfect (I should like to ask that Shedlock Homes person who is out for removing the roofs o f our criminal classics by what deductio ad domunum he hopes de tacto to detect anything unless he happens ofhimself, movibile tectu, to have a slade off) after
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
210
? which they can be reduced to a fragment oftheir true crust by even the youngest of Margees if she will take place to be seated and smile if I please. (FW165-66. 30-. 02)
The Sigla used by Joyce to describe Finnegans Wake was a box: ? . "These boxes," invented into inscrutability, contain his kiribis pouch filled with litterish fragments lurk dormant in the paunch ofthat halpbrother ofa herm, a pillarbox" (FW66. 29-. 31). A 'herm' is a Greek four-cornered pillar on which is placed a head, usually of Hermes.
Again the Wake. Trying to open the shedlock, a make a home a home, is Shedlock Homes whose reductio ad absurdum is also a deductio ad domunum, leading to the Lord. How can we touch {de iacto) god, enter into domum dei, unless we have a slate off our own roof (a chip of the old block; a part for whole)? If we remove a slate we can see inside, if not another's head, then into our own, if we discover ourselves (or not) in our children for example. Are these boxes, our minds, our world, our god, fragments like pieces of crust once they are "foolproof and pryperfect", or will the youngest o f Margees reduce these
boxes of ourselves and the world to fragments of the true cross, or the crust of the bread ofthe body ofChrist. Would this 'youngest ofMargees" have a slade offher roof, or is it that having taken a place in the world her smile if the text pleases (or more insidiously if the text or the author decrees) reduces these promises of sense and benediction to crusts?
These boxes, the targets of our interpretation that form new boxes to interpret, are equivalent to the grammatical soul Keats generated, except that these grammatical markers have no inside. Keats "soul-making" produced a becoming within a single grammaticalentity. ThereisnosuchstabilityintheWake,whereanybox,anysentence
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
211
? marks a becoming in relation to another box, another sentence. This means in effect that Finnegans Wake (and Philosophical Investigations) do not satisfy one of Keats' criteria for poetry: "They will explain themselves--as all poems should do without any comment"(2 January 1818: Letters, n, 21). They constitute new criteria.
1In his Disputed Questions on the Soul, Aquinas asks "Can the human soul be both a form and a real particular (hoc aliquid)T
2 Sir Edward Sullivan in his Introduction to The Book o f the Kells, cited in McHugh (1980).
3". . . speeching, yeh not speeching noh man liberty is, he drinks up words, scilicet, tomorrow till recover w ill not, all too many much illusiones throgh photoprismic velamina o f hueful panepiphanal world spectacunun o f Lord Joss, the o f which zoantholic furniture, from mineral through vegetal to animal, not appear to full up together M ien man than under but one photoreflection. . . " (FW611. 10-16).
4 Wittgenstein's second note about this on page 59 makes this clear:
Supposeitwereasked: Whendoyouknowhowtoplaychess? Allthetime? orjustwhileyouare makinga move? --Howqueerthatknowinghowtoplaychessshouldtakesuchashorttime,and a game so much longer!
The translation hides the conflation o f "to know" with "can" exploited in the German--"Wann kanst du Schachspielen? ". Wittgensteinremarksontheclosenessofthegrammarof"toknow"and"can"at150 (on page 59) in order to bring out the sense of "mastery' tying knowing and understanding to how we use language. Ifoneaskswhencanyouplaychess? IfIknowhow,allthetime. Whatconstitutesknowing here? being able to play the game. One might ask how many rules can I forget before no longer knowing howtoplay. Thatmightdependonmyopponent Ifmyunderstandingoftheruleswouldnotmakeit even possible for me to win a game then this might constitute a dividing line. If asked "when did you stop understanding that word? " I might not understand this as asking for a time but a criterion like "when I could no longer use it". This possibility for misunderstanding is highlighted in the question about chess. "When"knowinghowtoplaychessisacaseofatonement Atonementwouldbetheconditionwhenone could not ask of oneselfor look with some stupefaction at someone who asks "do you know how to play the whole of chess during each move? " This is notjust a knowing how opposed to a knowing that The playingofchesstakestime--itisconstitutedbyaseriesofmoves. Asking"when? "asksforatimeseries andforanarticulationofthecriteriaallowingforplayingchess: forpossibility. Thispossibilityisnot present in our knowing but in our form of life, in the knowing how, training, social practice, having an opponent or a board. This temporal dimension is brought out by Wittgenstein's "How queer that knowinghowtoplaychessshouldtakesuchashorttime,andagamesomuchlonger! ". Whatconstitutes knowing how can be found as if holographically in every moment of playing chess, if one does indeed know how to play. This present in every moment is the "short time". This knowing how 'now' is not experienced as such, and thus it seems not to be in time at all, rather this taking "such a short time" seems a joke for it doesn't take any time at all. Is this knowing how then a transcendent realm? Each move is not only a fragment of the entire game, but a fragment enacted and implying the possibilities of move and counter-move that constitute the finite system of chess.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
212
? n
THE SEMANTICS OF IDENnTY AND THINGS
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
? 7
The Semantics of Identity and Mind
Both Wittgenstein and Joyce describe thinking toward the limit between the animate and inanimate and sense and nonsense through our involvement within the grammarofourlanguagegames. FinnegansWakeandPhilosophicalInvestigations describe a dynamic grammar that constructs a non-psychological T as a shifting marker throughwhichweinvestourselvesintheselanguagegames. Howweinvestourselvesin these language games and in the world as our world is one way o f understanding how language can animate the world, resuscitate a soul, or construct a mind. I might ask these questions in a number o f moods, for any number o f reasons, most o f which begin in a sense that the world is dead or inanimate, the soul moribund, and the mind unmade or something to make. Beginning here is, however, misleading. Pursuing animation, resuscitation, and construction asks, at some fundamental level, how we inhabit the forms of our experience as if we ourselves are inanimate. In asking this we are led to the edge of nonsense, in search o f manuals describing either how to animate ourselves or how to animate things.
T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Heidegger's "Das Ding" want to re-animate the world. Thustheyarestudiesinwhatitmeanstobeanimateandinwhatconstitutesa world. WhenIbegananalyzingEliot'sandHeidegger'smethodsofanimation,Iimagined they would articulate inverse ways of conceptualizing being as identities or things within, respectively, subjunctive and semantic modes. What I understood as Eliots's subjunctive
Notes for this chapter begin on page 247
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
213
? aesthetics, working out a semantics o f identity, I thought would provide a target for Joyce's figuration o f what I have called the distance between mind and soul. Similarly, Heidegger's attempt to translate the real into the meaningful, I thought, would describe an ontological grammar akin to Wittgenstein's enactment of time in Philosophical
Investigations, but in a form that fails to provide a way for human beings to invest themselves within this grammar (and thus it fails as a description of our involvement in the world and in language). This limited investigation ofboth Eliot and Heidegger, however, was soon eclipsed by the possibilities for understanding how the rejection o f substance as a description o f what is real can lead to the hypostatization o f identity as a void (in The Waste Land) or as a grammatical principle from which things and meaning enfold along fragments o f time (in "Das Ding"). After I had breached the walls o f their texts, the work of both Eliot and Heidegger seemed two pear trees whose fruit I could not stop picking.
A direct comparison between Eliot and Heidegger and Joyce and Wittgenstein is no longer manageable within the confines ofthis dissertation. My analysis ofEliot and Heidegger, however, is still meant to demonstrate what is at stake in describing the limits of the mind and soul within and against the conceptual and grammatical limits Joyce and Wittgenstein expose. Butwhoiscirclingwhomhasbecomeunclear. Thefollowingchaptershouldbe
read as a preface to both what is at stake in the animation of things and identities attempted in Eliot and Heidegger, and as a prologemenon to the grammatical descriptions o f time and being I will examine in Joyce and Wittgenstein.
In his latter work, Heidegger reconstitutes the ontological claims the world makes on us as semantic functions, as following a conceptual pattern o f meaningful relations. In
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
214
? otherwords,heattemptstoreconstitutewhatsomethingisaswhatitmeans. These ontological claims and semantic possibilities determine Being, not simply as existence, but as the functional condensation o f all meanings o f the verb (to be' into those aspects o f our experience we recognize as things, ourselves, and the world. "Das Ding" enacts the question 'What is the qualitative aspect ofthings? from within a language that can enact
the answer as our re-education; the ontology ofthings in their participation or inhabitation ofBeing can look like a psychology ofthings. Heidegger begins his essay with the question "What is a thing? " He takes this question to be asking something like 'How do things exist? ' or 'What exists for us? '. His answer to these question, however, proceeds tlirough asking 'what does "existence" mean? ', questioning the verb o f 'to be' into its ontological and functional force. We inhabit this force through a redemptive semantics which transforms the concepts o f identity and predication determining existence, 'being' and 'is', from a world both containing and against us, into the categorical semantic ambiguity of the word 'weilen' (dwelling, staying, abiding, lingering) under the pressure of
this re-education.
The Waste Land exposes as its own animating principle of order or meaning
something like the following conditional: If we are dying, our living is counterfactual. The counterfactual or the subjunctive is both what is given as possible, determined within and by language and history and society, and what can be made or created beyond. The relation between quality and quantity is articulated in The Waste Land through an exploration o f how to make the subjunctive real, ontological.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
215
? Coleridge, commenting on the mental schema articulated in Wordsworth's Prelude, re-describes the reciprocal relation between the senses and the world that constructs the mind. Following what he believes was "partly suggested by m e . . . He [Wordsworth] was to treat man as man--a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses" (188). 1 What has changed between Coleridge's Wordworth and Eliot when he writes in "Gerontion"? :
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch: How should I use them for your closer contact?
Such poetry is not simply an expression o f personality. Age and terror and revulsion and the failure of our knowing and knowledge, the realization that not only can the mind and the world be confused with each other, but that a failure of courage or of sense or of meaning can tempt us to deny our mind. What kind o f questions are these? : "Do I dare disturb the universe? "2or "After such knowledge, what forgiveness? " or "I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: How should I use them for your closer contact? "3 or "Shall I set my lands in order? " or '"What! areyou here? "'. 4 We can say at least that questions about the limits of knowledge can be understood as questions about redemption (ofour knowing, ofour language(s), ofourselves). The possibility ofredemption in The Waste Land underwrites a theory of animation (a set of embedded assumptions) that
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
216
? displaces the site of our mind or soul (the between in Finnegans Wake) into the subjunctive. How does one animate possibility? This sounds like a nonsense question. I think, however, that one should understand it to mean that Eliot's use o f possibility highlights the failure o f knowledge, such that the demand to reanimate mind and world is not a rejection o f this failure (skepticism), as in pantheism, but a demand to reanimate
mind and world from within or as this uncertainty.
"What The Thunder Said" in The Waste Land does not promise the sound of
thunder, but the meaning o f a particular burst o f thunder-talk. Joyce gives the thunder a voice as well, but Wakean thunder is not yet caught up into fragmented allegories: it structures the world o f "broken heaventalk" (261. 28) as a semantic/ syntactic/ phonetic limit between the body o f the dreamer, whose turning in the night is signaled by these thunderous peals, and the mind or language he finds himselfbeing or in, which we call the book Finnegans Wake:
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarr hounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthumuk! ) o f a wallstrait oldparr is retale early in bed and later on life down through all Christian minstrelsy. (3. 15-16)
Thunder phonemes repeat and therefore constitute a rhythmic order: mm, nn, onn, t . . . t, h. . . h,bababada,gh. . . gh,etc. Thisrepetition,likethe"Da/Damata. . . "ofEliot's thunder, grows, barnacle-like, through accretion into parodic forms o f human sense: "konnbronntonner" or "toohoohoord": to be able to bum and thunder [G. konnen, brenn, tonner] and 'also who heard? '. Does this make the sense of the thunder a question of training (maybe even scientific training) or of listening or of failing to hear or failing to be
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
217
? a person who can hear, who can recognize 'me' and 'who' in 'toohoohoord'? Joyce has included at least 13 words for thunder in this sound: "thunntro" and "tonnerr" pun the English thunder, German, Donner, Japanese, kaminair, Hindi, karak, Greek, brontao; French lonnerre\ Italian, tuono, Swedish, aska\ Portaguese, trovao\ Irish, tomach, Old Rumanian, tun , Danish, tordenen. Does the inclusion o f these multi-lingual puns in the soundofthethundermakethissoundself-reflexive? Whatthethunderspeaksisitsname, as if in some comedy, 'thunder thunder thunder. ' But this is not God's 'I am that I am. '
The sounds and the name are for us Thunder. They are for us a semantics discovered in the self-replication o f names in a series o f phonemes. Language o f this sort is a dreaming into the world, not into ourselves. Eliot wrote 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,anddisciplinedkindofdreaming. Wetakeitforgranted that our dreams spring from below: possibly the quality of our dreams suffers as a consequence. {SelectedEssays, 204)
What is the ontological status (is it real? ) or the intentional claim (what is it about? ) of a dream exposing the world and not our psychology? Finnegans Wake is such a dream, that is, the world dreaming a mind; so would the world be if constructed by a demon, or if our brain was wired into its vat; or ifwe found ourselves in a world which was made in the way that we were made; culture would be such a dream; so would psychology be a dream intotheworldandnotintous. "IBshearingisindoubtingjustasmyseeingisonbelieving" (FW468. 15-16). Tothinkaboutbelievingthreatensunbelieving. Forthemoment
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
218
? philosophy and poetry will seem "the world, mind, is, was and will be writing its own wrunes for ever, man, on all matters that fall under the ban o f our infrarational senses" (FW19. 35-20. 01).
A certain awe attends the world and its adequacy for us. This adequacy can at least be explained as an effect ofnatural selection. But thejustification ofthe worlds adequacy, its existence as a world for us, can mutate into a further confusion about how a world is constituted for us as our own. Or we might ask how we might lose the world not only to skeptical doubt, but in not knowing how to find ourselves in the world, lost "[tjill human voices wake us, and we drown". 5 In his notes on a philosophy seminar given by Josiah Royce, Eliot criticized philosophical theories o f knowledge as limited by their failure to "treat illusion as real" (Costello, 119). 6 I f I posit the causes o f my dream-vision as bio-chemical interactions in my brain or as a function of some psychological allegory,71 have not explained how the irreality ofmy vision alters what is a world; how can we survive fantasy? "What we should consider is not so much the meaning o f the images, but
the reverse process, that which led a man having an idea to express it in images"(204). Eliot ties this process to the clarity of visual images in allegorical thinking and poetry. Allegory generates meaning even without our being aware o f the particular meaning o f an image. This might be our response to systemic coherence, where the image manifests an order that constitutes the kind of order determining of a world or an organism or a mind.
Eliot's poetry constructs meaning at the edge o f these allegories (or worlds or organisms or minds), where we must always ask what is this poetry in relation to what the worlds are it points to and abuts. This poetry cannot itself function as a form of
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
219
? consciousness as might Romantic poetry. Instead, Eliot's poetry describes limits to both howandwhyweinhabitourformsofmind(s)andworld(s). Thepoetryofallusionand fragmentation in The Waste Land' therefore, functions as grammatical categories written as ifthey were ontological categories describing the limits ofbeing human within the world. Fragments act as interlocking domains, pointing elsewhere, or switching point-of- view, failing to designate some other something (even the allusions do not mean as a
function o f their originary texts). The Waste Land poetic world, enacts subjunctive possibilities (word meanings, other texts, other worlds and persons, other minds that might read nonsense as sense) as the ontological description o f our stance toward each other and the world. In other words, both the conventional pictures o f the world and poetic fantasies and nonsense do not describe possible worlds, but rather pick us out as the limits o f all such possible worlds. 8
The claims that both the world and what counts as the subject or self are determined and limited, and made problematic or only possible by our being betrayed withinandthroughthispoetryasnothingmorethanthelimitofthesepossibilities. Lifeis counterfactual. Claims about what is real are all limit claims; the borders of sense and nonsensesketchedinTheWasteLanddescribethesesamelimits: theconflationofthe semantic and the ontologic draws our psychology into conflicting language games used to capture the interplay between husband and wife and friends, and living and dead, animate andinanimate,symbolicandordinary,etc. Theeffectofthepoetryistorequirea
justification for how we inhabit or project or commit ourselves to different and fluid grammatical (or what we often call psychological) limits: subject, object, self, other, 'I',
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
220
? 'you', 'we', 'they', etc. The patterns of our involvement describe a meta-temporal order that can count as either a mind (ours or someone else's or the worlds) or a world (ours or someone else's or a presupposed given).
How do we confuse minds for world(s)? Thoreau can give us a hint about what it means to be confused enough to ask another version o f this question. In Walden's "Brute Neighbors", he fits the world to the mind, where this fitting is, itself, our awe:
Whydopreciselytheseobjectswhichwebeholdmakeaworld? Whyhasmanjust these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice? I suspect that Pilpay & Co. have put animals to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts. (151)
Do the objects we see make a world? "Make" can almost be read as a semantic pun. Interposing the clause 'which we behold' between the objects and 'making the world' not only pictures our seeing or an 'I' between objects and world, it attaches our beholding to world-making. Thus the question 'why do we make a world with these objects? requires us to answer with another question, 'how do we make a world? , placing these objects and the world on top o f the poetic and engineering modeling power o f our mind, [transcendental aesthetic]; But our seeing is a beholding, or a being held by the objects which might then make a world. These objects make a world, and our seeing is not a Kantian apperception but a perception ofwhat Heidegger calls the 'throwness of being". This would translate Thoreau's question into 'how do objects constitute a world? "; this is one way o f understanding Hiedegger's question "What is a thing? " in "Das Ding".
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
221
? Thoreau, however, nests what makes a world in the questions 'Why these objects? ', 'Why this beholding? ', 'Why a world? '. These questions ask for the criteria (a
justification) that determines what counts as a world: why do these objects make a world? What objects? Look around. Pilpay, falsely believed to have written the Sanskrit fables collectedastheHitopadesa(telleroffables),makesfictionalworldsoftheworld. Already in the pressure Thoreau places on 'beasts ofburden' and 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts', our language functions as our thought. Animals become animals in our stories. But if they are not reduced into fetishes, they manifest "a portion o f our thoughts" (what portion? ) to ourselves as the world. We may think, in other words only what the world offers or the world may only be what we think. We are returned to Parmenides, even inthe difficulty oftranslation that attends his Greek: to yap auto voeiv ecmv xe
Kaisivai. Wecantranslatethisas'becausethesamethingisthoughtasexists'(57). 9 Does this mean that only what is thought exists? Or that to be thought about and to exist are the same? Or even as Sparshott suggested, "'Only what can think can exist? ' Or even 'Thinking and being are the same? "' (110). 10
The adequacy o f the world is understood here as the expression o f meaning, or possibly a theory of meaning, if what counts as a theory is understood to be a problem about how the world means. The adequacy o f the world, therefore, can be determined by how one answers (or if one asks) the question: 'how does the world mean or manifest our thinking (about it) in what it is? '; or 'how do we use the world to manifest our mind to ourselves or to express the world as the world? '
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
222
? The awe attending the adequacy o f the world can seem to be a description o f the mind. The psycho-physiologist Warren McCulloch asks Thoreau's question o f the mind under the aspect o f logical coherence: "What Is a Number that a Man May Know It, and a Man that He May Know a Number? "11 Although his answer returns us to the question, it formulates a model o f time as a probabilistic logic expressed through "all-or-none impulsesoftheneurons"(9). Hesayshisobject,"asapsychologist,"
was to invent a kind of least psychic even, or "psychon," that would have the following properties: First, it was to be so simple an event that it either happened orelseitdidnothappen. Second,itwastohappenonlyifitsboundcausehad happened--shades o f Duns Scotus! --that is, it was to imply its temporal antecedent. Third, it was to propose this to subsequent psychons. Fourth, these were to be compounded to produce the equivalents of more complicated propositions concerning their antecedents. " (8)
The ambiguity in Thoreau's use of "make a world" is mirrored here in McCulloch's attempt "to invent a kind o f psychic event. " Logic is meant to provide a temporal invariant that in essence functions as the identity structure constituting both number and consciousness. Thismodelcanbeunderstoodasatranslationmachine(ofinputsinto outputs) structuring time through causal implication ("imply its temporal antecedent") in a hierarchical system whose final output, grasping an identity (number), mimics its own deep structure o f simple events as a succession o f organized identities (psychons).
Thoreau and McCulloch both describe the world from within, that is, not as a whole, and thus as built out of fragments. They describe, however, different kinds of
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
223
? fragments. Thoreau,torqueingtheKantianlimitbetweenthemindandtheworldinthe stalling circular aesthetic logic of his sentences, marks out his neighbors, the particulars that fit within the world. These particulars present themselves to him in/ within/ as his awe and questioning. This may not seem a fragmentation; it is a peculiar kind. He finds himselfaskinghowtheobjectsfitsowellintoaworld,asifsuchafittingsurprisesus. He
finds himselfin the midst of a quantity of objects, and asks about what qualities (why these? ) fits these particulars within the qualitative whole of our experience and the world. McCulloch understands what exists as countable, and therefore wants to translate the qualitativeexperienceofconsciousnessintocountableunits. Hestructuresthetransitive relation between mind and brain as the instantiation o f identity as the determining atomic units o f mind-existence. Both we and the world inhabit this awe and these numbers.
One way o f reducing ourselves to quantity is to call ourselves clocks timing the world and actions and thoughts, speaking, remembering, returning, and hoping into being someone anyone might see again, surviving either humiliation or infinite diminishment. In such a clock, what someone might imagine the mind to be as the limit o f the world, the first moment must fix all other moments. Such an assumption underlies what was called in the Fifteenth century the problem o f the Absolute Clock. The Dominican philosopher Graziadei of Ascoli writes in his Quaestiones litterales:
Even though time is the measure ofall movement, and there is, at the same time, a multitude o f movements, there is, however, only one numerically single time, and not multiple times; that is so because the first movement is unique, and time concerns this movement and properly. '12
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
? Duhem explains: "Time is an abstract concept formed by the intellect form every concrete movement; it remains always the same, whatever the concrete movements are from which it was formed" (362). This is time abstracted from the world, the creation of a still point or uniform series o f changes in relation to which time emerges as an idealized concept beyond the confusion of change and identity in the world. Heidegger in "Das Ding" and Eliot in The Waste Land twist this abstract series back into the world of things. These orderings oftime within the world constitute a semantics ofthings, an animation ofthe inanimate through the hypostatization o f existing (in various modes and forms) for Heidegger and of identity for Eliot.
Eliot's and Heidegger's investigation ofthe semantics o f'to be' revolve, I think, aroundthedistinctionbetweenredemptionandjustification. Youcanseethisrevolution in Eliot's Four Quartets: "There is only the fight to recover what has been lost and found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions that seem unpropitious"(EC)13; "Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in timepast. Ifalltimeiseternallypresentalltimeisunredeemable"(BN). Thisisonewayof saying we do not know even what redemption might mean. Redemption might require perspicuous description of ourselves and/or the world. 14 But "Words strain, crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension, slip, slide, perish, decay with
imprecision, will not stay in place, will not stay still. "(BN) 'Tor us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. "(EC) "Also pray for those who were in ships, and ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea's lips or in the dark throat which will not reject them or wherever cannot reach them the sound o f the sea bell's perpetual angelus. "(DS)
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
225
?
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
? with feelings approximating to those of a real occasion. That I have actually
experienced something ofthe sort will naturally help me to do so. (PI? 642)
This is clear enough for my purposes. It is important to see that the sentence "At that moment I hated him" is a judgment or interpretation. It's meaning is, therefore, part of thatinterpretation(meaningisnotalwayslikethis). Therecognitionofthishatredandthe fact ofthis hatred can be interpreted further: "IfI now become ashamed ofthis incident, I am ashamed of the whole thing: of the words, of the poisonous tone, etc. " (PI? 643). Wittgensteinthenaskshowdoesthisshameattachtothishatred. WhatexactlyamI ashamed of? "I am not ashamed of what I did then, but of the intention which I had. " -- And didn't the intention lie also in what I did? What justifies the shame? The whole historyoftheincident. "(PI? 644;underlineadded). Whatisincludedinthis"whole history" changes and shifts according to how it is embedded in our lives when we remember this incident. Our moral education might be learning how to describe the limits o f our "whole history" as a manifestation o f a set o f values.
Wittgenstein suggests that what we call our intentions are rather interpretations of what we remember o f our "thoughts, feelings, movements, and also connexions with earlier situations" (PI? 645). Learning the correct interpretation not o f our intentions alone but o f how we figure ourselves with intentions, with shames, with hatreds does not entailremakingourlanguage. Itentailsremakingourselveswithinourordinarylanguage figured within organizing limits (for Wittgenstein often normative limits). One might still expect a battle over what these limits are, for example, over what the limits of the ordinary are or over how we learn or use particular language games. This debate (one o f the
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
206
? debates inFinnegans Wake,or rather the pressure deforming language in the Wake, describesalanguagenotyetformedaroundaparticularhumanbeing. Ourreadingofthe Wake puts on these words as ours directed at the limits formed by nonsense, negation, materiality, causation, interpretation, sense, substance, and so on. Seeing the world as consisting o f these limits [and at times as nothing more than these limits] means thinking theologically).
The figure which Milton uses to describe how interpretation and meaning are embedded in each other, how we manifest ourselves in the interpretive histories we use to describe the totalities we inhabit, is animation. Milton animates books: "For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction o f that living intellect that bred them" (720). These books are not to be judged by men, who have invented "new limbos and new hells wherein they might include our bookswithinthenumberofthedamned"(725). Thejustificationofbooks,liketheir meaning, is a function of their use, for even bad books may allow "the judicious reader. . . to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate" (727). Such a use is a justification o f the books and the reader, but a justification different from the judgment about someone'sorsomething'snatureasgoodorbad. SuchjudgmentisreservedforGod. Books are animated through their potential use as manifest inhabitations (a "vial") of our moral stances. Is this a version o f a use by right without justification?
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
207
? Can we find ourselves within a community in which what counts as a justification becomes unclear? I f the Wake continually requires justification, is it the justification like that which James meditated upon for America?
"Oh, yes; we were awfully dear, for what we are and for what we do"-- it was proud, but it was rather rueful; with the odd appearance everywhere as of florid creations waiting, a little bewilderingly, for their justification, waiting for the next clause in the sequence, waiting in short for life, for time, for interest, for character, for identity itselfto come to them, quite as large spread tables or superfluous shops may wait for guests and customers" (American Scene, 90)
James diagnoses this demand for justification as a waiting for completion in which Americans are thingified as spread tables or superfluous shops, which are then animated by their waiting, by an intentionality directed toward this future completion. Justification, itselfj is enacted as "the next clause in the sequence," life, time, interest, character, and identity. This is a kind o f picture o f being-within. The analogic reduction o f justification to the continuation of the linguistic context within which meaning emerges (a model of James' style) is further analogized back into a psycho-philosophical description of a human being bordered by "life" and "identity". The terms connecting these limits o f soul and mind are well chosen. Life, both the principle of animation (something like energy here)
and the totality o f a life, is in the following "time" abstracted and specialized as the form ofthisdynamismandasthelimitonanyparticularlife. Thisdynamismandlimitisrefined in 'interest', an intentional stance expressing value (priorities) and possibility (a moving toward). Thecontentofthispotentialdynamismandvaluationonesuspectsconstitutes
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
208
? character,bothasapsychologicaltermandamoraljudgment. Thispsychologyis stabilized into metaphysics by Identity: I am. This T am' describes the formal limits o f a particular, and is, therefore, in relation to the generality of life stabilized as a mind. In this model justification requires and is constituted by a model of the relation between the limit described by the soul and that described by the mind.
Aestheticjustification means not ajustification ofany particular word, but that each word justifies the whole. Consequently, it is not that each sentence o f the Wake is a microcosm of the Wake, a holographic reflection as are the heterocosoms of romantic art or Schlegels romantic fragments. The appearance ofmimicry is a way ofjustifying the Wake by offering an interpretation of a particular moment, character, or set of words as an interpretation of the entire book (or let's say of an entire life). Projecting forward towards our death means within the logic ofthe Wake projecting ajustification toward that end, the dreamers, ours, or the books. These justifications are all limited and incomplete, but not because of a limit to our knowledge or understanding. The limitation is a function of
justification proceeding through interpretation. Ajustification is never simply an interpretation that simulates the text. W. Wimsatt and M. Beardsley's are wrong when they claim that "judging a poem is likejudging a pudding of a machine. One demands that it work. It is only because an artifact works that we infer the intention o f an artificer" (4). Thispictureassumesapoemworksandexistsasanartifact,asamechanism. Howdoesa poem work separate from its interpretation? What is the output of a poem that can be
judged. Forbothapuddingandamachinewecanclearlyarticulatethecriteriabywhich
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
209
? to judge if its performance is successful or not. No such articulation is possible for a poem.
A text like Firmegans Wake, consisting o f a continuous commentary on itself is nothing but enveloping facts and no text: "Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content o f any document to the sore neglect o f the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is hurtful to sound sense (and let it be added to the truest taste) a s " (FW109. 12-16). What follows from the ellipse is nonsense, so that one can determine in any sensible way what ignoring the enveloping facts would mean. What constitutes these facts is also not clear (nor is the literal or psychological content). A
justification of the Wake must include a version of the Wake but in this it is not the Wake, not only because each interpretation will not be able to include itself as an interpretation, butbecauseinterpretationalwayspointselsewhere. Thedetectivedoesnotsolvethe crime in the same way as the criminal commits it. The detective and the criminal might seemclose,andyetintheirdifferenceliestheentireworldof"envelopingfacts. " Wecan more easily see that the diagnoses o f the disease is different from the disease; but do we imagine a virus as a criminal? The historian writes history, and in this makes history, but not the same history he writes about:
The boxes, if I may break the subject gently, are worth about four pence pourbox but I am inventing a more patent process, foolproof and pryperfect (I should like to ask that Shedlock Homes person who is out for removing the roofs o f our criminal classics by what deductio ad domunum he hopes de tacto to detect anything unless he happens ofhimself, movibile tectu, to have a slade off) after
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
210
? which they can be reduced to a fragment oftheir true crust by even the youngest of Margees if she will take place to be seated and smile if I please. (FW165-66. 30-. 02)
The Sigla used by Joyce to describe Finnegans Wake was a box: ? . "These boxes," invented into inscrutability, contain his kiribis pouch filled with litterish fragments lurk dormant in the paunch ofthat halpbrother ofa herm, a pillarbox" (FW66. 29-. 31). A 'herm' is a Greek four-cornered pillar on which is placed a head, usually of Hermes.
Again the Wake. Trying to open the shedlock, a make a home a home, is Shedlock Homes whose reductio ad absurdum is also a deductio ad domunum, leading to the Lord. How can we touch {de iacto) god, enter into domum dei, unless we have a slate off our own roof (a chip of the old block; a part for whole)? If we remove a slate we can see inside, if not another's head, then into our own, if we discover ourselves (or not) in our children for example. Are these boxes, our minds, our world, our god, fragments like pieces of crust once they are "foolproof and pryperfect", or will the youngest o f Margees reduce these
boxes of ourselves and the world to fragments of the true cross, or the crust of the bread ofthe body ofChrist. Would this 'youngest ofMargees" have a slade offher roof, or is it that having taken a place in the world her smile if the text pleases (or more insidiously if the text or the author decrees) reduces these promises of sense and benediction to crusts?
These boxes, the targets of our interpretation that form new boxes to interpret, are equivalent to the grammatical soul Keats generated, except that these grammatical markers have no inside. Keats "soul-making" produced a becoming within a single grammaticalentity. ThereisnosuchstabilityintheWake,whereanybox,anysentence
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
211
? marks a becoming in relation to another box, another sentence. This means in effect that Finnegans Wake (and Philosophical Investigations) do not satisfy one of Keats' criteria for poetry: "They will explain themselves--as all poems should do without any comment"(2 January 1818: Letters, n, 21). They constitute new criteria.
1In his Disputed Questions on the Soul, Aquinas asks "Can the human soul be both a form and a real particular (hoc aliquid)T
2 Sir Edward Sullivan in his Introduction to The Book o f the Kells, cited in McHugh (1980).
3". . . speeching, yeh not speeching noh man liberty is, he drinks up words, scilicet, tomorrow till recover w ill not, all too many much illusiones throgh photoprismic velamina o f hueful panepiphanal world spectacunun o f Lord Joss, the o f which zoantholic furniture, from mineral through vegetal to animal, not appear to full up together M ien man than under but one photoreflection. . . " (FW611. 10-16).
4 Wittgenstein's second note about this on page 59 makes this clear:
Supposeitwereasked: Whendoyouknowhowtoplaychess? Allthetime? orjustwhileyouare makinga move? --Howqueerthatknowinghowtoplaychessshouldtakesuchashorttime,and a game so much longer!
The translation hides the conflation o f "to know" with "can" exploited in the German--"Wann kanst du Schachspielen? ". Wittgensteinremarksontheclosenessofthegrammarof"toknow"and"can"at150 (on page 59) in order to bring out the sense of "mastery' tying knowing and understanding to how we use language. Ifoneaskswhencanyouplaychess? IfIknowhow,allthetime. Whatconstitutesknowing here? being able to play the game. One might ask how many rules can I forget before no longer knowing howtoplay. Thatmightdependonmyopponent Ifmyunderstandingoftheruleswouldnotmakeit even possible for me to win a game then this might constitute a dividing line. If asked "when did you stop understanding that word? " I might not understand this as asking for a time but a criterion like "when I could no longer use it". This possibility for misunderstanding is highlighted in the question about chess. "When"knowinghowtoplaychessisacaseofatonement Atonementwouldbetheconditionwhenone could not ask of oneselfor look with some stupefaction at someone who asks "do you know how to play the whole of chess during each move? " This is notjust a knowing how opposed to a knowing that The playingofchesstakestime--itisconstitutedbyaseriesofmoves. Asking"when? "asksforatimeseries andforanarticulationofthecriteriaallowingforplayingchess: forpossibility. Thispossibilityisnot present in our knowing but in our form of life, in the knowing how, training, social practice, having an opponent or a board. This temporal dimension is brought out by Wittgenstein's "How queer that knowinghowtoplaychessshouldtakesuchashorttime,andagamesomuchlonger! ". Whatconstitutes knowing how can be found as if holographically in every moment of playing chess, if one does indeed know how to play. This present in every moment is the "short time". This knowing how 'now' is not experienced as such, and thus it seems not to be in time at all, rather this taking "such a short time" seems a joke for it doesn't take any time at all. Is this knowing how then a transcendent realm? Each move is not only a fragment of the entire game, but a fragment enacted and implying the possibilities of move and counter-move that constitute the finite system of chess.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
212
? n
THE SEMANTICS OF IDENnTY AND THINGS
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
? 7
The Semantics of Identity and Mind
Both Wittgenstein and Joyce describe thinking toward the limit between the animate and inanimate and sense and nonsense through our involvement within the grammarofourlanguagegames. FinnegansWakeandPhilosophicalInvestigations describe a dynamic grammar that constructs a non-psychological T as a shifting marker throughwhichweinvestourselvesintheselanguagegames. Howweinvestourselvesin these language games and in the world as our world is one way o f understanding how language can animate the world, resuscitate a soul, or construct a mind. I might ask these questions in a number o f moods, for any number o f reasons, most o f which begin in a sense that the world is dead or inanimate, the soul moribund, and the mind unmade or something to make. Beginning here is, however, misleading. Pursuing animation, resuscitation, and construction asks, at some fundamental level, how we inhabit the forms of our experience as if we ourselves are inanimate. In asking this we are led to the edge of nonsense, in search o f manuals describing either how to animate ourselves or how to animate things.
T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Heidegger's "Das Ding" want to re-animate the world. Thustheyarestudiesinwhatitmeanstobeanimateandinwhatconstitutesa world. WhenIbegananalyzingEliot'sandHeidegger'smethodsofanimation,Iimagined they would articulate inverse ways of conceptualizing being as identities or things within, respectively, subjunctive and semantic modes. What I understood as Eliots's subjunctive
Notes for this chapter begin on page 247
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
213
? aesthetics, working out a semantics o f identity, I thought would provide a target for Joyce's figuration o f what I have called the distance between mind and soul. Similarly, Heidegger's attempt to translate the real into the meaningful, I thought, would describe an ontological grammar akin to Wittgenstein's enactment of time in Philosophical
Investigations, but in a form that fails to provide a way for human beings to invest themselves within this grammar (and thus it fails as a description of our involvement in the world and in language). This limited investigation ofboth Eliot and Heidegger, however, was soon eclipsed by the possibilities for understanding how the rejection o f substance as a description o f what is real can lead to the hypostatization o f identity as a void (in The Waste Land) or as a grammatical principle from which things and meaning enfold along fragments o f time (in "Das Ding"). After I had breached the walls o f their texts, the work of both Eliot and Heidegger seemed two pear trees whose fruit I could not stop picking.
A direct comparison between Eliot and Heidegger and Joyce and Wittgenstein is no longer manageable within the confines ofthis dissertation. My analysis ofEliot and Heidegger, however, is still meant to demonstrate what is at stake in describing the limits of the mind and soul within and against the conceptual and grammatical limits Joyce and Wittgenstein expose. Butwhoiscirclingwhomhasbecomeunclear. Thefollowingchaptershouldbe
read as a preface to both what is at stake in the animation of things and identities attempted in Eliot and Heidegger, and as a prologemenon to the grammatical descriptions o f time and being I will examine in Joyce and Wittgenstein.
In his latter work, Heidegger reconstitutes the ontological claims the world makes on us as semantic functions, as following a conceptual pattern o f meaningful relations. In
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
214
? otherwords,heattemptstoreconstitutewhatsomethingisaswhatitmeans. These ontological claims and semantic possibilities determine Being, not simply as existence, but as the functional condensation o f all meanings o f the verb (to be' into those aspects o f our experience we recognize as things, ourselves, and the world. "Das Ding" enacts the question 'What is the qualitative aspect ofthings? from within a language that can enact
the answer as our re-education; the ontology ofthings in their participation or inhabitation ofBeing can look like a psychology ofthings. Heidegger begins his essay with the question "What is a thing? " He takes this question to be asking something like 'How do things exist? ' or 'What exists for us? '. His answer to these question, however, proceeds tlirough asking 'what does "existence" mean? ', questioning the verb o f 'to be' into its ontological and functional force. We inhabit this force through a redemptive semantics which transforms the concepts o f identity and predication determining existence, 'being' and 'is', from a world both containing and against us, into the categorical semantic ambiguity of the word 'weilen' (dwelling, staying, abiding, lingering) under the pressure of
this re-education.
The Waste Land exposes as its own animating principle of order or meaning
something like the following conditional: If we are dying, our living is counterfactual. The counterfactual or the subjunctive is both what is given as possible, determined within and by language and history and society, and what can be made or created beyond. The relation between quality and quantity is articulated in The Waste Land through an exploration o f how to make the subjunctive real, ontological.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
215
? Coleridge, commenting on the mental schema articulated in Wordsworth's Prelude, re-describes the reciprocal relation between the senses and the world that constructs the mind. Following what he believes was "partly suggested by m e . . . He [Wordsworth] was to treat man as man--a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses" (188). 1 What has changed between Coleridge's Wordworth and Eliot when he writes in "Gerontion"? :
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch: How should I use them for your closer contact?
Such poetry is not simply an expression o f personality. Age and terror and revulsion and the failure of our knowing and knowledge, the realization that not only can the mind and the world be confused with each other, but that a failure of courage or of sense or of meaning can tempt us to deny our mind. What kind o f questions are these? : "Do I dare disturb the universe? "2or "After such knowledge, what forgiveness? " or "I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: How should I use them for your closer contact? "3 or "Shall I set my lands in order? " or '"What! areyou here? "'. 4 We can say at least that questions about the limits of knowledge can be understood as questions about redemption (ofour knowing, ofour language(s), ofourselves). The possibility ofredemption in The Waste Land underwrites a theory of animation (a set of embedded assumptions) that
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
216
? displaces the site of our mind or soul (the between in Finnegans Wake) into the subjunctive. How does one animate possibility? This sounds like a nonsense question. I think, however, that one should understand it to mean that Eliot's use o f possibility highlights the failure o f knowledge, such that the demand to reanimate mind and world is not a rejection o f this failure (skepticism), as in pantheism, but a demand to reanimate
mind and world from within or as this uncertainty.
"What The Thunder Said" in The Waste Land does not promise the sound of
thunder, but the meaning o f a particular burst o f thunder-talk. Joyce gives the thunder a voice as well, but Wakean thunder is not yet caught up into fragmented allegories: it structures the world o f "broken heaventalk" (261. 28) as a semantic/ syntactic/ phonetic limit between the body o f the dreamer, whose turning in the night is signaled by these thunderous peals, and the mind or language he finds himselfbeing or in, which we call the book Finnegans Wake:
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarr hounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthumuk! ) o f a wallstrait oldparr is retale early in bed and later on life down through all Christian minstrelsy. (3. 15-16)
Thunder phonemes repeat and therefore constitute a rhythmic order: mm, nn, onn, t . . . t, h. . . h,bababada,gh. . . gh,etc. Thisrepetition,likethe"Da/Damata. . . "ofEliot's thunder, grows, barnacle-like, through accretion into parodic forms o f human sense: "konnbronntonner" or "toohoohoord": to be able to bum and thunder [G. konnen, brenn, tonner] and 'also who heard? '. Does this make the sense of the thunder a question of training (maybe even scientific training) or of listening or of failing to hear or failing to be
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
217
? a person who can hear, who can recognize 'me' and 'who' in 'toohoohoord'? Joyce has included at least 13 words for thunder in this sound: "thunntro" and "tonnerr" pun the English thunder, German, Donner, Japanese, kaminair, Hindi, karak, Greek, brontao; French lonnerre\ Italian, tuono, Swedish, aska\ Portaguese, trovao\ Irish, tomach, Old Rumanian, tun , Danish, tordenen. Does the inclusion o f these multi-lingual puns in the soundofthethundermakethissoundself-reflexive? Whatthethunderspeaksisitsname, as if in some comedy, 'thunder thunder thunder. ' But this is not God's 'I am that I am. '
The sounds and the name are for us Thunder. They are for us a semantics discovered in the self-replication o f names in a series o f phonemes. Language o f this sort is a dreaming into the world, not into ourselves. Eliot wrote 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,anddisciplinedkindofdreaming. Wetakeitforgranted that our dreams spring from below: possibly the quality of our dreams suffers as a consequence. {SelectedEssays, 204)
What is the ontological status (is it real? ) or the intentional claim (what is it about? ) of a dream exposing the world and not our psychology? Finnegans Wake is such a dream, that is, the world dreaming a mind; so would the world be if constructed by a demon, or if our brain was wired into its vat; or ifwe found ourselves in a world which was made in the way that we were made; culture would be such a dream; so would psychology be a dream intotheworldandnotintous. "IBshearingisindoubtingjustasmyseeingisonbelieving" (FW468. 15-16). Tothinkaboutbelievingthreatensunbelieving. Forthemoment
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
218
? philosophy and poetry will seem "the world, mind, is, was and will be writing its own wrunes for ever, man, on all matters that fall under the ban o f our infrarational senses" (FW19. 35-20. 01).
A certain awe attends the world and its adequacy for us. This adequacy can at least be explained as an effect ofnatural selection. But thejustification ofthe worlds adequacy, its existence as a world for us, can mutate into a further confusion about how a world is constituted for us as our own. Or we might ask how we might lose the world not only to skeptical doubt, but in not knowing how to find ourselves in the world, lost "[tjill human voices wake us, and we drown". 5 In his notes on a philosophy seminar given by Josiah Royce, Eliot criticized philosophical theories o f knowledge as limited by their failure to "treat illusion as real" (Costello, 119). 6 I f I posit the causes o f my dream-vision as bio-chemical interactions in my brain or as a function of some psychological allegory,71 have not explained how the irreality ofmy vision alters what is a world; how can we survive fantasy? "What we should consider is not so much the meaning o f the images, but
the reverse process, that which led a man having an idea to express it in images"(204). Eliot ties this process to the clarity of visual images in allegorical thinking and poetry. Allegory generates meaning even without our being aware o f the particular meaning o f an image. This might be our response to systemic coherence, where the image manifests an order that constitutes the kind of order determining of a world or an organism or a mind.
Eliot's poetry constructs meaning at the edge o f these allegories (or worlds or organisms or minds), where we must always ask what is this poetry in relation to what the worlds are it points to and abuts. This poetry cannot itself function as a form of
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
219
? consciousness as might Romantic poetry. Instead, Eliot's poetry describes limits to both howandwhyweinhabitourformsofmind(s)andworld(s). Thepoetryofallusionand fragmentation in The Waste Land' therefore, functions as grammatical categories written as ifthey were ontological categories describing the limits ofbeing human within the world. Fragments act as interlocking domains, pointing elsewhere, or switching point-of- view, failing to designate some other something (even the allusions do not mean as a
function o f their originary texts). The Waste Land poetic world, enacts subjunctive possibilities (word meanings, other texts, other worlds and persons, other minds that might read nonsense as sense) as the ontological description o f our stance toward each other and the world. In other words, both the conventional pictures o f the world and poetic fantasies and nonsense do not describe possible worlds, but rather pick us out as the limits o f all such possible worlds. 8
The claims that both the world and what counts as the subject or self are determined and limited, and made problematic or only possible by our being betrayed withinandthroughthispoetryasnothingmorethanthelimitofthesepossibilities. Lifeis counterfactual. Claims about what is real are all limit claims; the borders of sense and nonsensesketchedinTheWasteLanddescribethesesamelimits: theconflationofthe semantic and the ontologic draws our psychology into conflicting language games used to capture the interplay between husband and wife and friends, and living and dead, animate andinanimate,symbolicandordinary,etc. Theeffectofthepoetryistorequirea
justification for how we inhabit or project or commit ourselves to different and fluid grammatical (or what we often call psychological) limits: subject, object, self, other, 'I',
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
220
? 'you', 'we', 'they', etc. The patterns of our involvement describe a meta-temporal order that can count as either a mind (ours or someone else's or the worlds) or a world (ours or someone else's or a presupposed given).
How do we confuse minds for world(s)? Thoreau can give us a hint about what it means to be confused enough to ask another version o f this question. In Walden's "Brute Neighbors", he fits the world to the mind, where this fitting is, itself, our awe:
Whydopreciselytheseobjectswhichwebeholdmakeaworld? Whyhasmanjust these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice? I suspect that Pilpay & Co. have put animals to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts. (151)
Do the objects we see make a world? "Make" can almost be read as a semantic pun. Interposing the clause 'which we behold' between the objects and 'making the world' not only pictures our seeing or an 'I' between objects and world, it attaches our beholding to world-making. Thus the question 'why do we make a world with these objects? requires us to answer with another question, 'how do we make a world? , placing these objects and the world on top o f the poetic and engineering modeling power o f our mind, [transcendental aesthetic]; But our seeing is a beholding, or a being held by the objects which might then make a world. These objects make a world, and our seeing is not a Kantian apperception but a perception ofwhat Heidegger calls the 'throwness of being". This would translate Thoreau's question into 'how do objects constitute a world? "; this is one way o f understanding Hiedegger's question "What is a thing? " in "Das Ding".
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
221
? Thoreau, however, nests what makes a world in the questions 'Why these objects? ', 'Why this beholding? ', 'Why a world? '. These questions ask for the criteria (a
justification) that determines what counts as a world: why do these objects make a world? What objects? Look around. Pilpay, falsely believed to have written the Sanskrit fables collectedastheHitopadesa(telleroffables),makesfictionalworldsoftheworld. Already in the pressure Thoreau places on 'beasts ofburden' and 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts', our language functions as our thought. Animals become animals in our stories. But if they are not reduced into fetishes, they manifest "a portion o f our thoughts" (what portion? ) to ourselves as the world. We may think, in other words only what the world offers or the world may only be what we think. We are returned to Parmenides, even inthe difficulty oftranslation that attends his Greek: to yap auto voeiv ecmv xe
Kaisivai. Wecantranslatethisas'becausethesamethingisthoughtasexists'(57). 9 Does this mean that only what is thought exists? Or that to be thought about and to exist are the same? Or even as Sparshott suggested, "'Only what can think can exist? ' Or even 'Thinking and being are the same? "' (110). 10
The adequacy o f the world is understood here as the expression o f meaning, or possibly a theory of meaning, if what counts as a theory is understood to be a problem about how the world means. The adequacy o f the world, therefore, can be determined by how one answers (or if one asks) the question: 'how does the world mean or manifest our thinking (about it) in what it is? '; or 'how do we use the world to manifest our mind to ourselves or to express the world as the world? '
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
222
? The awe attending the adequacy o f the world can seem to be a description o f the mind. The psycho-physiologist Warren McCulloch asks Thoreau's question o f the mind under the aspect o f logical coherence: "What Is a Number that a Man May Know It, and a Man that He May Know a Number? "11 Although his answer returns us to the question, it formulates a model o f time as a probabilistic logic expressed through "all-or-none impulsesoftheneurons"(9). Hesayshisobject,"asapsychologist,"
was to invent a kind of least psychic even, or "psychon," that would have the following properties: First, it was to be so simple an event that it either happened orelseitdidnothappen. Second,itwastohappenonlyifitsboundcausehad happened--shades o f Duns Scotus! --that is, it was to imply its temporal antecedent. Third, it was to propose this to subsequent psychons. Fourth, these were to be compounded to produce the equivalents of more complicated propositions concerning their antecedents. " (8)
The ambiguity in Thoreau's use of "make a world" is mirrored here in McCulloch's attempt "to invent a kind o f psychic event. " Logic is meant to provide a temporal invariant that in essence functions as the identity structure constituting both number and consciousness. Thismodelcanbeunderstoodasatranslationmachine(ofinputsinto outputs) structuring time through causal implication ("imply its temporal antecedent") in a hierarchical system whose final output, grasping an identity (number), mimics its own deep structure o f simple events as a succession o f organized identities (psychons).
Thoreau and McCulloch both describe the world from within, that is, not as a whole, and thus as built out of fragments. They describe, however, different kinds of
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
223
? fragments. Thoreau,torqueingtheKantianlimitbetweenthemindandtheworldinthe stalling circular aesthetic logic of his sentences, marks out his neighbors, the particulars that fit within the world. These particulars present themselves to him in/ within/ as his awe and questioning. This may not seem a fragmentation; it is a peculiar kind. He finds himselfaskinghowtheobjectsfitsowellintoaworld,asifsuchafittingsurprisesus. He
finds himselfin the midst of a quantity of objects, and asks about what qualities (why these? ) fits these particulars within the qualitative whole of our experience and the world. McCulloch understands what exists as countable, and therefore wants to translate the qualitativeexperienceofconsciousnessintocountableunits. Hestructuresthetransitive relation between mind and brain as the instantiation o f identity as the determining atomic units o f mind-existence. Both we and the world inhabit this awe and these numbers.
One way o f reducing ourselves to quantity is to call ourselves clocks timing the world and actions and thoughts, speaking, remembering, returning, and hoping into being someone anyone might see again, surviving either humiliation or infinite diminishment. In such a clock, what someone might imagine the mind to be as the limit o f the world, the first moment must fix all other moments. Such an assumption underlies what was called in the Fifteenth century the problem o f the Absolute Clock. The Dominican philosopher Graziadei of Ascoli writes in his Quaestiones litterales:
Even though time is the measure ofall movement, and there is, at the same time, a multitude o f movements, there is, however, only one numerically single time, and not multiple times; that is so because the first movement is unique, and time concerns this movement and properly. '12
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
? Duhem explains: "Time is an abstract concept formed by the intellect form every concrete movement; it remains always the same, whatever the concrete movements are from which it was formed" (362). This is time abstracted from the world, the creation of a still point or uniform series o f changes in relation to which time emerges as an idealized concept beyond the confusion of change and identity in the world. Heidegger in "Das Ding" and Eliot in The Waste Land twist this abstract series back into the world of things. These orderings oftime within the world constitute a semantics ofthings, an animation ofthe inanimate through the hypostatization o f existing (in various modes and forms) for Heidegger and of identity for Eliot.
Eliot's and Heidegger's investigation ofthe semantics o f'to be' revolve, I think, aroundthedistinctionbetweenredemptionandjustification. Youcanseethisrevolution in Eliot's Four Quartets: "There is only the fight to recover what has been lost and found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions that seem unpropitious"(EC)13; "Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in timepast. Ifalltimeiseternallypresentalltimeisunredeemable"(BN). Thisisonewayof saying we do not know even what redemption might mean. Redemption might require perspicuous description of ourselves and/or the world. 14 But "Words strain, crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension, slip, slide, perish, decay with
imprecision, will not stay in place, will not stay still. "(BN) 'Tor us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. "(EC) "Also pray for those who were in ships, and ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea's lips or in the dark throat which will not reject them or wherever cannot reach them the sound o f the sea bell's perpetual angelus. "(DS)
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
225
?
