Thetransformationofthe"word"into flesh is analogous to the transformation o f an "it" into a "thou"
discussed
by Buber in I and Thou.
Constructing a Replacement for the Soul - Bourbon
Theeightlettersonthissideofthecentral"ad"coalesceintoonlytwoterms: "abu abiad".
The second word, "abiad"(white), continues to sound in Arabic.
HCE is invoked as the "White Father", the European God, the white imperialist entering Africa,
conquering those countries where Arabic is spoken. The polyphonic confusion o f terms and principles o f progression in the first eight letters is pushed toward an end where the father "abiad[s]", awaits, continues, abides, in tautology. This parody of Christ's claim to
be "the Alpha and the Omega" does not rest on the replication and leveling o f the beginning and end; but describes a beginning moving toward an end: a between.
The eight letter bookends, the past (ALP) and the future (HCE), isolate the toward (ad)asadescriptionofthepresentasakindofsubjunctive. Thesignificanceofthe number eight in the movement from nothingness to creation is described by Augustine in his Confessions. In his dissection of how time gets measured through sound and
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language, Augustine invokes Ambrose's evening hymn, "God, Creator o f all things" , and then analyzes how this phrase describes God's creation from nothing:
'God, Creator o f all things'--Deus Creator omnium--the line consists o f eight syllables,inwhichshortandlongsyllablesalternate. Sothefourwhichareshort (the first, third, fifth, and seventh) are single in relation to the four long syllables (the second, fourth, sixth and eighth). . . . But when one syllable sounds after another, the short first, the long after it, how shall I keep my hold n the short, and how use it to measure the longs, so as to verify that the long is twice as much? . . . They do not exist. . . Therefore it is not the syllables which I am measuring, but something in my memory which stays fixed there. (Xl. xxvii [35])
The logic describing the relationship between the short and "single in relation to the four long" syllables recalls Joyce's "odd's without ends", and links this syllable interaction, in Joyce's case letter interactions, with this Creator o f all things: on one side o f "ad" ALP and on the other "HCE". The measuring of time in words, for Augustine, is measuring ourselves, our memory, and therefore a measuring of nothing in relation to the Ideality of God. ThemeaningofJoyce'sversionof"God,Creatorofallthings",inhishymntothe night, forces this Creator both into the missing substance, used by Augustine to describe
time, and into language. Joyce is making time language, and forcing God into grammar. This 18 letter description o f the Wake writes the ABC's as a modulation o f the
tautologically repetitive 'a and a a a' defining itselfas marking a succession of moments(? ) or minds(? ) or generations(? ) that in the marking separate out into noise (or poetry). This returns us to the Biblical story of continual separation, and, therefore, to the
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fall of language from its ontological connection with God into Babel: "A babbel men dub gulchoftears. " Thisalphabet,however,remainsa"mamafesta[tion]"ofALP'sweeping and is thus a "babbel men dub", from the Arabic "Bab-el-Mandeb" ("the gate o f tears"), "gulch o f tears. " This doubled "gate/gulch o f tears" replicates the different perspectives o f conqueror and vanquished. The Arabic, o f course, is the repressed language o f the
natives, who understand the "White Father" as forcibly opening, as if raping their mother tongue, the "gate of tears". The "White Father", however, speaking in English sees only the manifestation of his crime, the eroded ravine filled with a torrent oftears that he gulps (from M E. gulchen, to gulp) into his "mawn" (91. 24).
These tears are ALP's children ("medears"). We must, however, distinguish betweentwoaspectsoftearsandcrying. Masculinetearsformthemselvesoutofa question: "And, Cod, says he with mugger's tears: Would you care to know the prise of a laird? " (54. 20). This question asked o f God the Cod can be translated "would you care to know the price/praise of a coin (F. laird), or the price/praise of a lord? " How can we separate the coin with its image of a lord from the lord himself? the king from divinity? This coinage is smelted out ofthe fiction that a piece of metal, a symbol, can be identified with actions, things, and people. This kind o f exchange is based on what Adorno calls a principle of identification, what in theological terms we could call the naming and the creation of man in God's image (Negative Dialectics, 146). The principle of identification is a symbolic economy that sets up equivalencies between goods and coins, between coins and lords, between lords and god(s). This economy, however, can function as a system of exchange only because these equivalencies do not describe identities, but rather serve to
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hide fundamental inequalities. Thus the price of a coin is simultaneously the necessary loss and sacrifice people must pay in such an economy and the transubstantiation o f work and goods into coin.
In this picture o f patriarchy, God selling and God creating are the same. Thus it is the masculine voice that asks o f itself: "If I sell whose, dears? Was I sold here' tears? " In the first question, Shaun the spaceman looks to the future and considers becoming a father and selling ALP's dear tears. Then the Oedipal identification with the father devolves into memory, into an identification with the children, asking whether he too was one of "her" tears sold here.
Themaleiscastontwosidesofthecoin: theenslavingpatriarchandthe victimized (spent) child. So ask him: "Did a weep get past the gate ofyour pride? " (
145. 12-13). The Pride ("prise o f a laird") that ties one to coins and to God represses the weeping that is ALP which exists prior to patriarchal selling. It is this weeping the father (abu in Arabic and a rune written in the procession o f letters in ALP) makes into coins and sells. Withoutcryingthemaleisleftwithonlyonewaytowatertheworld: he,asthe Wakesays,"Pee[s]forPride"(296. 05)fromhismale"prise"(prize). Onemightcallthis watering with an identity, with one, 1,1.
ALP's "feminine" weeping, however, is the movement o f the present as a continuous becoming (ALP) into the potential o f the future; and any weeping is a remembrance o f the past becoming into the present (maimeries in me buzzin). The conjunction between creating and losing generates a "why". A "why" uttered in the face o f such change is an expression o f the collapse o f what one could characterize as the
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Augstinian self-directed and the Thomist world-directed theologies. In Augustine we find an allegorical distension o f the everyday into himself and towards God, a collapse o f metaphysics into confession. Aquinas inverts the implosive force o f Augustine's formulation o f the relation between the human and the divine into a hierarchy o f shifting sets of ontological relations and identities moving toward Absolute Actuality. Finnegans Wakewritesoutourordinaryexperienceofthenightasbetweenthesetwopoints: "Isthis space of our couple o f hours too dimensional for you, temporiser? " (154. 25-26).
Our expression of confusion forms a kind of statement, a mark of particularity that acts as an "ad" in our Babelling "gulch of tears". 12 The tears arise as a continual "Why" (the why we ask ourselves as we read the Wake):
But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: "Why, why, why! Weh, 0 weh! I'se so silly to be flowing but I cana stay"! (159. 17-19)
These whys do not function as, what S. Bromberger calls, "normal form" why-questions. Normal form why-questions begin with a "why" and are followed by "an interrogative question designed to ask a whether-question-i. e. , a question whose right answer in English, if any, must be either 'yes' or 'no'" (86). 13ALP's "why" is not about anything that can be asserted. It has no intentional target. Once this intentionality is disengaged 'meaning' becomes the expression of a grammatical distinction or shift between what, withintheWake,looksliketheologicallanguagegames. Thisshiftingdescribesakindof time. The brook is broke into the tears that "for a thousand of tears had gone eon her and come on her" (159. 11). The "medears", the "by ones and twos, then by threes and fours .
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. express themselves through "why, why, why? " This is the story o f asking "why" forming itself as a "whim" within language.
"[S]eeheeing the gheist" (299. 14) of Wakean nonsense, we can still make sense of the question "Why is this an answer? " We continually ask 'why read? ', 'why this? '. Our continual "why", a "weh" (way; why) through which we are conscious and measure our time in relation to the text, is itself a door between two incommensurable language systems, the "nat language" that generates this continual "why? ", and thus our asking o f it as well, and the indicative language of predication that can be evaluated as true or false, answered by a 'yes' or a 'no'. Thus ALP's "why, why . . . weh" asks 'why way? '; her "streamsbecoming" asks not "what way? ". The ontological instability o f the Wake generates why-questions not what-questions: "Was liffe worth leaving? "
10. 6 Masculinetautology
This feminine process of becoming is opposed to the masculine creative, sexual process o f repetitious identity, the continuous imprint o f man's own image and being on the supine woman:
while the man to be is in a worse case after than before since she on the supine satisfies the verg to him! Toughtough, tootoological. Thou the first person shingeller. Art, the imperfect subjunctive. (468. 16-09)
"Toughtough" suggests the German taufen, which means "baptism", a male baptism o f the female maybe, or the repetitious HCE expressing himselfthrough and as ALP, or ALP
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becoming this repetition, the why returning to counting. The male creative act is also tautological repetition, which is too logical.
Logic is the rational process of relating defined symbolic quantities or qualities; it is the process o f transforming identities into rationally equivalent and, hence, related series o f concepts. In this tautological creative process the man is worse off than before, since the verge (his penis) is satisfied only to the verge (the shore of the river, of ALP), and thus the woman remains outside o f his tautological equation. The man's movement through eros toward thanatos leads toward self-annihilation without the renewing transformation into the other, which is to break beyond the solipsistic limits o f Kantian metaphysics: the verge. The meta-sexual symbolism here traces the logic o f our metaphors as they construct the logic o f relations defining substance. This tautological process is opposed to the fluidity of the relations within the flux of the river, of which art is an imperfect imitation o f the streams "subjunctive", underlying connective, quality (226. 14-17). The result of the male creative process is a loss of creative energy, where he is worse off than before. In other words, his creative process is one-directional and not one of renewal.
This too is a part o f the principle o f identification, where, as Adorno asserts, "non- identity is the secret telos of identification" (Negative Dialectics, 149). Self-annihilation in theotherisneverrealized. YetJoycegoesbeyondthelimitsofidentityandcreatesakind of dialectic between "Thou the first person shingeller" and "Art, the imperfect subjective. " Structurally the "Thou" functions within a subject/object grammar. The "Thou" is both object (identified as a 2nd person) and simultaneously a subject (1st person): such would be "man's" definition o f YHWH as the first cause o f creation. The voice that identifies the
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"Thou" does not recognize itself nor claim the authority o f 1st person. This voice gains its identity in the succeeding sentence: "Art, an imperfect subjunctive. " This voice is both "Art", the Wake and its created consciousness, and an archaic form of "are", the verb associated with the second person "Thou". This verb, however, as an "imperfect subjunctive" functions as a continuous movement o f what we call our past. Whatever our motivations or desires, they remain incomplete, and thus create a future for us out o f our investment in our being ("Art": are) these possibilities we desire. This is a form of not-
being-toward-an-object. The dialectic moves between the 2nd person verb and pronoun, and yet neither the "Thou" nor the voice speaking through the verb can create themselves as objects. They exist as subjects who never translate themselves into an other, for such a translation is self-annihilation and tautological. This voice, therefore, stands outside of the creative power generated by the principle o f identification and differentiation that we associate with YHWH and HCE.
The feminine creative process constructs itselfas ALP, who contains hyperbolicallyallchange,alltime,inacontinualrenewal: "Mammywas,Mimmyis, Minuscolinie's to be. . . The same renew" (226. 14-17). This well known passage, unlike the earlier assertion that "Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle's to be" ( 215. 24), begins to explain the mechanism o f time embedded within ALP's identity. The vowels in "Mammy" and"Mimmy"mimicthevowelsineachrespectiveandsucceedingverb. "Alphabetty
verbage" is introjected into the consonant world ofMMMY as if verbal tense were pulling being behind it. This pattern is foregone in the future tense. Identity begins to dwindle into the Italian minuscoline (feminine plural), very tiny "plurabilities". The future as a
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final goal is ahead of being and thus contains a vmmis-cailin (Gaelic, a young girl, a maiden, and one would suspect a virgin). The future then becomes a negative feminine space, but also a looking forward to a time when ALP's youth will be subtracted from her. Such a dwindling old woman recalls the Sibyl that Eliot invokes in the epigraph to "The Waste Land", with, however, the inclusion of what both the Sibyl and Eliot could not remember: "the same renew. " In the Wake constant renewal creates an eternal now of "tocoming", of self-transformation and movement toward the forever mysterious space of the "minuscoline". This is the present missing in Genesis: "all in the tocoming o f the semperetemal apeel spry with it" (508. 29).
ALP contains all time, as does Christ, but she herself is not an identity o f being as Christ is. "In the becoming was the weared, wontnat! " ( 487. 20-21). The Word has become Old English wyrd, time, change, becoming, but also destiny and fate, the space of the future created through the becoming that was, is, and will be, as a description of ourselves within our grammatical distinctions. This "weared" is apparently "wontnat. " A complex word that sandwiches a phallic "t" between "won" (victoiy and one) and "nat" (night and not, null, zero). Thus are Christ, HCE, and all dreamers and readers o f the Wake (whatever their gender) crucified and linked with the world o f identity (God) and theworldoftime(loss). Simultaneouslywithinthiscosmologyonefinds"wantnot"and "wont (dwell, abide) not". The interpenetration of the command to not desire (to abide) and to not abide creates an unsettled tension, a disruption that undercuts itselfjust as it attemptstocompleteitself(likefindingan"a"in'abide',"abiad"). "Wontnat"becomesa compressed but inverted version of "A and aa ab ad abu abiad", inverted because the
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"won" is crucified into "nat" and the "to" replaced with a "t". And what is most important in this inverted logos is the replacement o f desire with unspecified movement, and thus the failure to create an objective space toward which one can move.
This "weared" can never be resolved into the relatively static categories of language, and therefore not into any Word: "In the beginning was the gest he joustly says, fortheendiswithwomen,flesh-without-word"(468. 05-06). Thebeginningisnotthe sameastheend. Inthebeginningwasajest,anadventure,astory,agesture,andan "enterruption" (332. 36), the change ofthe established pattern ofrelations, a mutation that sprung from "he war", the jousting spear slung horizontal from desire for a damsel that cannot be named, captured, nor held within identity or tautology.
We must be careful not to repress the "with" and read this as "the end is women. " Rather this end must be read as either a masculine movement toward and into a relationship "with women", and/or an expression o f masculine fear o f women, who possess the end and therefore must be avoided or killed. The first reading asserts that the existential reality grounded in flesh and in the present possesses the identities which frame it. It inverts the dynamics o f possession and identity by creating a new sense o f possession. Ifwe look back a page we find: "thinking himselfinto the fourth dimension and place the ocean between his and ours" ( 467. 22-3). Within the Wake the sleeper's and the characters' possession o f themselves is impossible, as it is in time, within the "fourth dimension," where our selves unravel before the constant intrusion o f change. "His" and "our", therefore, represent the faith in identity, in possession, that holds our conscious selveswithintheontologyofdifferencedefinedbyYHWH. Theyarenot,however,the
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ground o f our being, if one can call it that, which lies, instead, within the ocean between "I" ("our"), first person plural, and "he" or "it" ("his"), third person singular: "Thou art" --
"It wham"?
The relationship between subject ("I") and object ("it") is explored in Joyce's
characterizationof"women,flesh-without-word".
Thetransformationofthe"word"into flesh is analogous to the transformation o f an "it" into a "thou" discussed by Buber in I and Thou. This transformation redefines the relationship between subject and object by establishing a verbal consciousness created out o f the instantiating equation o f an "I" with the speaking self and the animation of "things", or of an "it", through its recognition as a "thou". ForJoycetheend,whatinthelanguageofconsciousnessisunderstoodasan identity or an object, becomes the actualization of a relationship "with women. " Women here are categorically defined, reduced to the existential condition o f mortal flesh, as opposed to the conceptual objectification o f words. While such a reduction is certainly a violent limitation on women, it does transform "women" into a "thou" and not an object, an"it". Fleshbecomesthecommonrealityofbeingforboththeselfandtheother;andas
the ground o f being becomes actualized as a presence which can define itself and interact with the "I" as an equivalent "I", that is, as a "you" within the grammar of this recognition.
10. 6 The limits of 'why"
The over 800 river names in Book I, chapter 8 cannot name this flesh, this "polycarppool"oftheunconscious. Althoughinsleepyouarenolongeryourself,you stillstreamalong,untired,throughthesubjunctivetiesofcreation: "Theuntiretiesof
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liveslivingbeingtheonesubstranceofstreamsbecoming"(597. 07-08). Beingis transformed into an active becoming ("livesliving") which cannot be totalized within an identity, but remains unentire, incomplete. Both Faust's "In the beginning was the Deed", and Yeats' "How can we know the dancer from the dance? " totalize the action o f being within an equation identifying the subject with the object, the beginning with the end. For Joyce, the incompleteness that moves through "livesliving being" is united within a single "substrance". Substanceispunnedintoasubstratethatisaperspective,aviewing,a tranceratherthanabeing. "Trancitivespace"(594. 03)isfilledwith"substrance",which isnotsubstanceatallbutsubjectivityreflectingitselfasitbecomesitself: "everybally being is becoming in its owntown eyeballs" ( 523. 12).
In Book IV, the feminine dynamic o f becoming begins to hide behind the coming light of day, or rather it fades into the gap between the developing identities of consciousness. The a Wakening sleeper must re-constitute being as identity. The father (abu) in ALP must be identified, differentiated, and established as a final end:
Or, but, now and airing out her mirgery margery watersheads and, to change that subjunct from the traumaturgid for once in a while and darting back to stuff, if so beyoumayidentifyyourself withhiminyou. . . sincethenourtoomanyofher, Abha na Life, and gettin on to dadaddy.
(496. 25-31)
One must clear one's head o f the waters o f Anna Livia, for a moment and alter the subjunctive flow o f becoming into an identity that is you. This is the transformation from "pluralities" of "Abha na Life" into the male creative process of "dadaddy. " The last line of
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the book moves as close to the world o f identities and nouns as possible without stepping out of the immanent "river of lives": "A way a lone a last a loved a long the"( 628. 15-16). The word is no longer "aplomb" (vertical), rather it moves like the spirit of God, in the second verse o f Genesis, across the surface o f chaos not yet ready to transform the unknown into the known.
Within the fluidity o f change the source o f creation is known, but the manifestation, the identity ofthis creation remains a mystery: "Ofcause so! And in effect, as? (615. 11). If the sleeper is to wake up he must jump from the 'the' to an identity. This re-beginning is the renewal o f the creative flux o f the "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's" withwhichthebookopens. Withinthis"streamsbecoming"onelosesone'sselftothe flowing totality o f the eternal now. It is only when the world is fragmented into a complex o f non-becoming identities that reality gains a definable substance o f being: "The untireties o f livesliving being the one substrance o f a streamsbecoming" (597. 07-08). "Untireties" are not entire; they are incomplete. When one is asleep one is no longer entire, or in complete control of oneself. Where does one look for oneself? In other peoplemaybe,callingitlove. Yetwithinthe"streamsbecoming"onecontinuestostream along,untired,throughthesubjunctivetiesofcreation. "[Ljiveslivingbeing"represents the transformation of identity and being into the action of living. The "untireties of livesliving" are equated with "the one substrance of a streamsbecoming". We remain
withinthe"hauntingcrevices"betweenidentities: "Verbumprincipiantthroughthe trancitive spaces! " (594. 02-03). The dynamic creative process is equated to the underlying, all inclusive, trancitive space o f incompleteness.
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The Bible tries to reduce why-questions to what-questions, to confuse meaning for substance as a way o f excluding the kind o f ontological instability creation myths explicitly domesticate. The process o f creation, as it is understood in Genesis, and as it is a return to consciousness and identity, hypostatizes creative power (transformation, becoming, making) into static forms that undermine this very creative power. God destroys himself. Thus, it is God who must be reborn. His rebirth flows through an equivalency between the created, the act of creation, and the creator. Yet this rebirth remains within an ontology o f identity, and thus it generates, in the image o f itself, a fragmented world o f identities. Joyce, however, recreates reality by defining creation within the "chaosmos" of the present, playing between the residual forms of identity associated with HCE and the dynamic becoming of ALP. Finnegans Wake continually follows and conflates being as becoming (ALP as "riverrun") as it leads to the discorded identity of HCE (Howth Castle and Environs). This is the movement of the first sentence. Joyce has reintegrated the present into a creative ontology by defining creation as a becoming o f potential, grounded in both the doer (ALP) and the doing (HCE). For Joyce, however, it is ALP who
ultimately becomes Christ, who drowns herself as did Phlebas, and loses her identity, but gains the eternal ability, the "Plurabilities," to become, to renew, and to always be a becoming o f herself.
But is ALP as this becoming only a figure o f speech? a transcribed desire for god reconfigured at the edge of a syntax associated for Joyce with the strange interaction between identity and being, internal consciousness and expression, which describes Augustine's exploration o f the Trinity, as much as Freud's articulation o f identity
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determined by desire and fear? In De Trinitate Augustine discovers the Trinitarian relations and identities embedded in our actual thinking, practices, and being, or rather he derives out of our experience the shifting set of relations leading to and expressing the Triune God. Joyce pursues a similar theological goal, but one grounded in the ordinariness o f our nocturnal life and one that rewrites Trinitarian Identities into flux, but a flux out o f which a consciousness may emerge. Self-reflexively dynamic ALP replaces through her "corrosive sublimation" the world of identities naming HCE. This process of replacement mimics Augustine's replacement in De Trinitate of how mind, knowledge,
and love determine our knowing of the world with how memory, understanding, and will redefine these Trinitarian images in self-knowledge: in knowing what we already know as ourselves. The complex relation between knowing and self-knowing rewrites the absolute nature of mind into the "notion of love as a 'search"'(72). 14 In other words, Augustine follows the "certainties with regard to the nature of mind", defined by mind, knowledge and love, into a study of our sensory awareness of becoming in time, within ourselves, and
towards God. Finnegans Wake embodies such a study in the "finnecies of [its] poetry wed music" (377. 17).
Music can seem an "A and aa ab ad abu abiad. A babbel men dub gulch o f tears" (254. 17), and in this approach mathematics. A mathematics o f this sort articulates an order, a pattern, a logic of forms: a syntax pretending to generate out of this logic a content (even if only at the limits of sense). Poetry asserts that its essence lies not in its parts so much as in its organization. At this level of abstraction Peter Caws' description of poetry makes sense of such a mathematics: "words that belong together, to be
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remembered and recited in a given but not intuitively obvious order" (241). 15 From this he makes the important observation that the first and in many ways most significant poems we leam are the alphabet and the ordinal numbers. This belonging together functions like syntax does for Quine, which determines what strings count as legitimate within a language. Poetry can, therefore, be understood as syntax. But a syntax for what? What is the meaning o f the syntax o f this kind o f nonsense? The creative logic, the relationship between being and becoming, in Finnegans Wake enacts this question as, what Geoffrey Hill calls, the menace and atonement attending, maybe notjust ofpoetry, but ofbeing human. Finnegans Wake becomes a special kind of poetry in which we have to discover what goes together and why it remains apart. In constructing this syntax we build and uncoverTrinitarianversionsofourselves,identitiesconstructedastime: mindand memory; knowledge and understanding; love and will oscillating into each other through our own "present tense integument". We measure ourselves in reading the Wake as it measures us, and in this count ourselves as countable into being "to becontinued's Tale".
But even this measurement is only another language game, although one in which we crucify ourselves: one might call this a grammatical game with ontological consequences.
1Big Typescript, translated and cited by David G. Stem, in Wittgenstein on Mind and Langauge, 157. 2ForadiscussionoftheabsentsleeperseeJohnBishop. JoycesBookoftheDark: FinnegansWake. 3Reported Sightings.
4 I will investigate the complexity of how this works in chapter 13. 5Ed. A. F. vonPauly,G. Wissowa,etal. Marcovichreplacestheprobablycorruptfinalword'sleep'with 'waking reality'. Although this reconstruction remains controversial, it is supported by the logic of opposition found in the proceeding phrase, a logic animating much of the Heraclitian corpus. A similar logic o f opposition is o f course central to the working o f Finnegans Wake.
For an alternative reconstruction see D-K: Diels, h. rev. W. Kranz. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 6th ed. Zurich, 1951.
5Heraclitus: Fragments, A text and translation with a commentary. The fragment is found in Clement's Stomateis 4. 141. 2
7 The Basic Works o f Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon.
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8Plotinus,7volumes,trans. A. H. Armstrong. Ifwereimaginethesoulasourformoflifeandexpand experience into the complex interactions between language games this is not unlike how time is exposed in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Because o f his separation between the grammatical and the psychological, however, time is not hypostasized into a metaphysical category.
9 See Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary, translated by John J. Scullion S. J. Also Tanalch: The Holy Scriptures. Also Walther Eichrody, "In the Beginning: A Contribution to the Interpretation of the First Word of the Bible" (1962), Creation in the Old Testament, ed. Bernhard W. Anderson.
10ClementofAlexandria, Stromata. Liber7, EnglishandGreek,translatedbyFentonJohn Anthony Hort and Joseph B. Mayor.
11 Finnegans Wake: A Facsimile o f the Buffalo Notebooks, VI. B1-VI. B. 4, preface and arranged by David Hayman, VI. B. 40. 47.
12The grammar of this "why" is, therefore, very close to Wittgenstein's description of the statement "I understand" that I examine in the first chapter o f my dissertation.
13SylvainBromberger,"Why-Qustions",InMindandCosmos: EssaysinContemporaryScience and Philosophy.
14Augustine: Later Works.
15Yorick'sWorld: ScienceandtheKnowingSubject.
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IV
WTTTGENSTEINIAN TIME
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11
The Ontology of Time
The previous chapter was meant to show how the measurement of ourselves in the measurement of time makes the variety of syntaxes we use and inhabit visible or audible as semantic (or symbolic) systems. A sustained reading ofthe Wake, tracing through the grammatical shifts that enact time as an aspect o f the limit between sense and nonsense and between ourselves and the text, precipitates a version o f the same crisis that Karl Barth describes, in The Epistle to the Romans, which I earlier claimed informs Eliot's poetics. I asked, "how do we stand 'before an irresistible and all-embracing dissolution of the world, o f time and things and me, before a penetrating and ultimate KRISIS, before the supremacy o f a negation by which all existence is rolled up" (iii. 21). Finnegans Wake shows that this crisis, as it was for Adams, threatens less the world or our language, as our status within both. I suggested earlier that the vanishing o f any intentional target for Wake&n language (pointing as it ostensibly does at the vanished person asleep) both picks us out as its target (again exposing a crisis about how we constitute our world as ours) and displays itself as an intentional mechanism within which the world emerges as the shifting limits between grammatical and symbolic relations. Finnegans Wake is a temporal descriptionofthehumanmindenactingthisvanishingintentionality. Thisdescription(or enactment) o f time instigates and demonstrates as way o f thinking toward the limits o f sense. This thinking is what I understand as the construction o f a theological language
and stance, traced along a complicated interwoven epistemological limit described by skeptical doubt, science, and a resistance to the ontological claims o f poetic metaphysics,
Notes for this chapter are on page 492
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Vico'stermforthemythologicalimaginationsofmoreprimitivepeoples. Thetranslation of thinking into an enactment of time was systematized along a single continuum (as opposed to the shifting multiple times in Finnegans Wake and Philosophical
Investigations)byHegel,especiallyinthePhenomenologyofSpirit. Iwillnotinvestigate Hegel's phenomenological dialectic here, but I will use an aspect o f this dialectic as a path from Finnegans Wake to PhilosophicalInvestigations. This aspect ofthe
Phenomenology should be understood as elaboration ofthe becoming ofmind (both historically and philosophically) through the intentionality o f the dialectic, an intentionality describedbyourinteractionswiththephenomenalworld. Iwillbrieflydescribeapattern o f temporality (although for Hegel this should be understood as becoming and not time)
that unfolds subjectivity through a shifting intentionality.
Augustine's description of the dialectic from mind to soul describes an
hermeneutic education, as does Finnegans Wake, that remakes our human stance toward the world and God by remaking the forms within which we configure both this stance and the world. We discover God and ourselves within our language and practices. One way of understanding Wittgenstein is that he constructs a dialogic dialectic of fragments between our practices within language-games and totalities (from sentences to form(s) of life). Dialectic might sound misleading within its sense o f linear movement toward truth, missing the circular and repetitive perambulations that describe (or that the reader is forced to follow in) Philosophical Investigations. I use it, however, to describe the way in which any entry into the landscape of philosophical problems and ordinary language enacts a path from some problem to others through alternative descriptions. This path
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may return to the same problems again and again, but even in this circularity these problems change shape and color. The nature ofthis change (something I will discuss in the next section) alters the nature of our relation to the world described by these problems by and in our language, and thus provides a picture ofa kind oftemporality. Wittgenstein spoke with approval of the dialectical method:
. . . the dialectical method is very sound and a way in which we do work. But it should not try to find, from two propositions, a and b, a further more complex proposition, as (C. D. ) Broad's description implied. It's object should be to find out where the ambiguities in our language are. (74)1
These ambiguities shape the world because we inhabit them, and through them our inhabitationoftheworldbecomesvisible. Thus,ourthinkingabouttheseconfusions,ata fundamental level and as it does for Hegel, describes the limits in relation to which we live. ThepictureofhowWittgensteinthinks(orwrites),therefore,displaystheworld. The depth ofthe world is equivalent to the depth ofhow we think (not necessarily ofwhat we think). 2
The problem o f time can be understood as the problem o f the specious present, our phenomenologicalexperienceofchangethatfigurestheworldasflux. D. Stemhas shown how Wittgenstein's grammatical analysis developed through his analysis o f his own temptation to first construct a phenomenological language of our momentary experience (in response to the skeptical temptation to say that only the present exists, and thus only my present exists). 3 Wittgenstein realized that a claim like "all is flux" is a misuse of 'flux': "Language can only say those things we can also imagine otherwise"
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(Philosophical Remarks, 54). 4 Wittgenstein's analysis o f 'all is flux', however, always proceeds from the assumption that it is a phenomenological description ofthe world, in whichcaseitisnottruethateverythingisincontinualflux. Theleavesareblowninto spiraling relative to the branches to which they are attached. In addition, as a phenomenological description the claim that "all is flux" describes our sense of the present constantlyescapingourgrasp.
conquering those countries where Arabic is spoken. The polyphonic confusion o f terms and principles o f progression in the first eight letters is pushed toward an end where the father "abiad[s]", awaits, continues, abides, in tautology. This parody of Christ's claim to
be "the Alpha and the Omega" does not rest on the replication and leveling o f the beginning and end; but describes a beginning moving toward an end: a between.
The eight letter bookends, the past (ALP) and the future (HCE), isolate the toward (ad)asadescriptionofthepresentasakindofsubjunctive. Thesignificanceofthe number eight in the movement from nothingness to creation is described by Augustine in his Confessions. In his dissection of how time gets measured through sound and
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language, Augustine invokes Ambrose's evening hymn, "God, Creator o f all things" , and then analyzes how this phrase describes God's creation from nothing:
'God, Creator o f all things'--Deus Creator omnium--the line consists o f eight syllables,inwhichshortandlongsyllablesalternate. Sothefourwhichareshort (the first, third, fifth, and seventh) are single in relation to the four long syllables (the second, fourth, sixth and eighth). . . . But when one syllable sounds after another, the short first, the long after it, how shall I keep my hold n the short, and how use it to measure the longs, so as to verify that the long is twice as much? . . . They do not exist. . . Therefore it is not the syllables which I am measuring, but something in my memory which stays fixed there. (Xl. xxvii [35])
The logic describing the relationship between the short and "single in relation to the four long" syllables recalls Joyce's "odd's without ends", and links this syllable interaction, in Joyce's case letter interactions, with this Creator o f all things: on one side o f "ad" ALP and on the other "HCE". The measuring of time in words, for Augustine, is measuring ourselves, our memory, and therefore a measuring of nothing in relation to the Ideality of God. ThemeaningofJoyce'sversionof"God,Creatorofallthings",inhishymntothe night, forces this Creator both into the missing substance, used by Augustine to describe
time, and into language. Joyce is making time language, and forcing God into grammar. This 18 letter description o f the Wake writes the ABC's as a modulation o f the
tautologically repetitive 'a and a a a' defining itselfas marking a succession of moments(? ) or minds(? ) or generations(? ) that in the marking separate out into noise (or poetry). This returns us to the Biblical story of continual separation, and, therefore, to the
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fall of language from its ontological connection with God into Babel: "A babbel men dub gulchoftears. " Thisalphabet,however,remainsa"mamafesta[tion]"ofALP'sweeping and is thus a "babbel men dub", from the Arabic "Bab-el-Mandeb" ("the gate o f tears"), "gulch o f tears. " This doubled "gate/gulch o f tears" replicates the different perspectives o f conqueror and vanquished. The Arabic, o f course, is the repressed language o f the
natives, who understand the "White Father" as forcibly opening, as if raping their mother tongue, the "gate of tears". The "White Father", however, speaking in English sees only the manifestation of his crime, the eroded ravine filled with a torrent oftears that he gulps (from M E. gulchen, to gulp) into his "mawn" (91. 24).
These tears are ALP's children ("medears"). We must, however, distinguish betweentwoaspectsoftearsandcrying. Masculinetearsformthemselvesoutofa question: "And, Cod, says he with mugger's tears: Would you care to know the prise of a laird? " (54. 20). This question asked o f God the Cod can be translated "would you care to know the price/praise of a coin (F. laird), or the price/praise of a lord? " How can we separate the coin with its image of a lord from the lord himself? the king from divinity? This coinage is smelted out ofthe fiction that a piece of metal, a symbol, can be identified with actions, things, and people. This kind o f exchange is based on what Adorno calls a principle of identification, what in theological terms we could call the naming and the creation of man in God's image (Negative Dialectics, 146). The principle of identification is a symbolic economy that sets up equivalencies between goods and coins, between coins and lords, between lords and god(s). This economy, however, can function as a system of exchange only because these equivalencies do not describe identities, but rather serve to
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hide fundamental inequalities. Thus the price of a coin is simultaneously the necessary loss and sacrifice people must pay in such an economy and the transubstantiation o f work and goods into coin.
In this picture o f patriarchy, God selling and God creating are the same. Thus it is the masculine voice that asks o f itself: "If I sell whose, dears? Was I sold here' tears? " In the first question, Shaun the spaceman looks to the future and considers becoming a father and selling ALP's dear tears. Then the Oedipal identification with the father devolves into memory, into an identification with the children, asking whether he too was one of "her" tears sold here.
Themaleiscastontwosidesofthecoin: theenslavingpatriarchandthe victimized (spent) child. So ask him: "Did a weep get past the gate ofyour pride? " (
145. 12-13). The Pride ("prise o f a laird") that ties one to coins and to God represses the weeping that is ALP which exists prior to patriarchal selling. It is this weeping the father (abu in Arabic and a rune written in the procession o f letters in ALP) makes into coins and sells. Withoutcryingthemaleisleftwithonlyonewaytowatertheworld: he,asthe Wakesays,"Pee[s]forPride"(296. 05)fromhismale"prise"(prize). Onemightcallthis watering with an identity, with one, 1,1.
ALP's "feminine" weeping, however, is the movement o f the present as a continuous becoming (ALP) into the potential o f the future; and any weeping is a remembrance o f the past becoming into the present (maimeries in me buzzin). The conjunction between creating and losing generates a "why". A "why" uttered in the face o f such change is an expression o f the collapse o f what one could characterize as the
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Augstinian self-directed and the Thomist world-directed theologies. In Augustine we find an allegorical distension o f the everyday into himself and towards God, a collapse o f metaphysics into confession. Aquinas inverts the implosive force o f Augustine's formulation o f the relation between the human and the divine into a hierarchy o f shifting sets of ontological relations and identities moving toward Absolute Actuality. Finnegans Wakewritesoutourordinaryexperienceofthenightasbetweenthesetwopoints: "Isthis space of our couple o f hours too dimensional for you, temporiser? " (154. 25-26).
Our expression of confusion forms a kind of statement, a mark of particularity that acts as an "ad" in our Babelling "gulch of tears". 12 The tears arise as a continual "Why" (the why we ask ourselves as we read the Wake):
But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as though her heart was brook: "Why, why, why! Weh, 0 weh! I'se so silly to be flowing but I cana stay"! (159. 17-19)
These whys do not function as, what S. Bromberger calls, "normal form" why-questions. Normal form why-questions begin with a "why" and are followed by "an interrogative question designed to ask a whether-question-i. e. , a question whose right answer in English, if any, must be either 'yes' or 'no'" (86). 13ALP's "why" is not about anything that can be asserted. It has no intentional target. Once this intentionality is disengaged 'meaning' becomes the expression of a grammatical distinction or shift between what, withintheWake,looksliketheologicallanguagegames. Thisshiftingdescribesakindof time. The brook is broke into the tears that "for a thousand of tears had gone eon her and come on her" (159. 11). The "medears", the "by ones and twos, then by threes and fours .
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. express themselves through "why, why, why? " This is the story o f asking "why" forming itself as a "whim" within language.
"[S]eeheeing the gheist" (299. 14) of Wakean nonsense, we can still make sense of the question "Why is this an answer? " We continually ask 'why read? ', 'why this? '. Our continual "why", a "weh" (way; why) through which we are conscious and measure our time in relation to the text, is itself a door between two incommensurable language systems, the "nat language" that generates this continual "why? ", and thus our asking o f it as well, and the indicative language of predication that can be evaluated as true or false, answered by a 'yes' or a 'no'. Thus ALP's "why, why . . . weh" asks 'why way? '; her "streamsbecoming" asks not "what way? ". The ontological instability o f the Wake generates why-questions not what-questions: "Was liffe worth leaving? "
10. 6 Masculinetautology
This feminine process of becoming is opposed to the masculine creative, sexual process o f repetitious identity, the continuous imprint o f man's own image and being on the supine woman:
while the man to be is in a worse case after than before since she on the supine satisfies the verg to him! Toughtough, tootoological. Thou the first person shingeller. Art, the imperfect subjunctive. (468. 16-09)
"Toughtough" suggests the German taufen, which means "baptism", a male baptism o f the female maybe, or the repetitious HCE expressing himselfthrough and as ALP, or ALP
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becoming this repetition, the why returning to counting. The male creative act is also tautological repetition, which is too logical.
Logic is the rational process of relating defined symbolic quantities or qualities; it is the process o f transforming identities into rationally equivalent and, hence, related series o f concepts. In this tautological creative process the man is worse off than before, since the verge (his penis) is satisfied only to the verge (the shore of the river, of ALP), and thus the woman remains outside o f his tautological equation. The man's movement through eros toward thanatos leads toward self-annihilation without the renewing transformation into the other, which is to break beyond the solipsistic limits o f Kantian metaphysics: the verge. The meta-sexual symbolism here traces the logic o f our metaphors as they construct the logic o f relations defining substance. This tautological process is opposed to the fluidity of the relations within the flux of the river, of which art is an imperfect imitation o f the streams "subjunctive", underlying connective, quality (226. 14-17). The result of the male creative process is a loss of creative energy, where he is worse off than before. In other words, his creative process is one-directional and not one of renewal.
This too is a part o f the principle o f identification, where, as Adorno asserts, "non- identity is the secret telos of identification" (Negative Dialectics, 149). Self-annihilation in theotherisneverrealized. YetJoycegoesbeyondthelimitsofidentityandcreatesakind of dialectic between "Thou the first person shingeller" and "Art, the imperfect subjective. " Structurally the "Thou" functions within a subject/object grammar. The "Thou" is both object (identified as a 2nd person) and simultaneously a subject (1st person): such would be "man's" definition o f YHWH as the first cause o f creation. The voice that identifies the
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"Thou" does not recognize itself nor claim the authority o f 1st person. This voice gains its identity in the succeeding sentence: "Art, an imperfect subjunctive. " This voice is both "Art", the Wake and its created consciousness, and an archaic form of "are", the verb associated with the second person "Thou". This verb, however, as an "imperfect subjunctive" functions as a continuous movement o f what we call our past. Whatever our motivations or desires, they remain incomplete, and thus create a future for us out o f our investment in our being ("Art": are) these possibilities we desire. This is a form of not-
being-toward-an-object. The dialectic moves between the 2nd person verb and pronoun, and yet neither the "Thou" nor the voice speaking through the verb can create themselves as objects. They exist as subjects who never translate themselves into an other, for such a translation is self-annihilation and tautological. This voice, therefore, stands outside of the creative power generated by the principle o f identification and differentiation that we associate with YHWH and HCE.
The feminine creative process constructs itselfas ALP, who contains hyperbolicallyallchange,alltime,inacontinualrenewal: "Mammywas,Mimmyis, Minuscolinie's to be. . . The same renew" (226. 14-17). This well known passage, unlike the earlier assertion that "Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle's to be" ( 215. 24), begins to explain the mechanism o f time embedded within ALP's identity. The vowels in "Mammy" and"Mimmy"mimicthevowelsineachrespectiveandsucceedingverb. "Alphabetty
verbage" is introjected into the consonant world ofMMMY as if verbal tense were pulling being behind it. This pattern is foregone in the future tense. Identity begins to dwindle into the Italian minuscoline (feminine plural), very tiny "plurabilities". The future as a
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final goal is ahead of being and thus contains a vmmis-cailin (Gaelic, a young girl, a maiden, and one would suspect a virgin). The future then becomes a negative feminine space, but also a looking forward to a time when ALP's youth will be subtracted from her. Such a dwindling old woman recalls the Sibyl that Eliot invokes in the epigraph to "The Waste Land", with, however, the inclusion of what both the Sibyl and Eliot could not remember: "the same renew. " In the Wake constant renewal creates an eternal now of "tocoming", of self-transformation and movement toward the forever mysterious space of the "minuscoline". This is the present missing in Genesis: "all in the tocoming o f the semperetemal apeel spry with it" (508. 29).
ALP contains all time, as does Christ, but she herself is not an identity o f being as Christ is. "In the becoming was the weared, wontnat! " ( 487. 20-21). The Word has become Old English wyrd, time, change, becoming, but also destiny and fate, the space of the future created through the becoming that was, is, and will be, as a description of ourselves within our grammatical distinctions. This "weared" is apparently "wontnat. " A complex word that sandwiches a phallic "t" between "won" (victoiy and one) and "nat" (night and not, null, zero). Thus are Christ, HCE, and all dreamers and readers o f the Wake (whatever their gender) crucified and linked with the world o f identity (God) and theworldoftime(loss). Simultaneouslywithinthiscosmologyonefinds"wantnot"and "wont (dwell, abide) not". The interpenetration of the command to not desire (to abide) and to not abide creates an unsettled tension, a disruption that undercuts itselfjust as it attemptstocompleteitself(likefindingan"a"in'abide',"abiad"). "Wontnat"becomesa compressed but inverted version of "A and aa ab ad abu abiad", inverted because the
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"won" is crucified into "nat" and the "to" replaced with a "t". And what is most important in this inverted logos is the replacement o f desire with unspecified movement, and thus the failure to create an objective space toward which one can move.
This "weared" can never be resolved into the relatively static categories of language, and therefore not into any Word: "In the beginning was the gest he joustly says, fortheendiswithwomen,flesh-without-word"(468. 05-06). Thebeginningisnotthe sameastheend. Inthebeginningwasajest,anadventure,astory,agesture,andan "enterruption" (332. 36), the change ofthe established pattern ofrelations, a mutation that sprung from "he war", the jousting spear slung horizontal from desire for a damsel that cannot be named, captured, nor held within identity or tautology.
We must be careful not to repress the "with" and read this as "the end is women. " Rather this end must be read as either a masculine movement toward and into a relationship "with women", and/or an expression o f masculine fear o f women, who possess the end and therefore must be avoided or killed. The first reading asserts that the existential reality grounded in flesh and in the present possesses the identities which frame it. It inverts the dynamics o f possession and identity by creating a new sense o f possession. Ifwe look back a page we find: "thinking himselfinto the fourth dimension and place the ocean between his and ours" ( 467. 22-3). Within the Wake the sleeper's and the characters' possession o f themselves is impossible, as it is in time, within the "fourth dimension," where our selves unravel before the constant intrusion o f change. "His" and "our", therefore, represent the faith in identity, in possession, that holds our conscious selveswithintheontologyofdifferencedefinedbyYHWH. Theyarenot,however,the
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ground o f our being, if one can call it that, which lies, instead, within the ocean between "I" ("our"), first person plural, and "he" or "it" ("his"), third person singular: "Thou art" --
"It wham"?
The relationship between subject ("I") and object ("it") is explored in Joyce's
characterizationof"women,flesh-without-word".
Thetransformationofthe"word"into flesh is analogous to the transformation o f an "it" into a "thou" discussed by Buber in I and Thou. This transformation redefines the relationship between subject and object by establishing a verbal consciousness created out o f the instantiating equation o f an "I" with the speaking self and the animation of "things", or of an "it", through its recognition as a "thou". ForJoycetheend,whatinthelanguageofconsciousnessisunderstoodasan identity or an object, becomes the actualization of a relationship "with women. " Women here are categorically defined, reduced to the existential condition o f mortal flesh, as opposed to the conceptual objectification o f words. While such a reduction is certainly a violent limitation on women, it does transform "women" into a "thou" and not an object, an"it". Fleshbecomesthecommonrealityofbeingforboththeselfandtheother;andas
the ground o f being becomes actualized as a presence which can define itself and interact with the "I" as an equivalent "I", that is, as a "you" within the grammar of this recognition.
10. 6 The limits of 'why"
The over 800 river names in Book I, chapter 8 cannot name this flesh, this "polycarppool"oftheunconscious. Althoughinsleepyouarenolongeryourself,you stillstreamalong,untired,throughthesubjunctivetiesofcreation: "Theuntiretiesof
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liveslivingbeingtheonesubstranceofstreamsbecoming"(597. 07-08). Beingis transformed into an active becoming ("livesliving") which cannot be totalized within an identity, but remains unentire, incomplete. Both Faust's "In the beginning was the Deed", and Yeats' "How can we know the dancer from the dance? " totalize the action o f being within an equation identifying the subject with the object, the beginning with the end. For Joyce, the incompleteness that moves through "livesliving being" is united within a single "substrance". Substanceispunnedintoasubstratethatisaperspective,aviewing,a tranceratherthanabeing. "Trancitivespace"(594. 03)isfilledwith"substrance",which isnotsubstanceatallbutsubjectivityreflectingitselfasitbecomesitself: "everybally being is becoming in its owntown eyeballs" ( 523. 12).
In Book IV, the feminine dynamic o f becoming begins to hide behind the coming light of day, or rather it fades into the gap between the developing identities of consciousness. The a Wakening sleeper must re-constitute being as identity. The father (abu) in ALP must be identified, differentiated, and established as a final end:
Or, but, now and airing out her mirgery margery watersheads and, to change that subjunct from the traumaturgid for once in a while and darting back to stuff, if so beyoumayidentifyyourself withhiminyou. . . sincethenourtoomanyofher, Abha na Life, and gettin on to dadaddy.
(496. 25-31)
One must clear one's head o f the waters o f Anna Livia, for a moment and alter the subjunctive flow o f becoming into an identity that is you. This is the transformation from "pluralities" of "Abha na Life" into the male creative process of "dadaddy. " The last line of
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the book moves as close to the world o f identities and nouns as possible without stepping out of the immanent "river of lives": "A way a lone a last a loved a long the"( 628. 15-16). The word is no longer "aplomb" (vertical), rather it moves like the spirit of God, in the second verse o f Genesis, across the surface o f chaos not yet ready to transform the unknown into the known.
Within the fluidity o f change the source o f creation is known, but the manifestation, the identity ofthis creation remains a mystery: "Ofcause so! And in effect, as? (615. 11). If the sleeper is to wake up he must jump from the 'the' to an identity. This re-beginning is the renewal o f the creative flux o f the "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's" withwhichthebookopens. Withinthis"streamsbecoming"onelosesone'sselftothe flowing totality o f the eternal now. It is only when the world is fragmented into a complex o f non-becoming identities that reality gains a definable substance o f being: "The untireties o f livesliving being the one substrance o f a streamsbecoming" (597. 07-08). "Untireties" are not entire; they are incomplete. When one is asleep one is no longer entire, or in complete control of oneself. Where does one look for oneself? In other peoplemaybe,callingitlove. Yetwithinthe"streamsbecoming"onecontinuestostream along,untired,throughthesubjunctivetiesofcreation. "[Ljiveslivingbeing"represents the transformation of identity and being into the action of living. The "untireties of livesliving" are equated with "the one substrance of a streamsbecoming". We remain
withinthe"hauntingcrevices"betweenidentities: "Verbumprincipiantthroughthe trancitive spaces! " (594. 02-03). The dynamic creative process is equated to the underlying, all inclusive, trancitive space o f incompleteness.
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The Bible tries to reduce why-questions to what-questions, to confuse meaning for substance as a way o f excluding the kind o f ontological instability creation myths explicitly domesticate. The process o f creation, as it is understood in Genesis, and as it is a return to consciousness and identity, hypostatizes creative power (transformation, becoming, making) into static forms that undermine this very creative power. God destroys himself. Thus, it is God who must be reborn. His rebirth flows through an equivalency between the created, the act of creation, and the creator. Yet this rebirth remains within an ontology o f identity, and thus it generates, in the image o f itself, a fragmented world o f identities. Joyce, however, recreates reality by defining creation within the "chaosmos" of the present, playing between the residual forms of identity associated with HCE and the dynamic becoming of ALP. Finnegans Wake continually follows and conflates being as becoming (ALP as "riverrun") as it leads to the discorded identity of HCE (Howth Castle and Environs). This is the movement of the first sentence. Joyce has reintegrated the present into a creative ontology by defining creation as a becoming o f potential, grounded in both the doer (ALP) and the doing (HCE). For Joyce, however, it is ALP who
ultimately becomes Christ, who drowns herself as did Phlebas, and loses her identity, but gains the eternal ability, the "Plurabilities," to become, to renew, and to always be a becoming o f herself.
But is ALP as this becoming only a figure o f speech? a transcribed desire for god reconfigured at the edge of a syntax associated for Joyce with the strange interaction between identity and being, internal consciousness and expression, which describes Augustine's exploration o f the Trinity, as much as Freud's articulation o f identity
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determined by desire and fear? In De Trinitate Augustine discovers the Trinitarian relations and identities embedded in our actual thinking, practices, and being, or rather he derives out of our experience the shifting set of relations leading to and expressing the Triune God. Joyce pursues a similar theological goal, but one grounded in the ordinariness o f our nocturnal life and one that rewrites Trinitarian Identities into flux, but a flux out o f which a consciousness may emerge. Self-reflexively dynamic ALP replaces through her "corrosive sublimation" the world of identities naming HCE. This process of replacement mimics Augustine's replacement in De Trinitate of how mind, knowledge,
and love determine our knowing of the world with how memory, understanding, and will redefine these Trinitarian images in self-knowledge: in knowing what we already know as ourselves. The complex relation between knowing and self-knowing rewrites the absolute nature of mind into the "notion of love as a 'search"'(72). 14 In other words, Augustine follows the "certainties with regard to the nature of mind", defined by mind, knowledge and love, into a study of our sensory awareness of becoming in time, within ourselves, and
towards God. Finnegans Wake embodies such a study in the "finnecies of [its] poetry wed music" (377. 17).
Music can seem an "A and aa ab ad abu abiad. A babbel men dub gulch o f tears" (254. 17), and in this approach mathematics. A mathematics o f this sort articulates an order, a pattern, a logic of forms: a syntax pretending to generate out of this logic a content (even if only at the limits of sense). Poetry asserts that its essence lies not in its parts so much as in its organization. At this level of abstraction Peter Caws' description of poetry makes sense of such a mathematics: "words that belong together, to be
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remembered and recited in a given but not intuitively obvious order" (241). 15 From this he makes the important observation that the first and in many ways most significant poems we leam are the alphabet and the ordinal numbers. This belonging together functions like syntax does for Quine, which determines what strings count as legitimate within a language. Poetry can, therefore, be understood as syntax. But a syntax for what? What is the meaning o f the syntax o f this kind o f nonsense? The creative logic, the relationship between being and becoming, in Finnegans Wake enacts this question as, what Geoffrey Hill calls, the menace and atonement attending, maybe notjust ofpoetry, but ofbeing human. Finnegans Wake becomes a special kind of poetry in which we have to discover what goes together and why it remains apart. In constructing this syntax we build and uncoverTrinitarianversionsofourselves,identitiesconstructedastime: mindand memory; knowledge and understanding; love and will oscillating into each other through our own "present tense integument". We measure ourselves in reading the Wake as it measures us, and in this count ourselves as countable into being "to becontinued's Tale".
But even this measurement is only another language game, although one in which we crucify ourselves: one might call this a grammatical game with ontological consequences.
1Big Typescript, translated and cited by David G. Stem, in Wittgenstein on Mind and Langauge, 157. 2ForadiscussionoftheabsentsleeperseeJohnBishop. JoycesBookoftheDark: FinnegansWake. 3Reported Sightings.
4 I will investigate the complexity of how this works in chapter 13. 5Ed. A. F. vonPauly,G. Wissowa,etal. Marcovichreplacestheprobablycorruptfinalword'sleep'with 'waking reality'. Although this reconstruction remains controversial, it is supported by the logic of opposition found in the proceeding phrase, a logic animating much of the Heraclitian corpus. A similar logic o f opposition is o f course central to the working o f Finnegans Wake.
For an alternative reconstruction see D-K: Diels, h. rev. W. Kranz. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 6th ed. Zurich, 1951.
5Heraclitus: Fragments, A text and translation with a commentary. The fragment is found in Clement's Stomateis 4. 141. 2
7 The Basic Works o f Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon.
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8Plotinus,7volumes,trans. A. H. Armstrong. Ifwereimaginethesoulasourformoflifeandexpand experience into the complex interactions between language games this is not unlike how time is exposed in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Because o f his separation between the grammatical and the psychological, however, time is not hypostasized into a metaphysical category.
9 See Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary, translated by John J. Scullion S. J. Also Tanalch: The Holy Scriptures. Also Walther Eichrody, "In the Beginning: A Contribution to the Interpretation of the First Word of the Bible" (1962), Creation in the Old Testament, ed. Bernhard W. Anderson.
10ClementofAlexandria, Stromata. Liber7, EnglishandGreek,translatedbyFentonJohn Anthony Hort and Joseph B. Mayor.
11 Finnegans Wake: A Facsimile o f the Buffalo Notebooks, VI. B1-VI. B. 4, preface and arranged by David Hayman, VI. B. 40. 47.
12The grammar of this "why" is, therefore, very close to Wittgenstein's description of the statement "I understand" that I examine in the first chapter o f my dissertation.
13SylvainBromberger,"Why-Qustions",InMindandCosmos: EssaysinContemporaryScience and Philosophy.
14Augustine: Later Works.
15Yorick'sWorld: ScienceandtheKnowingSubject.
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IV
WTTTGENSTEINIAN TIME
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11
The Ontology of Time
The previous chapter was meant to show how the measurement of ourselves in the measurement of time makes the variety of syntaxes we use and inhabit visible or audible as semantic (or symbolic) systems. A sustained reading ofthe Wake, tracing through the grammatical shifts that enact time as an aspect o f the limit between sense and nonsense and between ourselves and the text, precipitates a version o f the same crisis that Karl Barth describes, in The Epistle to the Romans, which I earlier claimed informs Eliot's poetics. I asked, "how do we stand 'before an irresistible and all-embracing dissolution of the world, o f time and things and me, before a penetrating and ultimate KRISIS, before the supremacy o f a negation by which all existence is rolled up" (iii. 21). Finnegans Wake shows that this crisis, as it was for Adams, threatens less the world or our language, as our status within both. I suggested earlier that the vanishing o f any intentional target for Wake&n language (pointing as it ostensibly does at the vanished person asleep) both picks us out as its target (again exposing a crisis about how we constitute our world as ours) and displays itself as an intentional mechanism within which the world emerges as the shifting limits between grammatical and symbolic relations. Finnegans Wake is a temporal descriptionofthehumanmindenactingthisvanishingintentionality. Thisdescription(or enactment) o f time instigates and demonstrates as way o f thinking toward the limits o f sense. This thinking is what I understand as the construction o f a theological language
and stance, traced along a complicated interwoven epistemological limit described by skeptical doubt, science, and a resistance to the ontological claims o f poetic metaphysics,
Notes for this chapter are on page 492
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Vico'stermforthemythologicalimaginationsofmoreprimitivepeoples. Thetranslation of thinking into an enactment of time was systematized along a single continuum (as opposed to the shifting multiple times in Finnegans Wake and Philosophical
Investigations)byHegel,especiallyinthePhenomenologyofSpirit. Iwillnotinvestigate Hegel's phenomenological dialectic here, but I will use an aspect o f this dialectic as a path from Finnegans Wake to PhilosophicalInvestigations. This aspect ofthe
Phenomenology should be understood as elaboration ofthe becoming ofmind (both historically and philosophically) through the intentionality o f the dialectic, an intentionality describedbyourinteractionswiththephenomenalworld. Iwillbrieflydescribeapattern o f temporality (although for Hegel this should be understood as becoming and not time)
that unfolds subjectivity through a shifting intentionality.
Augustine's description of the dialectic from mind to soul describes an
hermeneutic education, as does Finnegans Wake, that remakes our human stance toward the world and God by remaking the forms within which we configure both this stance and the world. We discover God and ourselves within our language and practices. One way of understanding Wittgenstein is that he constructs a dialogic dialectic of fragments between our practices within language-games and totalities (from sentences to form(s) of life). Dialectic might sound misleading within its sense o f linear movement toward truth, missing the circular and repetitive perambulations that describe (or that the reader is forced to follow in) Philosophical Investigations. I use it, however, to describe the way in which any entry into the landscape of philosophical problems and ordinary language enacts a path from some problem to others through alternative descriptions. This path
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may return to the same problems again and again, but even in this circularity these problems change shape and color. The nature ofthis change (something I will discuss in the next section) alters the nature of our relation to the world described by these problems by and in our language, and thus provides a picture ofa kind oftemporality. Wittgenstein spoke with approval of the dialectical method:
. . . the dialectical method is very sound and a way in which we do work. But it should not try to find, from two propositions, a and b, a further more complex proposition, as (C. D. ) Broad's description implied. It's object should be to find out where the ambiguities in our language are. (74)1
These ambiguities shape the world because we inhabit them, and through them our inhabitationoftheworldbecomesvisible. Thus,ourthinkingabouttheseconfusions,ata fundamental level and as it does for Hegel, describes the limits in relation to which we live. ThepictureofhowWittgensteinthinks(orwrites),therefore,displaystheworld. The depth ofthe world is equivalent to the depth ofhow we think (not necessarily ofwhat we think). 2
The problem o f time can be understood as the problem o f the specious present, our phenomenologicalexperienceofchangethatfigurestheworldasflux. D. Stemhas shown how Wittgenstein's grammatical analysis developed through his analysis o f his own temptation to first construct a phenomenological language of our momentary experience (in response to the skeptical temptation to say that only the present exists, and thus only my present exists). 3 Wittgenstein realized that a claim like "all is flux" is a misuse of 'flux': "Language can only say those things we can also imagine otherwise"
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(Philosophical Remarks, 54). 4 Wittgenstein's analysis o f 'all is flux', however, always proceeds from the assumption that it is a phenomenological description ofthe world, in whichcaseitisnottruethateverythingisincontinualflux. Theleavesareblowninto spiraling relative to the branches to which they are attached. In addition, as a phenomenological description the claim that "all is flux" describes our sense of the present constantlyescapingourgrasp.
