we must discover how it can be about
ourselves
or theworld.
Bourbon - "Twitterlitter" of Nonsense- "Askesis" at "Finnegans Wake"
This means undoing, as the Wake undoes, the historical and
duce or inhabit when the limits of the world
flicting set of fragments of science, technology, social anachronistic religion, psychological fantasy, and so on? Iunderstand
frames from within which we are trained to think.
interpretative
There are, of course, limits, but we have no way of determining what
these limits will and should be. This does not mean one should read without limits, by free association. In fact, the inability of any inter
pretative frame to control the Wakean "chaosmos . . . moving and
changing every part of the time" (FW 118. 21-23) means that reading requires thinking about what can and should count as a limit to our
reading.
II
The language of Finnegans Wake where "Som's wholed, all's part ed" is "[b]inomeans to be comprendered" (FW 563. 32, 285. 27-28). So why read it? Not surprisingly, there is a long-standing tradition that assumes that this question can best be answered by answering the
222
are constructed
can we pro as a con
prejudice,
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? ? "what is Finnegans Wake about? " James S. Atherton, in The Books at the "Wake," suggests that this is the fundamental question for critics. 19
In response to the demand to determine what the book is about,
critics often delineate some interpretative domain within which the
Wake gains a subject matter. Thus, it is about language, according to Ronald E. Buckalew, about culture (Christine Froula), about our psy
chology (Margot Norris), or about themind (Sheldon Brivic)? and so
question
on. 20 Such arguments, while
cannot help but take the form of special pleading or even of an apolo
getics for away of interpreting, sanctioned by the radical indetermi nacy of the text.
Such interpretative answers to the question "what is the Wake about? " are encouraged because it is not clear how the language of
theWake could be about anything, with two possible exceptions. They are exceptions only because their objects require only aminimum
interpretative frame. Inwriting Finnegans Wake, Joyce claimed that he was attempting to describe our night life, and in so doing he had to
put English to sleep (in the double sense of this phrase). Consequently, as John Bishop, in Joyce's Book of theDark, has shown rather convincingly, the Wake is literally a re-description of the night
life of amissing individual. 21 Because, however, this person "aslip" in the text ismissing (FW 377. 26,597. 12), he or she could be everyone or
anyone. The other object readily available for interpretation is the Wake itself. There are numerous versions of this, usually embedded in
other kinds of interpretations- A book about itself, however, pressures "about" in such away that not only is the text animated with a kind of intention, but it is difficult not simply to translate "about" into re
description. A Wakean sentence can be seen as a re-description of
itself as awhole and in parts. This need not be paradoxical. I can say,
"This is a story about telling a story. " It is not clear, however, how a sentence can be a re-description of itself. We can use a sentence to re describe a sentence or a story, but that isnot the same thing as trans
lating meaning into re-description. Thus, the Wake, if construed as a
producing interesting interpretations,
of itself, would be a re-description of a re-description. This is close to nonsensical22 One might call these literal interpreta
tions in order to capture the obviousness and general intelligibility of
their objects.
I do not want to criticize these two ways of reading (indeed, Iwant
to protect them). In both cases, however, the coherence of reading requires a sense of aboutness that the text cannot provide. How can theWake be about anything when even these objects, an absent sleep er and the Wake itself, unravel the intentionality of language? This
does not only mean that we should provide a reason for why a par 223
re-description
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? ? ticular sentence is formed in the way it is (Bishop provides excellent explanations and justifications for this), but we must also ask how
can be lost.
What does itmean for language to be about something or any
thing? The late nineteenth-century German philosopher Franz Brentano, in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, argues that
the intentional (aboutness) constitutes our mental experience:
Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of theMiddle Ages called the intentional (ormental) inexistence of an
object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously ref erence to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be under
stood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as an object within itself, although
they do not always do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved,
in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. 23
To be about X seems to require a relation between a thought and X. Any relation would, however, require another relation to relate it to X. And thus, if intentionality is understood as a relation, one would
require an infinite number of relations. 24 In this passage, the verbs
"refer," "symbolize," "suggest," and "point" are all black boxes to capture this ineffable intentional relation. If,however, the object does
not actually exist (as in "I hope to build the tallest building in the
the problem has shifted from the relation between language and object to the status of this object, which in this case is imaginary. Brentano uses the model of the imaginary object as a pattern for describing all of our mental stances toward the world. The aboutness
of our language is immanent within our attitudes and statements. In
intentionality
world"),
this is simply to replace themystery of the aboutness of our language with themystery of the immanence of the world in our statements.
Brentano's description of intentionality attempts to translate onto logical distinctions (claims about the world) into psychological or
many ways,
phenomenological distinctions (claims about our
Ludwig Wittgenstein, on the other hand, attempts to dissolve these
psychological
and
phenomenological
distinctions into the intersub
jective coherence of language. The intentionality of our language is not dependent on the attachment of language to the world. Rather,
according toWittgenstein, intentional statements (Iwish that x; I expect y; I have a suspicion about z) are matched by statements that describe their fulfillment, verification, denial, failure, and so forth. 25
Such a description of intentionality, while itmakes our mental con tent accessible to others, reduces aboutness to an agreement between,
224
experience).
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? ? for example, an order and the description of its fulfillment. Thus, the
intentionality of language is determined by the way we figure kinds of sentences in relation to each other. Ihave to simplify here, but if
intentionality is reduced to an agreement
in language, then the problem of the relation between language and the world is replaced by the problem of how we inhabit language. We
are left with the question "how do we find ourselves within lan guage? " The short answer is, I think, through nonsense.
What an utterance is about, its intentional targets, are formulated
through language, so that the way language
by an agreement between language and a thing in the world but by an agreement within language between two related statements. The
intentional targets are within language, which iswhy, by deforming language into nonsense, we can lose the way the world becomes vis ible to us as something to talk about. Once a language cannot be used to articulate agreement between, for example, an expectation and its fulfillment, it cannot be about anything anymore. This suggests that
all interpretations of Finnegans Wake are not about theWake at all; they
are simply about themselves as interpretations.
Should we then abandon interpretation, claim it is senseless to
speak about what Wakean language is about? Endless and endlessly
replaceable interpretations would seem to serve little point. Ifwe abandon interpretation, however, what is left? Wakean language does not have any recognizable criteria of application to the world. Ifwe
cannot apply this language to the world, we must find the world within it: "[b]etween his voyous and her consinnantes" (FW 485. 10
11). The agreement in the Wake between world and statement is not
intentional but punning. There is agreement among world, language, and an "I" or a "we" in nonsense.
If Finnegans Wake enacts the world of an absent sleeper, as Bishop
then our failure to read backwards into his or her life or con
every sentence Joseph Conrad's claim that for anything to be art it
must justify itself in every line. 26What any sentence means collapses
into how we justify the particularity of the sentence, that is, how we
justify the nonsense of any particular sentence. Such justification means that we reflect upon ourselves (prosoche), our reading, our
making sense and not making sense of the Wake, through the very nonsense of the text. We must read ourselves into the text, just as we must read sense into nonsense. How can one do this? One way is to
ask the riddle-question: "Is reading Finnegans Wake a human activi 225
argues, sciousness,
into amind that we would recognize as our own, forces us to place our minds as the intentional target of the text. But this would mean that we do not understand ourselves. How could this be our night life, our dreams, our absence? Joyce forces to the surface of
between descriptions with
is about something is not
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? ? ty? "
What I am suggesting here is that Finnegans Wake separates reading
er, is about ourselves. But what does the Wake say about ourselves,
which would mean, in the context ofmy discussion of intentionality, what kind of thing arewe that can be talked about through nonsense?
"Ourselves" ismeant here as "us human beings. " This might suggest
a kind of test where only someone who asks the question about
whether reading the Wake is a human activity is a human being. I remain an agnostic about the answer to this. A question remains,
from interpreting. An interpretation
but about itself as an interpretation; our reading of the Wakef howev
arewe that we can be that which the Wake could be about? " or "what arewe that we can be targeted by the need for the kind of justification the Wake demands? "
Ill
Although Finnegans Wake can be interpreted in any number of ways, Ihave been arguing that it cannot be read as being about any
thing. The nonsense of the text separates reading from interpretation. Ihave suggested that this shifts the site of intentionality towards us,
as readers. This does not mean simply that our interpretations betray us, as if they were slips of the tongue or Rorschach tests. Any argu
ment about themeaning of our interpretations would simply allego rize one interpretation into another. Ifwe refuse to equate our inter
pretations with reading, with claims about what the text means, then we can no longer properly ask questions like "what does this sen
tence, passage, textmean? " Instead, we have to begin from the under standing that our reading confesses our being within and against lan
guage.
In Finnegans Wake, Augustine's conversation with God is replaced
with a conversation with nonsense, generating a theological crisis or
what Joyce calls a "theoperil" (FW 223. 28). The divine threat in Finnegans Wake emerges as the threat of nonsense that ismeant to
trace the limits of our language and of ourselves as human beings. Both language and the nonsense in the Wake are a dreaming into the world, not into ourselves. T. S. Eliot writes in his essay on Dante, "We
have nothing but dreams, and we have forgotten that seeing visions? a practice now relegated to the aberrant and uneducated?
was once a more significant, interesting, and disciplined kind of dreaming. We take it for granted that our dreams spring from below:
possibly the quality of our dreams suffers as a consequence. "27 What is the ontological status or the intentional claim of a dream exposing
the world and not our psychology? Finnegans Wake is such a dream, 226
however? "what
of the Wake is not about the Wake
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? ? that is, the world dreaming a mind; so would the world be if con
structed by a demon, or ifwe found ourselves in aworld that was made in the way that we were made; language itself would be such a dream; culture would be such a dream; so would psychology be a
dream into theworld and not into ourselves.
How could we survive or understand such a dreaming into the
world? This question is another version of my earlier query? "is
reading Finnegans Wake a human activity? " The answer to this ques tion need not be a description of what constitutes a human being but
might, instead, consist of a continual self-reflective (prosoche) account of how Imean as a human being when faced with the kind of non sense that maps my place within any language. I do not think that
"how Imean as a human being" has, itself, any clear meaning in our
ordinary language, nor do I think any philosophical account ofmean ing could provide itwith a sense adequate towhat would motivate
appealing to it. "How Imean as a human being" can only mean when meaning itself is at stake in the kind of reading that Ihave been argu
ing the Wake demands and requires.
In forcing the question "is reading Finnegans Wake a human activi ty? " the Wake ties our humanness to nonsense. The Wake exerts what
Iwould call a theological pressure. Iuse this phrase because Wakean nonsense shows our relation to the fundamental limits within which we are anything, which is the same as the fundamental shifting limits
between sense and nonsense. This means we should read theWake as a description of how the limits of linguistic sense match the limits in relation to which we understand ourselves as human beings.
This is the effect of Joyce's lists? to place the world enumerated against us and in this offer targets for sense and identification. But once art identification ismade, as a result of an interpretation (for
example, the claim that the Wakean phrase "alphybettyformed
is a version of the Wake? FW 183. 13), the meaning remains unclear. In other words, most uses of "meaning" are not equivalent to
most uses of "interpretation. " Is the meaning of Finnegans Wake the
list?
following
My wud! The warped flooring of the lair and soundconducting walls
verbage"
. . . were
. . . doubtful
literatured . . .
with burst
alphybettyformed ahems and
loveletters, telltale sto
thereof ries,
viasses,
lucifers,,. . counterfeit franks, best intentions,. . . gloss teeth for a tooth, . . . inversions of all this chambermade music one stands, given a grain of goodwill, a fair chance of actually seeing the whirling dervish,
Tumult, son of Thunder, self exiled inupon his ego, anightlong a shak
persianly eggshells,
vivlical ahahs, imeffible tries
dictas, visus
umbique,
at speech unasyllabled, you owe mes, eyoldhyms, fluefoul smut, fallen
ompiter
ing betwixtween white or reddr hawrors, noondayterrorised 227
to skin and
verbage,
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? ? writing themystery of himsel in fur
tive means through which this "him" becomes visible as an "I" to
himself. "Furniture," however, also marks a limit to both the "I," his
particularity, and language, which we designate "matter," or what George Berkeley calls "the furniture of earth. "28 "Furniture" and "lan
as limits are incommensurable domains that are written together by Wakean language and, thus, by a writing that is nonsen
that
replaces the intentional agreement in ordinary language.
What, however, is "the mystery of himsel," the mystery of any "I"?
In this passage, "himsel," an ineluctable phantom, writes while sit ting in furniture with himself a piece of furniture determined and
defined by materiality. This "mystery of himsel in furniture" becomes at the end of theWake, when the sleeper is awakening, the "furnit of heupanepi world" (FW 611. 18). "[F]urnit" contains fuit (Latin for "as
itwas") and furnus (Latin for "oven" or "fireplace") and can be read
simply as "burn it. " "[F]umit" can be translated, also, as "'as itwas' burns and is a furnace. " This burning is established as a thing when "furnit" puns on "the furniture of earth. " Consequently, the being and stability of the past condensed into furniture contains Heraclean
flux. "[H]eupanepi" consists of the Greek eu (good), pan (all), and epi (upon). Thus "furnit of heupanepi world" can be translated as "the furniture of the flux of the good upon all the world burns into a fur
nace. "
This kind of nonsense sentence promises profundity. Before we
accept or reject that promise as something we can understand, as an
expectation about ourselves and the world? in other words, before we say what this promise means?
we must discover how it can be about ourselves or theworld. If the puns of Finnegans Wake should be
read through either something like Augustine's self-reflection by way of language towards God or through something like Luther's writing
bone by an ineluctable phantom. . . niture. (FW 183. 08484. 10)
guage"
. . . writing
the
furniture" to describe both "furniture" and language as the constitu
I take "an ineluctable
phantom
mystery
of himsel in
expresses a kind of agreement among
sical. This writing-together
"furniture," "language," and "himsel" within a nonsense
towards the presence of God in the grammar of human
language,
then when we look into Wakean language, there is nothing to find
there but the looking itself. This is not quite circular, except, as Henry
David Thoreau notes, in theway art's delusive promise about looking through another's eyes (to see ourselves) is circular. 29 We have made amistake ifwe believe that seeing through another's eyes, that dis
covering ourselves looking for ourselves in Finnegans Wake, will pro
vide us with new
knowledge
about what we are. Ifwe read with this
228
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? ? kind of goal inmind, we either discover something trivial (we see what we always see) or uninformative (we would no longer be seeing
ourselves, being now something different). In the case of Finnegans Wake, there are no new facts to discover, because its language cannot
be about anything in any intelligible sense of "about. " We are thus presented with three options: 1)We can try to redeem "about" with in the Wakean language game; 2) we can accept this loss of intention
ality, but then itwould be unclear why anyone would read theWake;
3) or we can read ourselves (as the missing
language) against and in relation to this loss of sense. It is this last
option that I am suggesting we attempt. What Finnegans Wake demands is not interpretations but responses.
What would be a way of responding to the "furnit of heupanepi
to "the furniture of the flux of the good upon all the world burns into a furnace"? As the sleeper awakens into consciousness at the end of the Wake, under the sun and in rising color, some "part of it . . . had shown itself . . . unable to absorbere" (FW 611. 17-19). In
other words, as the sleeper seemingly awakens, some part ofwhatev
er he or she is shows itself as unable to absorb light because it is not matter. The "part of it. . . unable to absorbere" is that which is noth
ing more than present, than change, described by the phrase I am
translating as "the furniture of the flux of the good upon all theworld burns into a furnace. " What part of a person is this? What part of a person is not matter? If the Wake is itself a representation of that part,
then itmay be a representation of the soul. The soul, however, is shown to be the shifting limits of sense and nonsense made visible
through our reading (as part of a reflection of our entering and exit ing from Wakean language). "Furnit of heupanepi world" describes
being between things (furniture) and loss (burning), as a limit to them both. One implication of finding ourselves within language as non sense is that one cannot get any more meaning out of our own self
reflection than we can out of this passage in theWake. And themean
ing of this passage is a description of the limit to themeaning of this
world,"
passage.
about us, as human
This iswhat we are, and, thus, Wakean nonsense can be
beings.
"About" in the previous sentence cannot mean what "about" ordi
narily means. Nonsense cannot be about anything. What Ihave sug
therefore, is that we should read against our own interpreta tions of the Wake, in order to re-expose the limits between sense and nonsense that our interpretations hide. The loss of intentionality, the
aboutness of our language, in Finnegans Wake precipitates a version of the same crisis that the theologian Karl Barth describes, in The Epistle to the Romans, as our standing "before an irresistible and all-embrac
ing dissolution of the world, of time and things and me, before a pen 229
gested,
intentional target of its
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? ? etrating and ultimate KRISIS, before the supremacy of a negation by which all existence is rolled up. "30 Finnegans Wake shows that this cri sis threatens less the world or our language than our status within both. The vanishing of any intentional target forWakean language
us out as its target. If the Wake is about us, then we are
it only ifwe can find away tomatch ourselves with how it is nonsen
sical. There is no simple description of this, except to say that any
picks
reading
of theWake is also a description of what we are, so that we can, in reading theWake, describe a fundamental sense of time that is bound tohow we make sense of things and how this sense can be lost
in the vanishing intentionality enacted by our reading of the Wake. Is
reading Finnegans Wake, however, a human activity? It is certainly a question humans are prone to ask.
NOTES
1Pierre Hadot, "Ancient Spiritual Exercises and 'Christian Philosophy/"
Philosophy as a Form of Life (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1993). Further ref erences will be cited parenthetically in the text.
2
See Socrates, Theaetetus, ed. Myles Burnyeat, trans. M. J. Levett (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990), and Philo of Alexandria, Philo, trans. F. H.
Colson (Cambridge:Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), p. 84. While I follow Hadot's transcription of this list, I re-translate prosoche as self-attention to emphasize
description
its
meaning
3
in askesis.
SaintAugustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), XII. xxiii. 32. Further references will be cited parenthetical
ly in the text.
4
St. John Cassian, The Conferences, ed. and trans. Boniface Ramsey (New
York: Paulist Press, 1997). For a further discussion of St. John Cassian, see
Owen Chadwick, Western Asceticism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1958).
For a general discussion of exegesis, see Beryl Smalley, The Study of theBible inthMeiddleAges(NotreDame:Univ. ofNotreDamePress,1964),andHenri
de Lubac, Ex? g? seM? di? vale: Les Quatres Sens de V? criture (Paris: Aubier, 1964).
5
See Plato, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982), 352d; see also, in this regard, The Dialogues of Plato: "Eutkyphro," "Apology," "Crito," "Meno," "Gorgias," "Menexenus," trans. R. E. Allen (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), 487e, 501c, 527c. 6
SeeAristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), book 1. 7
Two classic discussions of ancient ethics that bring out these senses of self can be found in JuliaAnnas's TheMorality ofHappiness (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), and John Cooper's Reason and Human Good in Aristotle
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975),
8
See St. Ignatius of Loyola, Exercitia spiritualia: cum versione literall ex auto graphe Hisp? nico (Rome: Marini et B. Morini, 1847), and see Jean-Michel Rabat? , James Joyce,Authorized Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1984), p. 1. Further references to the Rabat? work will be cited parenthetical 230
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? ? ly in the text.
9 See Jacques Derrida, "Two Words for Joyce/' Post-structuralist Joyce, ed.
Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984),
147.
p.
10Robert Polhemus, "The Comic Gospel of 'Shem,'" Comic Faith (Chicago:
Chicago Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 294-338. 11
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. JohnMacquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: Blackwell Publishers, 1962), pp. 23 (H4), 161 (H124).
12Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knoivledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Harvard: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996), p. 191.
13 De Animae sen Augustine, Quantitate Dialogas
(Philadelphia; Peter Reilly 1924), 32. 66.
Questionum Liber
14See Augustine, De Trinitate (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 1968), 16. 10. 19.
15See Martin Luther, Werke: kritische Gesammtausgabe, Tischreden (Weimar: H. B? hlau, 1912-1921), vol. 15.
16
Johann Georg
Hamann's theories of language? see TheMagus of theNorth: J, G. Hamann and
theOrigins ofModern Irrationalism (London: JohnMurray, 1993). Hamann read
of Luther's remarks in Johann Albrecht Bengel, Gnomon novi testamenti in quo ex nativa verborum vi simplictas, profunditas, concinnitas, salubritas sensuum coelestium indicatur (Tubingen: Henr. Philippi Schrammii, 1742), preface, sec tion 14, p. [xxiv]? see Bii lO. lff.
17See such representative texts asHamann's Betrachtungun ? ber dieHeilige Schrift (Nuremberg: Lechner, 1816), and Johann Gottfried Herder's Christliche
Schriften (Riga: J. F. Hartknoch, 1794-1798).
18The general outline ofHamann's picture of the relationship between lan
guage and 19
the world
is similar to that of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Isaiah Berlin discusses how this idea resonated with
The Books at the "Wake" Univ. Press, 1959), p. 15.
Southern Illinois
James
S.
Atherton,
(Carbondale:
20See Ronald E. Buckalew, "Night Lessons on Language/Book II, chapter ii,"A Conceptual Guide to "Finnegans Wake" ed. Michael H. Begnal and Fritz
Senn (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1974); Christine Froula, Modernism's Body: Sex, Culture, ana Joyce (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996); Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe of "Finnegans Wake"
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974); and Sheldon Brivic, Joyce the Creator (Madison: Univ. ofWisconsin Press, 1985).
21 Book theDark Univ. ofWisconsin Press, John Bishop, Joyce's of (Madison:
1985).
22This gives us another answer: it is about nonsense, which is to say that
in being a kind of nonsense, and being about itself, itmust be about nonsense. This kind of claim makes nonsense out of themeaning of "about/7 Beyond generating a typology of the kinds of nonsense, it is not clear why this claim is not itself nonsense. Such a claim could, of course, be a part of some theory
of nonsense. Reading Finnegans Wake requires thinking about nonsense and maybe even generating a typology of nonsense, but it isunclear that it could
itself be about nonsense.
23Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. Antos C
231
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? ? Rancurello, D. B, Terrell, and Linda L. McAllister (New York: Humanities
Press, 1973),p. 88.
24A description of our relation to theworld cannot use the concept of rela
tion. This difficulty leads to claims that our relation to theworld is indescrib able. Brentano counters this by arguing that our reference to objects is imma
nent within our intentional stances.
25 York:
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New Macmillan
Publishers, 1953), ? ? 136,429,458.
26
204.
28George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning thePrinciples ofHuman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982), ? 6.
Conrad, Doubleday Publishers,
to The Nigger of the Narcissus (New York: 1914), p. 11.
preface
27T. S. Eliot, SelectedEssays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World,
Joseph
29Henry David Thoreau, "Economy," Waiden, ed.
duce or inhabit when the limits of the world
flicting set of fragments of science, technology, social anachronistic religion, psychological fantasy, and so on? Iunderstand
frames from within which we are trained to think.
interpretative
There are, of course, limits, but we have no way of determining what
these limits will and should be. This does not mean one should read without limits, by free association. In fact, the inability of any inter
pretative frame to control the Wakean "chaosmos . . . moving and
changing every part of the time" (FW 118. 21-23) means that reading requires thinking about what can and should count as a limit to our
reading.
II
The language of Finnegans Wake where "Som's wholed, all's part ed" is "[b]inomeans to be comprendered" (FW 563. 32, 285. 27-28). So why read it? Not surprisingly, there is a long-standing tradition that assumes that this question can best be answered by answering the
222
are constructed
can we pro as a con
prejudice,
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? ? "what is Finnegans Wake about? " James S. Atherton, in The Books at the "Wake," suggests that this is the fundamental question for critics. 19
In response to the demand to determine what the book is about,
critics often delineate some interpretative domain within which the
Wake gains a subject matter. Thus, it is about language, according to Ronald E. Buckalew, about culture (Christine Froula), about our psy
chology (Margot Norris), or about themind (Sheldon Brivic)? and so
question
on. 20 Such arguments, while
cannot help but take the form of special pleading or even of an apolo
getics for away of interpreting, sanctioned by the radical indetermi nacy of the text.
Such interpretative answers to the question "what is the Wake about? " are encouraged because it is not clear how the language of
theWake could be about anything, with two possible exceptions. They are exceptions only because their objects require only aminimum
interpretative frame. Inwriting Finnegans Wake, Joyce claimed that he was attempting to describe our night life, and in so doing he had to
put English to sleep (in the double sense of this phrase). Consequently, as John Bishop, in Joyce's Book of theDark, has shown rather convincingly, the Wake is literally a re-description of the night
life of amissing individual. 21 Because, however, this person "aslip" in the text ismissing (FW 377. 26,597. 12), he or she could be everyone or
anyone. The other object readily available for interpretation is the Wake itself. There are numerous versions of this, usually embedded in
other kinds of interpretations- A book about itself, however, pressures "about" in such away that not only is the text animated with a kind of intention, but it is difficult not simply to translate "about" into re
description. A Wakean sentence can be seen as a re-description of
itself as awhole and in parts. This need not be paradoxical. I can say,
"This is a story about telling a story. " It is not clear, however, how a sentence can be a re-description of itself. We can use a sentence to re describe a sentence or a story, but that isnot the same thing as trans
lating meaning into re-description. Thus, the Wake, if construed as a
producing interesting interpretations,
of itself, would be a re-description of a re-description. This is close to nonsensical22 One might call these literal interpreta
tions in order to capture the obviousness and general intelligibility of
their objects.
I do not want to criticize these two ways of reading (indeed, Iwant
to protect them). In both cases, however, the coherence of reading requires a sense of aboutness that the text cannot provide. How can theWake be about anything when even these objects, an absent sleep er and the Wake itself, unravel the intentionality of language? This
does not only mean that we should provide a reason for why a par 223
re-description
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? ? ticular sentence is formed in the way it is (Bishop provides excellent explanations and justifications for this), but we must also ask how
can be lost.
What does itmean for language to be about something or any
thing? The late nineteenth-century German philosopher Franz Brentano, in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, argues that
the intentional (aboutness) constitutes our mental experience:
Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of theMiddle Ages called the intentional (ormental) inexistence of an
object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously ref erence to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be under
stood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as an object within itself, although
they do not always do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved,
in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. 23
To be about X seems to require a relation between a thought and X. Any relation would, however, require another relation to relate it to X. And thus, if intentionality is understood as a relation, one would
require an infinite number of relations. 24 In this passage, the verbs
"refer," "symbolize," "suggest," and "point" are all black boxes to capture this ineffable intentional relation. If,however, the object does
not actually exist (as in "I hope to build the tallest building in the
the problem has shifted from the relation between language and object to the status of this object, which in this case is imaginary. Brentano uses the model of the imaginary object as a pattern for describing all of our mental stances toward the world. The aboutness
of our language is immanent within our attitudes and statements. In
intentionality
world"),
this is simply to replace themystery of the aboutness of our language with themystery of the immanence of the world in our statements.
Brentano's description of intentionality attempts to translate onto logical distinctions (claims about the world) into psychological or
many ways,
phenomenological distinctions (claims about our
Ludwig Wittgenstein, on the other hand, attempts to dissolve these
psychological
and
phenomenological
distinctions into the intersub
jective coherence of language. The intentionality of our language is not dependent on the attachment of language to the world. Rather,
according toWittgenstein, intentional statements (Iwish that x; I expect y; I have a suspicion about z) are matched by statements that describe their fulfillment, verification, denial, failure, and so forth. 25
Such a description of intentionality, while itmakes our mental con tent accessible to others, reduces aboutness to an agreement between,
224
experience).
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? ? for example, an order and the description of its fulfillment. Thus, the
intentionality of language is determined by the way we figure kinds of sentences in relation to each other. Ihave to simplify here, but if
intentionality is reduced to an agreement
in language, then the problem of the relation between language and the world is replaced by the problem of how we inhabit language. We
are left with the question "how do we find ourselves within lan guage? " The short answer is, I think, through nonsense.
What an utterance is about, its intentional targets, are formulated
through language, so that the way language
by an agreement between language and a thing in the world but by an agreement within language between two related statements. The
intentional targets are within language, which iswhy, by deforming language into nonsense, we can lose the way the world becomes vis ible to us as something to talk about. Once a language cannot be used to articulate agreement between, for example, an expectation and its fulfillment, it cannot be about anything anymore. This suggests that
all interpretations of Finnegans Wake are not about theWake at all; they
are simply about themselves as interpretations.
Should we then abandon interpretation, claim it is senseless to
speak about what Wakean language is about? Endless and endlessly
replaceable interpretations would seem to serve little point. Ifwe abandon interpretation, however, what is left? Wakean language does not have any recognizable criteria of application to the world. Ifwe
cannot apply this language to the world, we must find the world within it: "[b]etween his voyous and her consinnantes" (FW 485. 10
11). The agreement in the Wake between world and statement is not
intentional but punning. There is agreement among world, language, and an "I" or a "we" in nonsense.
If Finnegans Wake enacts the world of an absent sleeper, as Bishop
then our failure to read backwards into his or her life or con
every sentence Joseph Conrad's claim that for anything to be art it
must justify itself in every line. 26What any sentence means collapses
into how we justify the particularity of the sentence, that is, how we
justify the nonsense of any particular sentence. Such justification means that we reflect upon ourselves (prosoche), our reading, our
making sense and not making sense of the Wake, through the very nonsense of the text. We must read ourselves into the text, just as we must read sense into nonsense. How can one do this? One way is to
ask the riddle-question: "Is reading Finnegans Wake a human activi 225
argues, sciousness,
into amind that we would recognize as our own, forces us to place our minds as the intentional target of the text. But this would mean that we do not understand ourselves. How could this be our night life, our dreams, our absence? Joyce forces to the surface of
between descriptions with
is about something is not
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? ? ty? "
What I am suggesting here is that Finnegans Wake separates reading
er, is about ourselves. But what does the Wake say about ourselves,
which would mean, in the context ofmy discussion of intentionality, what kind of thing arewe that can be talked about through nonsense?
"Ourselves" ismeant here as "us human beings. " This might suggest
a kind of test where only someone who asks the question about
whether reading the Wake is a human activity is a human being. I remain an agnostic about the answer to this. A question remains,
from interpreting. An interpretation
but about itself as an interpretation; our reading of the Wakef howev
arewe that we can be that which the Wake could be about? " or "what arewe that we can be targeted by the need for the kind of justification the Wake demands? "
Ill
Although Finnegans Wake can be interpreted in any number of ways, Ihave been arguing that it cannot be read as being about any
thing. The nonsense of the text separates reading from interpretation. Ihave suggested that this shifts the site of intentionality towards us,
as readers. This does not mean simply that our interpretations betray us, as if they were slips of the tongue or Rorschach tests. Any argu
ment about themeaning of our interpretations would simply allego rize one interpretation into another. Ifwe refuse to equate our inter
pretations with reading, with claims about what the text means, then we can no longer properly ask questions like "what does this sen
tence, passage, textmean? " Instead, we have to begin from the under standing that our reading confesses our being within and against lan
guage.
In Finnegans Wake, Augustine's conversation with God is replaced
with a conversation with nonsense, generating a theological crisis or
what Joyce calls a "theoperil" (FW 223. 28). The divine threat in Finnegans Wake emerges as the threat of nonsense that ismeant to
trace the limits of our language and of ourselves as human beings. Both language and the nonsense in the Wake are a dreaming into the world, not into ourselves. T. S. Eliot writes in his essay on Dante, "We
have nothing but dreams, and we have forgotten that seeing visions? a practice now relegated to the aberrant and uneducated?
was once a more significant, interesting, and disciplined kind of dreaming. We take it for granted that our dreams spring from below:
possibly the quality of our dreams suffers as a consequence. "27 What is the ontological status or the intentional claim of a dream exposing
the world and not our psychology? Finnegans Wake is such a dream, 226
however? "what
of the Wake is not about the Wake
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? ? that is, the world dreaming a mind; so would the world be if con
structed by a demon, or ifwe found ourselves in aworld that was made in the way that we were made; language itself would be such a dream; culture would be such a dream; so would psychology be a
dream into theworld and not into ourselves.
How could we survive or understand such a dreaming into the
world? This question is another version of my earlier query? "is
reading Finnegans Wake a human activity? " The answer to this ques tion need not be a description of what constitutes a human being but
might, instead, consist of a continual self-reflective (prosoche) account of how Imean as a human being when faced with the kind of non sense that maps my place within any language. I do not think that
"how Imean as a human being" has, itself, any clear meaning in our
ordinary language, nor do I think any philosophical account ofmean ing could provide itwith a sense adequate towhat would motivate
appealing to it. "How Imean as a human being" can only mean when meaning itself is at stake in the kind of reading that Ihave been argu
ing the Wake demands and requires.
In forcing the question "is reading Finnegans Wake a human activi ty? " the Wake ties our humanness to nonsense. The Wake exerts what
Iwould call a theological pressure. Iuse this phrase because Wakean nonsense shows our relation to the fundamental limits within which we are anything, which is the same as the fundamental shifting limits
between sense and nonsense. This means we should read theWake as a description of how the limits of linguistic sense match the limits in relation to which we understand ourselves as human beings.
This is the effect of Joyce's lists? to place the world enumerated against us and in this offer targets for sense and identification. But once art identification ismade, as a result of an interpretation (for
example, the claim that the Wakean phrase "alphybettyformed
is a version of the Wake? FW 183. 13), the meaning remains unclear. In other words, most uses of "meaning" are not equivalent to
most uses of "interpretation. " Is the meaning of Finnegans Wake the
list?
following
My wud! The warped flooring of the lair and soundconducting walls
verbage"
. . . were
. . . doubtful
literatured . . .
with burst
alphybettyformed ahems and
loveletters, telltale sto
thereof ries,
viasses,
lucifers,,. . counterfeit franks, best intentions,. . . gloss teeth for a tooth, . . . inversions of all this chambermade music one stands, given a grain of goodwill, a fair chance of actually seeing the whirling dervish,
Tumult, son of Thunder, self exiled inupon his ego, anightlong a shak
persianly eggshells,
vivlical ahahs, imeffible tries
dictas, visus
umbique,
at speech unasyllabled, you owe mes, eyoldhyms, fluefoul smut, fallen
ompiter
ing betwixtween white or reddr hawrors, noondayterrorised 227
to skin and
verbage,
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? ? writing themystery of himsel in fur
tive means through which this "him" becomes visible as an "I" to
himself. "Furniture," however, also marks a limit to both the "I," his
particularity, and language, which we designate "matter," or what George Berkeley calls "the furniture of earth. "28 "Furniture" and "lan
as limits are incommensurable domains that are written together by Wakean language and, thus, by a writing that is nonsen
that
replaces the intentional agreement in ordinary language.
What, however, is "the mystery of himsel," the mystery of any "I"?
In this passage, "himsel," an ineluctable phantom, writes while sit ting in furniture with himself a piece of furniture determined and
defined by materiality. This "mystery of himsel in furniture" becomes at the end of theWake, when the sleeper is awakening, the "furnit of heupanepi world" (FW 611. 18). "[F]urnit" contains fuit (Latin for "as
itwas") and furnus (Latin for "oven" or "fireplace") and can be read
simply as "burn it. " "[F]umit" can be translated, also, as "'as itwas' burns and is a furnace. " This burning is established as a thing when "furnit" puns on "the furniture of earth. " Consequently, the being and stability of the past condensed into furniture contains Heraclean
flux. "[H]eupanepi" consists of the Greek eu (good), pan (all), and epi (upon). Thus "furnit of heupanepi world" can be translated as "the furniture of the flux of the good upon all the world burns into a fur
nace. "
This kind of nonsense sentence promises profundity. Before we
accept or reject that promise as something we can understand, as an
expectation about ourselves and the world? in other words, before we say what this promise means?
we must discover how it can be about ourselves or theworld. If the puns of Finnegans Wake should be
read through either something like Augustine's self-reflection by way of language towards God or through something like Luther's writing
bone by an ineluctable phantom. . . niture. (FW 183. 08484. 10)
guage"
. . . writing
the
furniture" to describe both "furniture" and language as the constitu
I take "an ineluctable
phantom
mystery
of himsel in
expresses a kind of agreement among
sical. This writing-together
"furniture," "language," and "himsel" within a nonsense
towards the presence of God in the grammar of human
language,
then when we look into Wakean language, there is nothing to find
there but the looking itself. This is not quite circular, except, as Henry
David Thoreau notes, in theway art's delusive promise about looking through another's eyes (to see ourselves) is circular. 29 We have made amistake ifwe believe that seeing through another's eyes, that dis
covering ourselves looking for ourselves in Finnegans Wake, will pro
vide us with new
knowledge
about what we are. Ifwe read with this
228
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? ? kind of goal inmind, we either discover something trivial (we see what we always see) or uninformative (we would no longer be seeing
ourselves, being now something different). In the case of Finnegans Wake, there are no new facts to discover, because its language cannot
be about anything in any intelligible sense of "about. " We are thus presented with three options: 1)We can try to redeem "about" with in the Wakean language game; 2) we can accept this loss of intention
ality, but then itwould be unclear why anyone would read theWake;
3) or we can read ourselves (as the missing
language) against and in relation to this loss of sense. It is this last
option that I am suggesting we attempt. What Finnegans Wake demands is not interpretations but responses.
What would be a way of responding to the "furnit of heupanepi
to "the furniture of the flux of the good upon all the world burns into a furnace"? As the sleeper awakens into consciousness at the end of the Wake, under the sun and in rising color, some "part of it . . . had shown itself . . . unable to absorbere" (FW 611. 17-19). In
other words, as the sleeper seemingly awakens, some part ofwhatev
er he or she is shows itself as unable to absorb light because it is not matter. The "part of it. . . unable to absorbere" is that which is noth
ing more than present, than change, described by the phrase I am
translating as "the furniture of the flux of the good upon all theworld burns into a furnace. " What part of a person is this? What part of a person is not matter? If the Wake is itself a representation of that part,
then itmay be a representation of the soul. The soul, however, is shown to be the shifting limits of sense and nonsense made visible
through our reading (as part of a reflection of our entering and exit ing from Wakean language). "Furnit of heupanepi world" describes
being between things (furniture) and loss (burning), as a limit to them both. One implication of finding ourselves within language as non sense is that one cannot get any more meaning out of our own self
reflection than we can out of this passage in theWake. And themean
ing of this passage is a description of the limit to themeaning of this
world,"
passage.
about us, as human
This iswhat we are, and, thus, Wakean nonsense can be
beings.
"About" in the previous sentence cannot mean what "about" ordi
narily means. Nonsense cannot be about anything. What Ihave sug
therefore, is that we should read against our own interpreta tions of the Wake, in order to re-expose the limits between sense and nonsense that our interpretations hide. The loss of intentionality, the
aboutness of our language, in Finnegans Wake precipitates a version of the same crisis that the theologian Karl Barth describes, in The Epistle to the Romans, as our standing "before an irresistible and all-embrac
ing dissolution of the world, of time and things and me, before a pen 229
gested,
intentional target of its
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? ? etrating and ultimate KRISIS, before the supremacy of a negation by which all existence is rolled up. "30 Finnegans Wake shows that this cri sis threatens less the world or our language than our status within both. The vanishing of any intentional target forWakean language
us out as its target. If the Wake is about us, then we are
it only ifwe can find away tomatch ourselves with how it is nonsen
sical. There is no simple description of this, except to say that any
picks
reading
of theWake is also a description of what we are, so that we can, in reading theWake, describe a fundamental sense of time that is bound tohow we make sense of things and how this sense can be lost
in the vanishing intentionality enacted by our reading of the Wake. Is
reading Finnegans Wake, however, a human activity? It is certainly a question humans are prone to ask.
NOTES
1Pierre Hadot, "Ancient Spiritual Exercises and 'Christian Philosophy/"
Philosophy as a Form of Life (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1993). Further ref erences will be cited parenthetically in the text.
2
See Socrates, Theaetetus, ed. Myles Burnyeat, trans. M. J. Levett (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990), and Philo of Alexandria, Philo, trans. F. H.
Colson (Cambridge:Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), p. 84. While I follow Hadot's transcription of this list, I re-translate prosoche as self-attention to emphasize
description
its
meaning
3
in askesis.
SaintAugustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), XII. xxiii. 32. Further references will be cited parenthetical
ly in the text.
4
St. John Cassian, The Conferences, ed. and trans. Boniface Ramsey (New
York: Paulist Press, 1997). For a further discussion of St. John Cassian, see
Owen Chadwick, Western Asceticism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1958).
For a general discussion of exegesis, see Beryl Smalley, The Study of theBible inthMeiddleAges(NotreDame:Univ. ofNotreDamePress,1964),andHenri
de Lubac, Ex? g? seM? di? vale: Les Quatres Sens de V? criture (Paris: Aubier, 1964).
5
See Plato, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982), 352d; see also, in this regard, The Dialogues of Plato: "Eutkyphro," "Apology," "Crito," "Meno," "Gorgias," "Menexenus," trans. R. E. Allen (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), 487e, 501c, 527c. 6
SeeAristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), book 1. 7
Two classic discussions of ancient ethics that bring out these senses of self can be found in JuliaAnnas's TheMorality ofHappiness (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), and John Cooper's Reason and Human Good in Aristotle
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975),
8
See St. Ignatius of Loyola, Exercitia spiritualia: cum versione literall ex auto graphe Hisp? nico (Rome: Marini et B. Morini, 1847), and see Jean-Michel Rabat? , James Joyce,Authorized Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1984), p. 1. Further references to the Rabat? work will be cited parenthetical 230
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? ? ly in the text.
9 See Jacques Derrida, "Two Words for Joyce/' Post-structuralist Joyce, ed.
Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984),
147.
p.
10Robert Polhemus, "The Comic Gospel of 'Shem,'" Comic Faith (Chicago:
Chicago Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 294-338. 11
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. JohnMacquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: Blackwell Publishers, 1962), pp. 23 (H4), 161 (H124).
12Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knoivledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Harvard: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996), p. 191.
13 De Animae sen Augustine, Quantitate Dialogas
(Philadelphia; Peter Reilly 1924), 32. 66.
Questionum Liber
14See Augustine, De Trinitate (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 1968), 16. 10. 19.
15See Martin Luther, Werke: kritische Gesammtausgabe, Tischreden (Weimar: H. B? hlau, 1912-1921), vol. 15.
16
Johann Georg
Hamann's theories of language? see TheMagus of theNorth: J, G. Hamann and
theOrigins ofModern Irrationalism (London: JohnMurray, 1993). Hamann read
of Luther's remarks in Johann Albrecht Bengel, Gnomon novi testamenti in quo ex nativa verborum vi simplictas, profunditas, concinnitas, salubritas sensuum coelestium indicatur (Tubingen: Henr. Philippi Schrammii, 1742), preface, sec tion 14, p. [xxiv]? see Bii lO. lff.
17See such representative texts asHamann's Betrachtungun ? ber dieHeilige Schrift (Nuremberg: Lechner, 1816), and Johann Gottfried Herder's Christliche
Schriften (Riga: J. F. Hartknoch, 1794-1798).
18The general outline ofHamann's picture of the relationship between lan
guage and 19
the world
is similar to that of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Isaiah Berlin discusses how this idea resonated with
The Books at the "Wake" Univ. Press, 1959), p. 15.
Southern Illinois
James
S.
Atherton,
(Carbondale:
20See Ronald E. Buckalew, "Night Lessons on Language/Book II, chapter ii,"A Conceptual Guide to "Finnegans Wake" ed. Michael H. Begnal and Fritz
Senn (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1974); Christine Froula, Modernism's Body: Sex, Culture, ana Joyce (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996); Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe of "Finnegans Wake"
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974); and Sheldon Brivic, Joyce the Creator (Madison: Univ. ofWisconsin Press, 1985).
21 Book theDark Univ. ofWisconsin Press, John Bishop, Joyce's of (Madison:
1985).
22This gives us another answer: it is about nonsense, which is to say that
in being a kind of nonsense, and being about itself, itmust be about nonsense. This kind of claim makes nonsense out of themeaning of "about/7 Beyond generating a typology of the kinds of nonsense, it is not clear why this claim is not itself nonsense. Such a claim could, of course, be a part of some theory
of nonsense. Reading Finnegans Wake requires thinking about nonsense and maybe even generating a typology of nonsense, but it isunclear that it could
itself be about nonsense.
23Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. Antos C
231
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? ? Rancurello, D. B, Terrell, and Linda L. McAllister (New York: Humanities
Press, 1973),p. 88.
24A description of our relation to theworld cannot use the concept of rela
tion. This difficulty leads to claims that our relation to theworld is indescrib able. Brentano counters this by arguing that our reference to objects is imma
nent within our intentional stances.
25 York:
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New Macmillan
Publishers, 1953), ? ? 136,429,458.
26
204.
28George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning thePrinciples ofHuman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982), ? 6.
Conrad, Doubleday Publishers,
to The Nigger of the Narcissus (New York: 1914), p. 11.
preface
27T. S. Eliot, SelectedEssays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World,
Joseph
29Henry David Thoreau, "Economy," Waiden, ed.
