THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES SIGNS OF INTELLIGENCE: THE SELF-AWARE TEXTUALITY OF JAMES JOYCE (original) (raw)
Related papers
1982 Finnegans Wake: Language and Style
When a part so ptee does duty for the halos, we soon grow to use of an allforabit. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake FINNEGANS WAKE is an unlikely source of pleasure for the reader who regards literary language as a means of access to something behind or beyond itself. The language of the Wake simply refuses to transmit data to a passive mind and then disappear; instead, it continually withholds or obscures external points of reference, insisting on itself as the necessary focus of the reader's attention. You might call it a language of reflexive signifiers -signifiers that are themselves the sensory objects they signify, and whose immanent structures are thus substantial embodiments rather than substitutional representations of their significance. If we can abandon the notion that the figural characters of a written language are phantom proxies for phenomenal entities and treat them instead as dramatic characters with past lives and present motives, characters who interact in complex ways, then any sentence from Finnegans Wake can be witnessed as a dramatic production, through and in the temporal, of its meaning.
Semiotic Perturbations: What The Frog's Eye Tells Us About Finnegans Wake
2018
Finnegans Wake presents a semiotic dilemma for the reader: How is it that the Wake means anything? And, Why doesn't it mean everything? To gesture, somewhat metonymically, toward the Wake itself: It is told in sounds in utter that, in signs so adds to, in universal, in polygluttural, in each auxiliary neutral idiom, sordomutics, florilingua, sheltafocal, flayflutter, a con's cubane, a pro's tutute, strassarab, ereperse and anythongue athall. [FW 117.12-16] As such, Finnegans Wake lays bare the dilemma of semiotics in general: that is, the problem of signification and indeterminacy of meaning.
Shem's business is not to create a higher life, but merely to find and utter the Word. Shaun, on the other hand, whose function is to make the Word become flesh, misreads it, fundamentally rejects it, limits himself to a kind of stupid concretism, and, while winning all the skirmishes, loses the eternal city. HCE, the father of this pair, represents the unity from which their po¬ larity springs. Compared with the rich plasticity of HCE, the boys are but shadow-thin grotesques. Their history plays like a strange mirage over the enduring core of the basic presence of HCE. The energy generated by their conflict is but a reflex of the original energy generated by the father's fall. Furthermore, antipodal as the brothers may be, they are both easily em¬ braced by the all-inclusive love of their wonderful mother ALP. (See, for instance, the charming passages on pages 194 to 195.) Toward the close of the work (specifically during the third chapter of Book III (pp. 474-554)), the forms of the son's world dissolve and the ever¬ lasting primal form of HCE resurges. The all-father is reunited with his wife in a diamond-wedding anniversary, as if to demonstrate that behind the complexity of their children's lives, they still continue to be the motivegivers. Together, they constitute the primordial, androgynous angel, which is Man, the incarnate God. What, finally, is Finnegans Wake all about? Stripping away its accidental features, the book may be said to be all compact of mutually supplementary antagonisms: male-and-female, age-and-youth, life-and-death, love-and-hate; * This passage carries forward the theme, introduced on pp. 10-n, of the little woman's bag of battle souvenirs. Later, pp. 205-12, it will be told how she crushed the scandal by dis¬ tributing among her children the inexhaustible contents of her bag. t Mor is Irish for "ancient." Mort (pronounced "mor") is French for "dead." "More" is English for the drive that builds the Empire.
Neologizing in Finnegans Wake: Beyond a Typology of the Wakean Portmanteau
This essay discusses the portmanteau as a privileged rhetorical figure in Finnegans Wake. It illustrates the manner in which Joyce’s use of the portmanteau enables him to establish a nonmathematical and nondialectical relation between the work’s minimal structural element and the structure as a whole. The essay draws on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “the virtual” and on Jacques Derrida’s notion of “invention” in order to theorize this relation. After reviewing previous discussions of Joyce’s technique of word combination, it proceeds to consider the Wakean portmanteau as a textual event, an utterly new object that irrupts within the fabric of language to suspend conventional protocols of interpretation. Within this theoretical framework, the text’s minimal structural element is charged with a radically inventive potential. The claim of this essay is that such potential pertains to a movement of thought that unfolds in excess of received hermeneutic paradigms.
Finnegans wake: the obliquity of trans-lations
1996
One can easily imagine the lack of understanding that must have prevailed after the confusion of tongues at Babel, which, until the remedy of transla tion, made an unintelligible babble of each post-Babelian parlance. This lalic (from Greek lalein: to babble) relationship that languages bore to one another may be compared with the ecstatic manifestations in the Biblical charisma of glossolalia, also called the gift of tongues in allusion to Pentecost, with which it has often been assimilated by Biblical exegesis, especially in the Pentecostal view. However, an operative distinction must be kept between these various linguistic events. Whereas the glossolalic utterance in the Corinthian expe rience as described by Paul is unintelligible and its communality spells division and disunity (Mills 104-5), every one Galilaean spoke intelligibly in a for eign, previously unknown tongue, according to the Lucan account of the Pen tecostal miracle (Acts 2:6-8ff.), an act made possible by th...
"Twone": Coincidentia oppositorum in Finnegans Wake
Broad Street Humanities Review, 2022
This essay traces examples of oppositions (such as male and female, left hemisphere and right hemisphere, good and evil, sense and nonsense, order and chaos) within Finnegans Wake and aims to show how they seek unification. It contends that, through the unity of opposites, Joyce's project tends towards an expression of the Absolute in a way that might resemble the movement of the Hegelian dialectic. From a more personal perspective, the book may produce a wholeness of Joyce's Self through an alchemical process of Jungian individuation. Yet, at the same time, it resists these kinds of totalising narratives in schizophrenic fragmentation-but it is this schizophrenia that paradoxically provides the necessary unification for Joyce's vision of the Absolute.