Figures of the Earth: Non-Human Phenomenology in Joyce

Ruben Borg

doi:10.3390/h6030071

Abstract

My paper addresses the non-human turn in Joyce’s work from the perspective of genetic phenomenology. I begin by commenting on Joyce’s characterization of Molly Bloom as a non-human apparition. I unpack the notion of a non-human apparition in light of Joyce’s interest in the idea of the earth as a generative matrix, and I relate this idea to a genetic enquiry into problems of passive synthesis and the givenness of objects to sense perception. I then trace the elaboration of this theme in a cluster of rhetorical figures from the later novels—puns, clichés, and metonymic associations—that play on the senses of matrix, materiality, and the sex of the mother. The second part turns to representations of the earth in Finnegans Wake. Focusing on scenes of interment and becoming one with the landscape, descriptions of tombs as echo chambers, and of geological sites as giant human bodies, I read Joyce’s earth as the crowning expression of his experiments with a radical (pre- and post-human) phenomenology.

Highlights

Returning to “Nausicaa” by way of these scenes, we discover a peculiar Joycean insistence on the realm of the senses, and, in particular, a synesthesia of smell and sound, on the one hand, and a fascination with color and light on the other
I would argue, in short, that the associative chain triggered by the breakfast routine, and brought to the fore again by the memory of the pussens on the staircase, is part of a broader Joycean concern with the genesis of sense perception—and that mobilized in the play of identifications is an attempt to think through the relation between the earth and the making of the sensible world
Heated Residence In Finnegans Wake, the function of the earth as generative matrix and as ground of sense perception largely attaches to two figures: the mound, which is associated with the fallen body of HCE; and the mystery of the “eternal geomater” (FW 296–97)8 which is revealed to be the sex of ALP.9

Summary

The Pussens and the Earth

I will begin by looking at the figure of the pussens as the site of an arbitrary, metonymic association between Molly and the earth. It is an example, same as any other animal, of organic, sentient but nonhuman life Its role, in this sense, is no different than that of the minnows that pick at the drowned man’s corpse in “Proteus” (U 63) , or the “obese grey rat” (U 145) Bloom spots among the graves in “Hades”: to participate in the cycle of organic transformation, proceeding from birth to burial, from individual creature to decomposing body, eating and producing waste; and, in so doing, to offer a Copernican challenge to the philosophical grammars that traditionally grant human consciousness a place of privilege among all organic forms. I would argue, in short, that the associative chain triggered by the breakfast routine, and brought to the fore again by the memory of the pussens on the staircase, is part of a broader Joycean concern with the genesis of sense perception—and that mobilized in the play of identifications is an attempt to think through the relation between the earth (its attendant figures) and the making of the sensible world

A Portrait of the Artist is a case in point

The Time the Movement Takes

Heated Residence

Being Given