Joyce in the Fold, the Fold in Joyce

Abstract

James Joyce's work has many folded documents, bodies, clothing, souls—and these objects often contain a mystery within their folds, literal and figurative. In the story “An Encounter,” the strange man met in a field at Ringsend tells the young narrator how he would love to whip a boy “as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery” (Dubliners 20). In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus feels “his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin, spreading abroad the balefire of its burning stars and folding back upon itself” (110). Virtually every document in Ulysses is folded, unfolded, and often refolded, including Leopold Bloom's letter from his flirtatious correspondent Martha Clifford, his copy of the Freeman's Journal, his prospectus for the Zionist colony of Agendath Netaim, Stephen Dedalus's telegram to Buck Mulligan, the mentally disturbed Dennis Breen's cryptic postcard, and the sailor D. B. Murphy's discharge from service on the three-master Rosevean.My purpose in citing these details is to suggest the importance of the figure of the fold in Joyce's work. My reading is informed by Gilles Deleuze's concept of the fold, notably as presented in his Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque (1988).1 In Deleuze's theory the figure of the fold reappears in a wide and potentially bewildering range of contexts. Materially, it refers to the shifting contours of a material surface, as in architecture, the plastic arts, and the human body. But the figure of the fold is also a metaphor for a theory of experience, with its own notions of subjectivity, epistemology, and ontology. It is precisely the inherent ambiguity of the concept, however, that constitutes its relevance to certain forms of literature, where the materiality of language reflects the highly inflected nature of human experience in both its internal and external structures. What I therefore propose is not so much a Deleuzian reading of Joyce as to show how the figure of the fold, as found in Deleuze and elsewhere, helps us to understand the form and spirit of Joyce's work, especially in its later stages. Finnegans Wake in particular can be understood as embodying the fold in linguistic and narrative form, as well as in the intricately involved texture of its significations. In this respect Joyce's work anticipates both later formulations of the fold in theory, and later manifestations of the fold in the arts. These resonate with certain wider cultural and technological movements that have taken place since Joyce's work was written.Before demonstrating the importance of this concept in Joyce, it may be useful to address the question of the nature of Joyce's work in a manner made possible by more recent theoretical and cultural developments. The question is whether his later work (primarily Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) constitutes an absolute exception to existing forms of literature, or whether it represents merely an extreme form of a literary genre such as the novel. In light of this question, we might revisit an early history of critical approaches outlined in Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer's Post-structuralist Joyce (1984), a collection of essays from French journals of the time. In their introduction to this volume, Attridge and Ferrer describe Joyce studies up to that point as attempting to “assimilate” Joyce's work to the literary tradition, for example by finding in it those qualities that have come to define the modern novel. The work of assimilation would thus have been carried out through empirical readings that pursue textual referents (e.g., the Wake's sources in Huckleberry Finn); through thematic readings of universal themes (e.g., the fall of man and eternal return); and through morally humanistic readings based on conventions of character and narrative (e.g., Leopold Bloom's acts of mercy, Molly Bloom's life-affirming nature).2 As if dissatisfied with these readings, Attridge and Ferrer introduce a number of essays that they call post-structuralist, including those of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Hélène Cixous—representing, respectively, the then relatively new approaches of deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and new wave feminism. A recurring theme in these essays is the resistance to “assimilation”; in various ways the claim is made that Joyce's work, and Finnegans Wake in particular, lies beyond the reach of existing and possibly even potential forms of literary analysis. These essays are in fact celebrations of the power of Joyce's later work as a kind of natural force: it cannot be deconstructed because it already deconstructs itself; it collapses the psychic orders of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real; it heralds a new écriture feminine with Molly Bloom “carrying Ulysses off any book and toward the new writing; ‘I said yes, I will yes’” (Cixous 884). Implicit in each of these approaches is a kind of disclaimer: the nature of Joyce's later work cannot be conveyed in straightforward, rational critical discourse; such a discourse risks doing violence to a work that is anything but straightforward and rational.In the decades since Post-structuralist Joyce, two new approaches to Joyce have notably come to the fore: genetic studies and postcolonial studies. The former constitutes an empirical reconstruction of the manner in which Joyce composed his works. In eighty years of criticism, genetic studies have provided one of the few instances of real, new knowledge concerning Joyce's work. This approach is nonetheless limited to the how and the when of the work, doing little for those of us rather concerned with the what and the why. As for postcolonial studies, they raise the question of how to place Joyce's work within the larger geopolitics of literature. For Franco Moretti, Joyce's Dublin is not the capital of a colonized Ireland so much as the modern metropolis in the age of consumer capitalism, as Joyce knew it in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. Pascale Casanova offers another interpretation of Joyce's extraterritorial position: faced with the alternative ideologies of Irish emancipation and British domination, Joyce chose exile in neutral territory, Paris, as the theater of operations for his subversion of the English tradition. From there, “Joyce dislocated English, the language of colonization, not only by incorporating within it elements of every European language, but also by subverting the norms of English propriety,” for example in the obscene and scatological elements of his language (315). With Félix Guattari, Deleuze himself had prepared the ground for such analyses by designating Joyce's work, with that of Kafka, as “minor literature.”This designation tends to undermine the view of Joyce's work as wholly anomalous, given the qualities that Deleuze and Guattari ascribe to minor literature. These include, first, the linguistic and formal deterritorialization of such writing with respect to the national tradition of its mother tongue, and second, its implicitly political character in disclosing the power relations inherent in institutions ranging from the family unit to the juridical order. And finally, as a consequence of these first two characteristics, the collective value of the work (Kafka 30): the work is not the individual expression of an author so much as the enunciation of a multiple voice with revolutionary potential.3 Although Joyce is mentioned only in passing by Deleuze and Guattari, we note that each of the attributes they ascribe to minor literature belongs to Joyce's work. Together these qualities allow us to consider Joyce's work in the context of Irish literature, even if its relation to that literature remains highly ambiguous. Joyce's deterritorialization with respect to English language and tradition lies not just in his “abnihilisation of the etym” (Finnegans Wake 353.22)4 but also in his subversion of the conventional narrative forms of plot, character, and narrative development. This subversion is implicitly revolutionary, not in the traditional political sense but rather in what Deleuze calls the “revolutionary becoming” [le devenir révolutionnaire] of a people (“Le devenir”). In one of the passages where Finnegans Wake announces its own incendiary practice, we are told that Shem the Penman, a figure for the writer, “would wipe alley english spooker, multaphoniaksically spuking, off the face of the erse” (178.6), or wipe every English speaker, multiphonetically speaking, off the face of the earth. Paradoxically, this makes a work like Finnegans Wake both Irish and global in its political content, beginning with the first chapter and its farcical tour of the “Willingdone Museyroom” (8.10) or Wellington Museum, a fictive monument to British imperial hubris. As for the collective value of such a work, one notes among many other qualities its ironic revival of traditional Irish myth, as well as the effacement of the figure of the author except in the comically degraded form of Shem the Penman. Finally, the Wake's embodiment of the fold, which I wish to demonstrate below, constitutes one more form of deterritorialization with respect to conventional literary paradigms.The question of the status of Joyce's work as minor literature returns us to the more essential question of its nature as literature per se. On one hand, the intense materiality of Joyce's language makes a radical departure from the vast body of works in prose fiction about which Derrida remarks that we have finished reading them as soon as we have begun: “program known” (24).5 On the other hand, while this materiality effectively constitutes a revolt against the symbolic order of institutional power, it also marks its autonomy from existing discourses of revolutionary struggle: program unknown. Joyce is not alone in this ambiguity, which he shares with Kafka and certain other writers going back at least as far as Sterne. But Joyce and Beckett have pushed the materiality of language to its opposing limits: Joyce in extreme condensation and linguistic range; Beckett in the intense ascesis of willed ignorance and poverty. Is Finnegans Wake then a novel? It is a work of fiction of substantial length, written in the syntax of prose. But Joyce scholars do not call it a novel, instead referring to it as “the book,” as if to recognize its formal and material difference from “the novel.”It is precisely the nature of this materiality that I wish to explore through the concept of the fold. For students of the novel it may be useful to distinguish this concept from that of “development,” which literally means unfolding. As commonly used in critical discourse, however, development refers to plot or character. Typically, the plot resolves its initial tensions, and character realizes its potential, through the temporal movement of narrative. In this unfolding, novelistic development is directional and teleological; it moves toward outcome and resolution. Patricia Meyer Spacks defines eighteenth-century “novels of development” as those that focus on the growth of character, demonstrating how, through narrative incident, a protagonist “accretes knowledge of the world and its workings as a result of these events” (59). But the unfolding fold as I treat it here has no goal; it is a figure neither of accretion, nor character, nor incident, nor of knowledge, nor cause and effect. Unlike the “development” of a novel, once unraveled it does not remain so; rather, it folds back on itself in ever renewed configurations. The fold is both theoretical and concrete, relating to both form and signification. Its advantage as a critical concept is that it allows us to see Joyce's work not just in relation to literature, but also in relation to the plastic arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, and fashion design. The question of the literary status of the work is thus rendered secondary to what it has in common with other art forms. By the same token, the question of its literary autonomy is superseded by that of its continuity with those forms, as well as by its resonance with the cultural conditions of modernity.The figure of the fold first received modern philosophical attention in Merleau-Ponty's Le visible et l'invisible, the work he left unfinished at his death in 1961. Merleau-Ponty speaks of the fold (le pli) constituted by the human body, whose inside is folded into its outside, which itself is enfolded in the world of objects through which it moves (189). The world of Being in turn is enfolded by an outside (le dehors) of non-Being. Rather than subject and object, self and other, there are “fields in intersection” (276). The image of the fold also figures prominently in Michel Foucault's Les mots et les choses (1966), where he explains that classical literature takes place in the movement from finding new names for things for which there are already names, to finding names for things never before named, the words for which have lain asleep in “the fold” of words hitherto far removed from the object they are now called upon to signify (134). The concept of the fold was revived by Deleuze in Le pli. In a series of dazzling moves between theory and art history, Deleuze proposes the fold as a figure for subjectivity, and ultimately for modern art.Without being a close reader of Joyce, Deleuze refers to Joyce's work notably in Logique du sens (1969), where he writes that the “informal chaos” of Finnegans Wake affirms the power of phantasm in such a way that, in a manner comparable to the return of the repressed, the reality of experience is reconciled with the structures of the art form: “divergence of series, decentering of circles, the constitution of a chaos which includes them, internal resonance and wide-ranging movement, assault of simulacres” (301). While this remains a plausible characterization of the Wake, Deleuze's later study of the fold, where Joyce is again mentioned only in passing (Le pli 111), nonetheless offers a way of reading Joyce's work in terms both of the plastic arts and of a more elaborated theory of language.For me, the relevance of Deleuze's work to Finnegans Wake is double. His concept of the fold allows for a way of defining the formal contours of Joyce's language: his treatment of both the ontology of the subject and of the subject's relation to language helps to explain the nature of Joyce's work. In his book on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the baroque, Deleuze cites the philosopher's 1676 dialogue Pacidus to Philalethes, on the nature of motion (Le pli 9). One of the speakers in the dialogue points out that a flexible or elastic body still has cohering parts that can be opened up and folded together in various ways. The division of such a body is not like the division of sand into grains, but rather like that of a sheet of paper or a tunic into folds, “always a fold within a fold, like a cavern within a cavern” (Le pli 6). A genealogy of this formal aspect of the baroque descends from that era through the centuries to the present. Since the 1990s a generation of architects has been influenced by this notion of form in Deleuze, as witnessed by a 1993 special issue of Architectural Design titled “Folding in Architecture.” As another example, a 2008 exhibition in Krefeld, Germany, celebrated the fold in works of sculpture, video, photography, and paper by artists ranging from Eva Hesse and Richard Serra to Rachel Whiteread (Buchner and Martin). For all the continuity of this form, it is nonetheless important to distinguish the ideological foundations of seventeenth-century baroque from the “neobaroque” of our own time. The former was an expression of the Counter-Reformation, designed to impress the spectator with the glory of the Church triumphant. Contemporary manifestations of the baroque have appropriated its form without this ideological grounding.In Deleuze's theory, each of us has a part of life that cannot be reduced to our familial, social, national, and sexual identities. As we nonetheless become “subjects” of these identities, this other life is concealed in a “fold” of subjectivation—the subject's relation to itself—which Deleuze compares to the “four rivers of hell”: these are constituted by the fold of the body, the fold of the relations of power (rapports de force), the fold of knowledge, and the fold of “the outside,” meaning the ultimate limit of life and death (Foucault 111; cf. Conley). The body, power, knowledge, death—these are the things in which our lives are enfolded, to which we are subject, and through which we suffer.6 By “the fold of knowledge” is meant the relation of our being to truth, a relation that differs historically—from antiquity to Christianity to René Descartes to Immanuel Kant—according to the nature of truth as it is understood to be.For Deleuze the fold of the self is not a static form but rather a process of constant dédoublement, a word that in this context can be translated as doubling, but also as passing or lining. In French, when a car passes another on the road it is said to “doubler” the first car. The lining folded into a coat is called a “doublure.” These words serve as metaphors for the process in which the self, constituted by its identifications, is constantly passed or “doubled” by history, so that in order to survive it must “fold” this experience into itself—into its knowledge, for example, thereby altering ever so slightly its constitution. Our subjectivity is constantly wrapping and unwrapping itself, folding, unfolding, and refolding in its continual adaptation to reality.For Deleuze, the form of art that best represents this process is the baroque, in which the fold and unfolding (le dépli) are essential elements of baroque aesthetic. In baroque art one does not seek to complete a fold, but to continue it, for example by having it cross a ceiling and extend indefinitely. Rather than follow a form, it creates form; it is the inflected line that engenders its own infinite extension (Le pli 49). By the same token, to unfold is not to unmake the fold but to continue it in its variability through the same substance, be it stone, plaster, paint, fabric, paper—or, as Joyce demonstrates, through language.Within the dynamic of the fold, then, there is a tension according to which each term gives rise to the next, this next term having been held or folded within the first. In baroque architecture the walls of the interior are hung with a restless myriad of folds within folds that can serve metaphorically as those of a soul or a mind. In the baroque façade, these folds are transformed and thrust forward into the space of the city. If the baroque ideally is defined by the fold that extends to infinity, it is also found in the billowing and flaring lines of baroque costume as we see it in painting, sculpture, and fashion. These folding waves of cloth and color liberate themselves from the finite body; in their excess of turbulent flow they fill up the frame of a painting, and risk unbalancing the equilibrium of a sculpture. But the importance of the fold is not just art-historical. Already in 1988 Deleuze finds it to be symptomatic of our time, that “the fluctuation of the norm replaces the permanence of law.” As a result, “the status of the object no longer belongs to a relation between form and matter, but to a temporal modulation involving the continual variation of matter and the continual development of form” (Le pli 26).With the use of computer-aided design, much of contemporary architecture has revived the baroque use of the fold as a means of giving texture and movement to form. The 1993 special issue of Architectural Design was inspired by Deleuze's essay on the fold.7 In his introduction to the book based on that issue, Greg Lynn defines a paradigm shift in design made possible by digital software such as CATIA, originally intended for aircraft design, with wider applications for industrial design and manufacturing.8 Characteristic of this “digital turn” in design is a multifaceted approach that relies on “slippages between complex interconnectedness and singularity, between homogeneity at a distance and near formal incoherence in detail, between disparate interacting systems and monolithic wholes, and finally between mechanical components and voluptuous organic surfaces” (Folding 11). The Cartesian geometry of form and perspective, of unity and coherence, gives way to the continual variation of an organic morphology seemingly in movement.Although Deleuze's version of baroque form is primarily that of curvilinear surfaces, a contemporary architect like Frank Gehry will freely interpret the “fold” as a pleat rather than a curve or wave. In any case, the concrete results of this paradigm shift are Gehry's crushed and exploded forms, the twisted, curvilinear structures of Peter Eisenman and Zaha Hadid, and the rhizomic “blob” architecture of Lynn himself. Commenting on his new building at 8 Spruce Street in Manhattan, Frank Gehry makes an explicit reference to the baroque: “All artists through the ages have spent time on the fold. Michelangelo had stacks of drawings of fabric. At 8 Spruce, we're using Bernini's folds to inspire the façade. I look for ways to express feeling in a building without using historic decoration” (Minner). Eisenman expands on this idea by comparing folded space to that of the Moebius strip, where architectural form abandons the classical vision of the frame and the plane in favor of “temporal modulation” and “variable curvature” (19). Such an architecture seems, according to Eisenman, to be “looking back” at us. It “seems to have an order that we can perceive even though it does not seem to mean anything. It does not seek to be understood in the traditional way of architecture yet it possesses some sense of ‘aura,’ an ur-logic which is . . . outside our vision” (20). Lynn describes recent architectural work of this kind as “compliant; in a state of being plied by forces beyond control.” This architecture is opposed to monumental forms that impose their presence by means of force, mass, height, and other symbols of power. Rather, its relation to its surroundings is “submissive, suppliant, adaptable, contingent, responsive, fluent, and yielding through involvement and incorporation” (Folding 30). Insofar as Finnegans Wake embodies the fold in language, one can see it as anticipating these later movements in architecture and the arts.Decades before the digital revolution, when architectural style was dominated by the elegant if austere classicism of Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Joyce produced a work that embodied the qualities Lynn would attribute to the digital turn a half century later: the “complex interconnectedness,” the “near formal incoherence,” the “disparate interacting systems,” as well as the viscosity and promiscuity of linguistic form. As Peter Eisenman says of folded architecture, “It does not seem to mean anything.” In the case of Finnegans Wake this seeming absence of meaning is partly a function of the book's lack of an ending. In a novel by Henry James, inflections and modulations abound, but they move toward resolution, and the conclusion confers a certain meaning to the incidents that have preceded it. This is hardly the case with the Wake. Instead, the last sentence on the last page continues on the book's first page, in cyclical fashion. Or rather, in the manner of the Moebius strip, for in the Wake, inside and outside, surface and depth, have been folded into in the same endlessly spiraling path.If meaning is elusive, the work of Philippe Mengue offers a useful approach to Joyce's fundamental project. He points out that from the beginning Joyce has confronted the problem of the real and its irreducibility to the symbolic, as a problem that won't let go, while it's also the very problem that moves him to write (Mengue 76). Mengue considers Joyce's early “epiphanies,” in their obsession with banality and emptiness, his first attempt at capturing the real in its unsayability.9 But Joyce subsequently found another way toward the same effect through linguistic plurality, through the overabundance of signs and the resulting uncertainty of their sense. “Having foreclosed any return to meaning capable of stabilizing the slippage of signs,” Mengue contends, “meaning flows or leaks out without ever stabilizing itself in a form of knowledge that would be graspable, translatable, transmissible” (Mengue 77–78); the real exists in a logic external to sense (une logique du hors-sens) that Joyce's evasions of sense can only appeal to or gesture toward. In this characterization of the Wake we come close to the “ur-logic outside our vision” that Eisenman attributes to the architecture of the fold (Eisenman 20). The ambiguous undulations of such architecture seem to threaten the stability of the structure as a whole, so that the building appears constantly on the verge of collapse. Likewise in the Wake, the danger of collapsing into the schizophrenia of arbitrary utterance is narrowly avoided through the controlled slippage of its significations.Finnegans Wake creates a literary form that shares the salient qualities of the baroque and the contemporary neo-baroque. Elements of this form can already be seen in Joyce's early work, where, in keeping with the figure of chiasmus, phrases fold out from themselves in mirror-like fashion: the snow “falling softly . . . and, farther westward, softly falling.” And again, “falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling” (Dubliners 225). The basic linguistic unit of Finnegans Wake is the portmanteau word, which consists by definition of two or more conventional words folded into one and which, like a work of origami, can often be unfolded in more than one way. However, where Lewis Carroll usually puts only two words into each of his portmanteaux—“slithy,” as Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice, combines “slimy” and “lithe” (Carroll 187)—Joyce is liable to stuff each of his own suitcases with several more. In the first chapter of the Wake, the same Humpty is envisioned as falling “frumpty times as awkward again in the beardsboosoloom of all our grand remonstrancers” (12.12–13). To unpack “Beardsboosoloom,” it contains potentially: the bawdy Scottish song “Kafoozalum” about “the harlot of Jerusalem”; the bearded members of parliament who issued the Grand Remonstrance to King Charles I in 1641; the “New Jerusalem” that this act heralded for the cannon booms of the Puritan Revolution; Leopold Bloom as the “lovelorn longlost lugubru Booloohoom” (Ulysses 15.146), later to reign, in fantasy, over the “New Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future” (15.1544–45); and the chorus of boos meeting this event from the boosers of Dublin saloons, grand remonstrancers of life at large. Folded within “beardsboosoloom” are thus other words, such as “Booloohoom,” which themselves enfold the name “Bloom.” At the same time, the figure of Humpty Dumpty is folded into that of Charles I, of Leopold Bloom, and of an imagined Jewish-Irish Messiah.In Logique du sens Deleuze points out that Joyce's use of the portmanteau is essentially an invention in vocabulary that can open “an infinity of possible interpretations in ramified series,” whereas syntactical discipline in fact eliminates a certain number of these possibilities” (112). This is indeed the case, but it does not prevent the logic of the portmanteau from extending to sentences, paragraphs, and chapters—in fact to any passage of the text, so that a given train of thought, imagery, or narrative can swerve into something quite different from the direction it has set out, including its contrary. In much larger units than the word, signifiers are folded within one another in such a manner that any one of them could be developed independently of its apparent context. Proceeding by the same principle, the Wake cannot be understood in the traditional way of literature; it appears to possess a logic that lies beyond rational understanding. In other works of literature we typically find a certain differentiation between figure and ground—whether within the work, as the difference between the main action and its background, or, in a larger context, in the relation of the work's “meaning” to the background of life itself. Finnegans Wake offers no such differentiation. Foreground and background, surface and depth are all one. The work itself does not stand for or stand against a larger context: on the contrary, its relation to the world is one of continuity. Like the map in Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno Concluded with “the scale of a mile to the mile” (170), it is coterminous with the world rather than being a representation of it. As Lynn says of curvilinear architecture, it is infinitely “suppliant, adaptable . . . and yielding through involvement and incorporation” (127) with respect to its linguistic, historical, psychological, and cosmic surroundings.Like Joyce's, other forms of modern art share with the baroque the project of producing a multiplicity that maintains the inherent heterogeneity of the elements from which it draws. Deleuze cites the example of Paul Klee, whose art derives not from the relation between matter and form but from the relation between matter and the surrounding, as yet unformed “chaos” (Bacon 106). In Joycean terms this is the relation between the material of language and the “chaosmos of Alle” (Wake 118.21) so that the Wake takes place in the temporality of the “passencore” (03.4–5), the pas encore, or not yet: the world as yet unformed by discursive disciplines. The material of modern art is consequently that of a molecular matter that has to be captured and “rendered visible” in the artwork, rather than a representation of what is already known (Bacon 58). That which is folded into knowledge, into category and identity, must be unfolded in order to reveal what is concealed. Of knowledge and its forma