Participatory Aesthetics: Reading Mallarmé and Joyce

Abstract

PARTICIPATORY AESTHETICS: READING MALLARMÉ AND JOYCE Dudley M. Marchi 2Ju reste, tauteparok étant idée, Ce temps d'un langage universeCviendra, —Arthur "RimBaud, Letter ofMay 15, 1871 The polyvocaUsm of the word in Stéphane MaUarmé's Un Coup de dés n'abolira jamais le hasard and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake produces strategies of suggestion and provides an intertextual field in which to examine their interrelated writing projects. By suggestion is meant the evocation ofobjects as opposed to their naming—the attempt to extract a pluraUty of signification from language whereby readers coUaborate vicariously with the text in order to produce meaning. This aesthetic project is outlined by Manarme in Sur l'Evolution littéraire as follows: "choisir un objet et en dégager un état d'âme, par une série de déchiffrements"—the poet thus provides for the reader "cette joie déUcieuse de croire qu'Us créent" (Oeuvres Complètes 869). Joyce stresses the importance of "sound sense," of the maUeable tangibiUty of individual words, and most importantly of the attention demanded by the signifier, equal to that of the signified: Who in his heart doubts either that the facts offeminine clothiering are there all the time or that feminine fiction, strangerthan the facts, is there also at the same time, only a little to the rere? Orthat one may be separated from the other? Or that both may then be contemplated simultaneously ? Orthat each maybetaken up and considered in turn apart from the other? (Finnegans Wake 109.30-35) One must thus consider the covering before what is inside. The signifier functions no longer as a window through which we have direct access to meaning, but displays semantic polyvalency and uncertainty that put Unguistic communication into question and subsequently invigorate the poetic experience. As CoUn MacCabe has stated: "It is this struggle between meaning and sound, between story and language, between male and female thatFinnegans Wake enacts, introducingthe reader to a world inwhichhisorherownlanguage cansuddenlyreveal new desires beneath old meanings as the material oflanguage forms and reforms" (25). Joyce is concerned with many ofthe same issues as MaUarmé, using different, yetrelated techniques. In examining some ofthe latter 's critical writings and portions of Un Coup de dés, then exploring points of contact with Finnegans Wake, we can better understand, even in their obvious differences , MaUarmé's and Joyce's paraUel strategies ofUterary production. MaUarmé, Uke Joyce, insists on the physicaUty of language, as well as on the instabiUty of Uterary interpretation, and uses words to evoke Vol. 19 (1995): 76 THE COMPAKATIST diverse significations that continue nevertheless to belong to a central hermeneutic paradigm as inscribed by the text. The text can, issuing from its denotative meaning, generate many connotative ones whose number is virtuaUy endless. MaUarmé condenses words, chooses syllables rich in resonance, embedding meaning in phonemes, etymologies, and resemblances to other words. Joyce explodes his into a carnival of portemanteaux and calembours—not to destroy words but to make them more powerful. In both Un Coup de dés and Finnegans Wake (as weU as in Ulysses) signifieds palpitate inside signifiers, rendering meaning not something to be recovered but pursued. Both writers play on the phonetic and Uteral senses of words to disrupt them and provide texts radicaUy scriptible in design, one condensing, constantly voiding the page oflanguage, the other expanding, endlessly filling it. The scriptible quaUty oftheir work produces a thematics of deferral that perpetuates the reader's continual struggle toward self-affirmation. MaUarmé maintains that there should be greater self-assertion on the part of the reader in the Uterary experience, leaving the form of quotidian communication , the transmission of dogmatic knowledge, to popular writers, poUticians, journaUsts, and merchants. He thus caUs for a gesture of performance to actively produce textual signification. He also distinguishes between the referential and emotive functions of literature —language is no longer solely in the service of social exchange, but is a special activity attentive to itself and to its informed consumers. The message becomes intransitive—the traditional relationship between content and expression is dismantled in the production of an open, polysemous mode of writing. This is certainly also the case with Finnegans...