Sound Sense and the Enveloping Facts: Inspecting the Wit’s Waste of an Unheavenly Body

Abstract

SO U N D SEN SE AN D TH E E N V E LO P IN G F A C T S : IN S P E C T IN G THE W IT 'S W A STE OF AN U N H E A V E N L Y BO D Y* DONALD F. THEALL McGill University T h e re has been an all too prevalent tendency in literary criticism to join James Joyce with Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot with respect to literary technique and literary philosophy. Pound's estrangement from Joyce following the beginning of Work in Progress is well known, and while Eliot never became estranged, his technique in his later poetry and plays diverged sharply from that of Joyce. In fact, when writing about the new literature of the twentieth century, Joyce and Eliot might well be contrasted in the same way that Schoenberg and Stravinsky might be contrasted when writing about the new music. The basic difference in technique that is immediately noticeable between Eliot and Joyce involves the Joycean use of language. Eliot, following the traditions of symbolism and the suggestions about words and l'analogie which were developed by Mallarmé and Valéry, uses words in such a way as to employ their suggestive resonances of meaning by using them as motifs in endless repetitions. This technique, as Valéry suggests, in its most condensed form can come about through the mere repetition over and over again of a single word such as light. Valéry illustrates this by suggesting that if, after someone makes the request ''give me a light," one were to go on repeating the phrase over and over again, the word light would develop all sorts of resonances, up to and including the ideas surrounding "Let there be light." Such suggestivity expands the field of meaning of the individual word to make it more inclusive. In contrast, Joyce's technique of adapting portmanteau words to "Wakese" demands the type of attention characteristic of metaphysical and neo-Augustan puns where there is a sharp recognition of specific meanings in playful conflict. While this may not instantly seem important, it defines a whole contrasting way in which Eliot and Joyce look at the play of reason in the literary work. So in the structure of Finnegans Wake, and for that matter Ulysses, Joyce's verbal technique of "Wakese" is involved with antinomies which create a dialectical movement. In fact, Joyce's sense of the relation between literature and dialects is so strong that in the composition of Ulysses he chose dialectics as the technique in the Library section where the art is literature. Dialectics, in the sense that Stephen pursues his theory of Shakespeare in the Library scene, involves argumentative dialogue. The Homeric analogue of the * Address delivered to the Joyce-Beckett Symposium, York University, 9 February 1974 English Studies in Canada, 1 , 1 (spring 197s) 98 English Studies in Canada section is Scylla and Charybdis, the extremes between which Homer's Ulysses must steer. Stephen's argument must steer between the extremes of Plato and Aristotle. In other words, dialectical movement must be intimately involved with communication, which is precisely the central focus of Joyce's last major work, Finnegans Wake. Here the dialectical movement is rooted in the language itself and emanates out from the language to inhabit the entire movement of the book. Shem in fact at one point, according to Shaun, is excommunicated "for his root language." That language is a dream-language, a product of a dream work and hence a night language, but the night language is also a negating language: ... in the Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues that is nat language of any sinse of the world ... (fw , 83:10)* The phrase "Nichtian glossery" is itself an example of the way the language works in interplay, since it indicates that a night glossary is also a not glossary a glossary of counterpointed negations, "this is nat language in any sinse of the world." The linguistic distortions of the Wake world, therefore, become a way of counterpointing the world and transforming it for contemplation. During the inquest of...