The Poetics of the Unsaid: Joyce’s Use of Ellipsis between Meaning and Suspension

Abstract

The interruption of incessant is what is proper to fragmentary writing.- Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster152exclamatory sentences and suspensions that do away with all syntax in favor of pure dance of words. The two aspects are nonetheless correlative: tensor and limit, tension in language and limit of language.- Gilles Deleuze, He Stuttered153...there appear instantsBetween no word and no wordWhen there are gaps between things.- Louis Zukofsky, A 1541 IntroductionThe word ellipsis comes from Greek elleipsis and means a falling short, defect. From linguistic point of view, phenomenon of ellipsis involves complex interplay at syntactic, linguistic and pragmatic level. The default interpretation of ellipsis usually corresponds to what linguists properly call i.e., nonexpression of word or phrase that is nevertheless expected to occupy place in syntactic structure of sentence.155 However, one should not neglect another crucial form of ellipsis, perhaps more difficult to detect: which could be defined as nonexpression of elements that, while crucial for full semantic interpretation, are not signalled by syntactic gap.156As punctuation, ellipsis denotes series of marks (suspension dots or points of suspension) that usually indicates an intentional omission of part of text, or an unfinished thought, which causes temporary suspension of narrative flow. The use of ellipsis might be considered sort of aposiopesis: author's silence expresses an unwillingness to continue, tell or write any further. Such reticence implies necessary reassessment of relationship between author and reader. The reader is invited to take part in creative process in order to fill, or at least try to fill, (meaningful) gap left by author. In his study on ellipsis and Maurice Blanchot, Michael Naas observes:The ellipsis is [...] sort of speaking that conceals itself behind simulated silence; it is coded and decipherable, and when deciphered, reader has impression of entering into very intimacy that narrator or author shares with their work.157Ellipsis may well be decipherable to some extent; however, kind of decoding it suggests does not mean that ontological gap between author's (simulated) silence and reader's hermeneutical attempt can be bridged: author's voice can only partially replace reader's. As Naas observes, reader has the impression of entering into very intimacy that narrator or author shares with their work, hence their roles do not completely overlap. Indeed, what is left interrupted and fragmentary through use of ellipsis becomes object of virtual writing: i.e., writing that finds its existence in its continuously being delayed, in effacement and extenuation of subject it is supposed to talk about. Paradoxically, such writing awaits to become meaningful although it will be never written, destined as it is to remain virtual, suspended in an indefinite dimension between being and non-being. It becomes one of reader's tasks, then, to creatively produce this (supplementary) writing and fill what Iser has called Leerstellen, those blanks of meaning that text either does not define or leaves open to reader's imagination.158In notebook draft of an essay on punctuation (1809), Coleridge observes that when punctuation makes reader pausethe activity of mind, generating upon its generations, anew-& pause is not, for which I am contending, at all retrospective, but always prospective -that is, pause is not affected by what follows, but by what anterior to it was foreseen as following. 159The pause (of full stop or ellipsis) that punctuation signals represents moment in which author involves reader in creative process, so that activity of (reader's) mind starts anew. …