Joyce's Finnegans Research Articles

New Reading: Notes on a Critical Phenomenology of Reading with Finnegans Wake

Abstract: In reading James Joyce's Finnegans Wake , two of the many shapes that phenomenology as a method has taken during and since the twentieth century come to light. The first is its use in constructing phenomenologies of reading; the second, its use as a critique of its own methods in the form of critical phenomenology. Bringing these two strands together and using the Wake as an illustration can help us imagine what a critical phenomenology of reading might look like. The three sections following the introduction respectively "pilot" three forms of critiques of reading: the phenomenological, which is often purely descriptive and does not change our ways of reading; the critical-phenomenological, which can fall into absolute skepticism and ennui toward the text; and the one provisionally termed "new," which can be imaginative yet impossible as an academic exercise. Together, they speculate upon possibilities for new ways of bringing phenomenology into literary critique.

River and Mountain, Land and Sea: The Political Topography of Finnegans Wake

River and Mountain, Land and Sea:The Political Topography of Finnegans Wake Caleb Fridell (bio) bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntqnnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk! James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1.15–17 The growing storm of climate crisis demands a new politics of soil, Bruno Latour argues. In his terms, a maelstrom of oncoming climate invaders—"erosion, pollution, resource depletion, habitat destruction"—whom no walls will keep out requires reconceptualizing our political relation to earth beyond worn ways of thinking like the opposition between right and left or, particularly, the Marxist conception of class struggle—scorned as an idealistic materialism that must be replaced by the new materialism.1 His identification of migration crisis, global expansion of capital, and climate change as three inseparable aspects of the same deep, difficult question about the organization of human life on earth states the problem correctly. And Latour's suggestion that an adequate response would compose, rather than assume, a new universalism that reconciles the imperatives of "attaching oneself to a particular patch of soil on the one hand, having access to the global world on the other," while repudiating both blood-and-soil ideology and the abstract homogenization of the world market, seems plausible (Latour, Down to Earth, 12). However, the underlying assumptions of his new materialism seem to work against the task he sets himself. [End Page 741] Latour's characteristic move is to turn the reader's attention from abstract political categories to the real material substrate of human life, typified by soil. The reactionary fear of le grand remplacement of white Europeans by migrants from the global south is for him misrecognition of the more material anxiety born of a literal great replacement of the soil, enacted by climate.2 The "migratory crisis" has been too narrowly assumed only to include refugees from the global south, Latour implies; it is instead "the symptom, to more or less excruciating degrees, of an ordeal common to all: the ordeal of finding oneself deprived of land" (Down to Earth, 6). For him, expropriation of land by violent colonial conquest or imperial war exemplifies the generalized, if uneven, condition of all humans who recognize climate's forceful agency, for "how do we occupy a land if it is this land itself that is occupying us?" (41) The "ground is giving way beneath everyone's feet at once," leaving all in the same predicament. "But actually, no, it upsets the former colonizers much more, as they are less accustomed to the situation than are the formerly colonized" (8–9). By collapsing incommensurable inequalities into one common struggle, Latour seems not to heed his own advice that "if we want to have a political ecology, we have to begin by acknowledging the division of a human species that has been prematurely unified."3 He adopts Carl Schmitt's idea that even physical-scientific spatial representation of earth is always a political action in itself, not a depiction of the objective background setting of politics. But under the assumption that the unprecedented Anthropocene requires categorically new terms, Latour draws his enemy-friend distinction between the still-Holocenic Humans and the Earthbound—those who imagine themselves to take the earth, and those, properly sensitive to the Anthropocene, who imagine themselves taken by it (Latour, Facing Gaia, 229–32, 248–53). Far removed from the existential stakes of such line drawing for Schmitt, the drama takes place at the level of denial and belief.4 Latour's division supplants the existing border lines of sovereignty that define the conditions of refugees, movement of global capital, and possibility of climate change action, as if this old terrain, surpassed in theory, no longer exists as the arena of political conflict. The real magnitude of the task to conceive a new spatial order that reorganizes social metabolic reproduction at the global level is disguised as long as the deeply-rooted system of nation-states that constrains all political action can be so easily wished away. This article will be an attempt to read in the topography of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake a political imagination that grounds a perspective that can "displace and estrange the world"—the condition of imagining a viable alternative—in the sedimented history of material interchange...

Modernist Fiction and News: Representing Experience in the Early Twentieth Century by David Rando

Reviewed by: Modernist Fiction and News: Representing Experience in the Early Twentieth Century by David Rando Mark S. Morrisson (bio) MODERNIST FICTION AND NEWS: REPRESENTING EXPERIENCE IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY, by David Rando. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 208 pp. $80.00. That we live in an "information age" has been repeated so often it has lost some of its force to impress or disturb. Yet terms such as "personal," "human experience," "memory," and even "history" are still troubled by the possibilities of an abundance of information [End Page 452] almost beyond our comprehension. In 1985, a character in Don DeLillo's White Noise could smugly proclaim, "[Y]ou are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that."1 Twenty years later, the futurist prophet of a technological singularity, Ray Kurzweill, announced with zeal that rapidly accelerating technological change would "rupture the fabric of human history."2 It goes without saying that the media contribute greatly to our information saturation, shaping our consumption of information, data, and news. But media members themselves must constantly adapt to technology-driven changes. The impact of the twenty-four-hour cable news cycle on our civil society seems almost a quaint concern in the face of the blogosphere, social-media-driven lives, and an internet accessed by more than a billion people, downloading perhaps as much as two hundred terabytes of information per second. And, for the first time since the seventeenth century, the very survival of print media is truly in question. But concern about the impact of media-driven information on human experience is not unique to the internet age. In his thought-provoking monograph Modernist Fiction and News, David Rando reminds us that "[t]he early twentieth century was the first period to face the impossibility of adequately storing, remembering, and prioritizing the avalanche of information that new recording technologies and mass communication networks pressed upon consciousness, thereby altering not only human experience but also reality itself" (1). Newspapers were a major component of the modernist period's proliferation of information. While European newspapers date back to the seventeenth century, by the modernist era, news barons such as Lord Northcliffe and William Randolph Hearst had transformed them utterly into enormous institutions, on a scale that would have been unimaginable even a century earlier. According to Rando, Northcliffe fancied that his publishing empire might "extend its purview to life as a whole" (2),3 and he argues that modernist writers understood that the rapidly changing media of their era fundamentally challenged humans' abilities to process experience. The scope of information and the rapidity with which it can be shared has changed vastly since the modernist era, but Rando passionately and convincingly proclaims that this modernist response offers our era something important. Rather than falling into simplistic, dated binaries such as literature versus journalism or high culture versus mass culture, Rando accepts as a given that the news media weighed on modernists as they sought a role for the novel in twentieth-century culture. With his stylish and lucid prose, Rando then traces this concern through classics of modernist difficulty—Virginia Woolf's "Sympathy" and "The Mark on the Wall," Joyce's Finnegans Wake, John Dos Passos's U.S.A., and Gertrude Stein's Everybody's Autobiography and Wars I Have Seen.4 [End Page 453] Difficulty, then, does not become the mark of high culture but, rather, a way of responding to informational overload. Rando's interpretive framework is largely based on Walter Benjamin's diagnosis of a shift at the heart of modernity from Erfahrung, which emphasizes the accumulation of lived experience, to Erlebnis, "'immediate'" or "'living'" experience (1).5 Readers of the JJQ will be interested to note Rando's emphasis on Finnegans Wake, rather than the more commonly explored Ulysses, as a response to the news—in this case, to scandal-reporting. Rando reads the Wake's episodic structure as elaborating on the possibilities of Benjamin's understanding of anecdote. Seen through this lens, the experience of scandal animates the Wake, which "springs scandal upon its readers anecdotally, in such a way that facts and actors remain primarily elusive but something of the experience of...

An Incident in Hyde Park: Basil Thomson, Roger Casement, and Wakean Coincidence

This essay unearths potential historical source for the mysterious crime at the center of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. On 12 December 1925, Sir Basil Thomson—writer, intelligence officer, and former Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard—was arrested in Hyde Park on suspicion of committing an act in violation of public decency with certain Thelma de Lava. Although he insisted he was merely researching book on London vice, he was ultimately found guilty, fined, and forced to suffer public embarrassment. The incident, which made headlines from London to New York, has an undeniably Earwickerian quality—a crime in the park involving a lustsleuth nosing for trouble in boobytrap—but whether or not Joyce was aware of the officer and his indiscretions, there are other ways in which Thomson's life and career have bearing on the novel. During the World War I, as head of the CID, he had hand in number of affairs, including the interrogation of Mata Hari and the dissemination of the controversial Black Diaries used to discredit the Irish revolutionary, Sir Roger Casement, who was executed for treason in August 1916. Drawing upon the officer's eccentric 1922 memoir, Queer People, as well as contemporary newspapers and other archival materials, this essay investigates the rise and fall of figure who exists in the margins of Joyce's masterwork, and whose curious career represents conjunction of authority and transgression.

The Philosophy of Literature: Four Studies by Donald Phillip Verene

Reviewed by: The Philosophy of Literature: Four Studies by Donald Phillip Verene Jeffrey Dirk Wilson VERENE, Donald Phillip. The Philosophy of Literature: Four Studies. Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2018. xii + 138 pp. Paper, $20.00 This book consists of a preface and introduction, in which Verene sets forth his own philosophy of literature, and then four chapters in which he applies his method to particular works of literature. In the preface, Verene explains that he means to investigate four different relationships of philosophy to literature. First, there is "literature as a kind of philosophy" in which the author asks the reader to think "both philosophically and poetically at the same time." El immortal of Jorge Luis Borges exemplifies this relationship "as the power of the word to embody thought." Like Vico, Borges confronts "us as readers with a style that we may call poetic learning." Granted that Vico is philosophical first and poetic second, while the relation is reversed for Borges, both can be read as refutation of Ockham's razor, for "fiction is always a doubling up," thus suspending the principle of noncontradiction since fiction makes it possible for us to "think the unthinkable," specifically in El immortal, immortality. Verene teases out an ethics of immortality by educating the memory in a way that comforts and guides us through the terror of our irreversible mortality. The second relationship is "philosophy of literature." The text is not intended philosophically and yet, also, the text can be fully comprehended only in relation to one or more philosophical works. James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is the focus here, a work to which Verene has dedicated two earlier books. Earlier in this work, Verene claims "sincerity" to be the [End Page 384] poison of both good writing and reading and that its antidote is irony, but this irony contributes to the philosopher's and poet's disturbing of the peace. Joyce expects the reader to laugh along with him (and wake him?) as he writes, thereby denying time, the devourer of us all, writer and reader alike. Finnegans Wake has no meaning; it is what it says, a speech ontologically and poetically complete, "a bolt of lightning" (Longinus) that illuminates the world perfectly, brilliantly, instantaneously before leaving us in complete darkness. The third relationship is "philosophy in literature" when "philosophical ideas reside" in a literary work. Throughout Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes!, "his sense of the joke" is never far from "his sense of human justice." Sandburg's poem is something of an origins' myth, concerned not with the creation of the world, rather with the creation of the people. Verene sees in Sandburg's "politics" something inimical to poetry and which the people should limit, thereby arriving at "the poetic politics of the people" in which "tradition" "that incorporates the wisdom of the ancestors" counteracts the "progress" of "technological society" in which self-knowledge and poetry are not possible, leaving the people without a language and defenseless against all-devouring time. The final relationship is when philosophy stands in dialectical counterpoint to literature, that is, "philosophy and literature." This occurs when philosophical and literary texts illuminate each other because "they are both concerned with the same theme but each takes it up differently." While Sebastian Brant's Das Narren Schyff is the announced work, in fact Verene reflects also on the Moriae encomium of Erasmus, Die verkehrte Welt of Ludwig Tieck, and other folly literature. Verene companions Hegel throughout this chapter and claims, in effect, that Descartes's evil genius replaces the fool, and deduction replaces folly, while Hegel restores the fool in his dialectic of opposites and bounding folly with decorum. Again, it is memory that comes to the rescue. Deduction can operate in a vacuum of forgetfulness, but folly remembers everything though upside-down and front-to-back. One has to remember everything with the fool in order to laugh with him. By providing catalyst to memory, the fool liberates the thinker from Cartesian deduction: laughter too can strike like lightning. Unlike deduction, neither laughter nor dialectic comes to a conclusion. A recurring theme with which Verene closes is the doubleness of things, especially of subjective knower and knowable...

Coping with Cage: On Organ2/ASLSP, Listening, and Music-Making

Coping with Cage:On Organ2/ASLSP, Listening, and Music-Making Hans Fidom (bio) During the evening session of the ASAP symposium in Amsterdam on May 25, 2018, I played the first line of John Cage's composition ORGAN2/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) on the little organ in the Kerkzaal, a room on the top floor of the University's main building, which was originally built to serve as a church hall. My companion was sound artist Mirjam Meerholz, who contributed a soundscape produced by a seven-part loudspeaker system, distributed across the hall and on the adjoining roof terrace. It made us think. How to cope with Cage in the context of a conference? MARYLAND In 1985, John Cage composed ASLSP for a piano competition at the University of Maryland. The piece has eight parts, one of which the pianist should choose to omit, and another one to repeat. One could imagine the pianist making a tone appear only when the former one has faded away completely, as that would make the music sound "as slow as possible." One could even expect such an approach to be to Cage's liking, as he himself "translated" ASLSP into "as slow as possible," but he actually gave no clues as to how it should be played; in fact, his instructions include the remark that "neither tempo nor dynamics have been indicated." To Thomas Moore, who premiered the piece and wanted to know how long the performance preferably would take, Cage responded, rather Zen-like: "If each section took one minute to play, then the piece would last eight minutes."1 In 1987, following a suggestion by German organist Gerd Zacher, Cage made the organ version, ORGAN2/ASLSP. Zacher premiered the piece the same year in Metz, France. It took him about twenty-nine minutes to play it. HALBERSTADT On September 5, 2001, a very special performance of ORGAN2/ASLSP started in the St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany: it is planned to last until at least the year 2640.2 Actually, the performance is the only function of the church. Gutted completely, having been abandoned for decades, it appears to be the perfect place for the likewise unpretentious yet significant music. The plan to have ORGAN2/ASLSP sound for centuries was born in 1998 in Trossingen, Germany. Following the First International Week of New Organ Music that had taken place a year earlier in the same town, organists including Christoph Bossert, Hans-Ola Ericsson, and Karin Gastell came together with organ builders including Gerald Woehl to think about time in music. Obviously, they [End Page 496] were inspired by the piece's title. They were aware that its performance might not need to be longer than it would take to say "lsp," as Cage had related ASLSP to that word in the final chapter of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake: "Soft morning, city! Lsp!"3 Yet taking the endlessness of organ tones instead to determine how slow "as slow as possible" could be fascinated them more. In principle, this idea is untenable: playing as slow as possible on an organ would mean that the music would never get beyond the first tones, as they would only die when the wind flow to the pipes producing them stopped—which it won't, provided the organ is maintained well. Hence, the Trossingen group envisioned Cage's music sounding so slowly that experiencing it would evoke a sensation of endlessness. A decisive practical step was taken by identifying Halberstadt as the birthplace of modern music: the little town once housed in its cathedral the first large organ equipped with keyboards providing twelve tones per octave.4 The fact that the organ was built in 1361 inspired the Trossingen group to a literally far-reaching idea: the time between 1361 and 2000 spans 639 years, so what if the performance would start in 2000 and last until 2639? Once again, and as always, Cage inspired keeping opposite options open; just like he mentions in his preliminary note to his famous piece 4′33″ regarding the length of its performance ("the work may … last any length of time"), ORGAN2/ASLSP...

Joyce's Punctuation and the Evolution of Narrative in <em>Finnegans Wake</em>

Many innovations in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939), often considered a limit case for literature, derive from Joyce's punctuation decisions. These decisions include using dashes to mark the boundaries of speech, removing hyphens from compound words and employing parentheses for multiple interrupting voices. By drawing upon manuscript material, revisions, and printed versions of Joyce's texts, I compare the punctuation of Joyce's earlier works to that of Finnegans Wake in order to show how Joyce's use of experimental punctuation indicates the boundaries between thought, speech, and voice in Finnegans Wake, thus establishing a new narrative mode.

The Faerie Queene at Finnegans Wake

In James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, HCE and some of his tavern customers listen to a radio show about a Norwegian Captain, who tries, through his agent the Ship's Husband, to have a tailored suit made...

How Unnatural Does It Get?

* Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 20x5.197 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1279-0. * Alber, Jan. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2016. 294 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8032-7868-4. Unnatural has become one of the most prominent recent developments in narrative theory. It started around the year 2000 with the work of Brian Richardson, who collected his explorations of narratives in his 2006 study Unnatural Voices. The approach quickly attracted a group of young scholars, focusing on unusual fictional texts and questioning the usual narratological concepts. Among them were Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Maria Makela, and Henrik Skov Nielsen. The term unnatural obviously alluded to Monika Fludernik's narratology (1996). Fludernik was inspired by Jonathan Culler's idea of naturalization, stressing the ways in which readers try to turn alienating texts into something they can understand. Richardson, on the other hand, took his cue from postmodernist fiction and poststructuralist theories, stressing the irreducibility of the alien and the exceptional. Culler's is a strategy that turns the peculiar and the unknown into the known. It depends upon and literary supposedly present in readers' heads (138). These models range from general cultural patterns of signification, such as intentionality, to specific literary knowledge of periods and genres. The application of the models normalizes the abnormal: 'Naturalization' emphasizes the fact that the strange or deviant is brought within a discursive order and thus made to seem (137). Fludernik elaborates on and updates Culler's study of these models via cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis. From William Labov she borrows the term narrative--oral, everyday stories people tell each other. Fludernik develops Culler's concept of models into her concept of frames; she uses the term experientiality to describe the central process of normalization (as soon as a reader recognizes a center of experience in a narrative, he or she can come to grips with the text); and she replaces the term with narrativation. Although Fludernik's basic idea is that people tend to normalize the abnormal, she does realize that some texts cannot be fully normalized. such as James Joyce's Finnegans Wake remain unreadable (Towards 293). They result in collapse: When narrativization breaks down, whether incipiently or in full measure, it does so where the consciousness factor can no longer be utilized to tide over radical inconsistency, and this happens first and foremost where overall textual coherence or micro-level linguistic coherence (and cohesion) are at risk. (317) The preference for consistency and narrativization that seems to underlie formulations like these is precisely what Richardson's rejects. Simply put, he sees the process of naturalization as a form of reductionism, which smooths over the problematic aspects of narrative texts and which reformulates the new into something old. In this way, the complex, literary, and disruptive nature of the narrative is disregarded. Unnatural narratology, on the other hand, holds this complex nature in high regard and wants to respect it in its interpretation. The fundamental differences between the two narratological views were formulated clearly in a joint 2010 essay by Alber et al. They claimed that natural and classical are guilty of mimetic reductionism (Unnatural Narratives 115) as they reduce the sophistication of literary narrative to everyday storytelling. The theorists point to three levels of literary unnaturalness (116): storyworlds (in which impossible things happen), minds (e.g., a character that knows he is being narrated by someone else, or an omniscient character), and acts of narration (e. …

Eugene Jolas: A Poet of Multilingualism

Eugene Jolas, the first-time publisher of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939 / 2012), started his career as a translingual journalist and poet. A French-German bilingual, Jolas acquired English in adolescence, crossing the Atlantic to refashion himself as an American man of letters. A Man from Babel, as he styles himself in his posthumous autobiography of the same title (1998), Jolas published poetry in English, French, and German and eventually arrived to an understanding of his linguistic predicament as representative of humanity's path back to a pre-Babel state. Thus, he repeatedly called for a new language, a poetically-charged polygloss, Atlantica, that would surpass Esperanto and allow poets to lead humanity out of a post-war malady of language. Here as elsewhere, this self-identified homme migrateur presque symbolique” was right in his claim: “je fais toujours partie du cosmos inter-racial et inter-linguistique, …. j'appartiens au futur (“The Migrator and His Language”, 1948; French draft Box 4, Folder 100; translation Jolas, 2009, p. 458). This paper explores Jolas’ largely unpublished legacy as a multilingual poet. In addition to published collections of poems in three languages, Jolas left a largely forgotten legacy of multilingual, macaronic, and outright nonsense texts that baffle by their inventiveness. These curious poems, which oscillate between virtuosic linguistic creativity and the construction of a new language, carve out a niche within the modernist movement for literally and metaphorically non-native use of poetic language. Jolas does more than simply create a multilingual collage; he is reconstructing the experience of a creative mind that knows no borders between linguistic systems. By forcing us into a world where any words can enter into any relationships, this experiment in a multilingual poetics invites the critic to think not in terms of poetic value alone but also in terms of method, and it is an extrapolation of this method that this article seeks to achieve.

Impossible Joyce: Finnegans wakes

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake has repeatedly been declared to be entirely untranslatable. Nonetheless, it has been translated, transposed, or transcreated into a surprising variety of languages - including complete renditions in French, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, and Korean, and partial renditions in Italian, Spanish, and a variety of other languages. Impossible Joyce explores the fascinating range of different approaches adopted by translators in coming to grips with Joyce's astonishing literary text. In this study, Patrick O'Neill builds on an approach first developed in his book Polyglot Joyce, but deepens his focus by considering Finnegans Wake exclusively. Venturing from Umberto Eco's assertion that the novel is a machine designed to generate as many meanings as possible for readers, he provides a sustained examination of the textual effects generated by comparative readings of translated excerpts. In doing so, O'Neill makes manifest the ways in which attempts to translate this extraordinary text have resulted in a cumulative extension of Finnegans Wake into an even more extraordinary macrotext encompassing and subsuming its collective renderings.

Modernist Literature in the Modern Media Ecology

Modernist Literature in the Modern Media Ecology

Hazard Adams, The Offense of PoetryThe Offense of Poetry. HazardAdams. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. Pp. x+271.

Applying this neo-Blakean vision of cultural critique to literary analysis, Adams offers his own terms and theoretical justifications for something like the New Critical dictum against “the heresy of paraphrase.” “The poetic gesture,” Adams writes, “encompasses and is the whole of the text”; poetry's offense is that it remains “untranslatable” into “any abstractable message, persuasion, or conveyance of fact” (262). Through brief and illuminating close readings of Keats, Donne, Dryden, Byron, and William Carlos Williams, among others, and through longer examinations of works by Blake, Giambattista Vico, James Joyce, Joyce Cary, and Seamus Heaney, Adams insists on the formal properties behind literature's cultural politics. These are formal properties broadly conceived—dramatic and tropological—and they apply to novels and philosophical texts as well as canonical lyrics. They include Vico's philosophical and performative commitment to historical fictions as well as the play between straightforward syntax, abrupt line breaks, and implied dramatic context in Williams's “This Is Just to Say.” Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939), Adams asserts, must be considered as “many performances (mime, interview, dialogue, story, etc.) and yet one performance, the total gesture of the text, which has no verbal equivalent” (192). For Adams, as for others before him, it is precisely this performative refusal to be anything other than its own dynamic accumulation of movements that distinguishes literature from other kinds of discourse and that makes it so culturally valuable.

Digression, Ethical Work, and Salinger's Postmodern Turn

Many contributors to Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature’s 1963 special issue on J.D. Salinger found themselves dealing with the sticky fact that his writing after The Catcher in the Rye (1951) had grown increasingly unconventional and, for numerous readers, off-putting. In the lead essay, for example, Ihab Hassan focused on ‘‘certain peculiarities of form in these stories, a form that is so asymmetrical, so tolerant of chance and digression, as to warrant the name of antiform’’ (5). Salinger’s asymmetries and digressions were of interest to Hassan because they exemplified a ‘‘new conception of form, particularly suitable to their vision, which is becoming rife in current literature’’ (6). Although today any critical attention paid to Salinger is centered almost exclusively on The Catcher in the Rye, it is worth asking how his later work could be representative of a new antiform becoming ‘‘rife’’ in American literature. This later work is indeed significant because its digressive sensibility can be read as a response to the influence of New Critical attitudes toward narrative fiction, which held that to be successful, fiction must exhibit a unity (‘‘The sense of wholeness or oneness’’) which digression would disrupt (Brooks and Warren, Understanding Fiction 608). 1 Salinger’s aesthetic, on the other hand, emphasized that far from being a rhetorical device that merely distracts from the main point of the work, digression could be significant in and of itself. In fact, insofar as his highly digressive work disrupts the sense of unity described by the New Criticism, it encourages readers to re-evaluate how they assign meaning and significance in and for the work, a task that amounts to what I will term ethical work. In its interest in antiform more broadly and digression specifically, Salinger’s later work, dismissed though it has been by those critics working from New Critical standards of evaluation, actually anticipates the postmodern turn of the later 1960s and beyond. This essay first describes a New Critical Steven Belletto is assistant professor of English and chair of the American Studies program at Lafayette College. His essays on postwar American literature and culture have appeared in such journals as American Quarterly, ELH, Clio, and Criticism. His book, No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

James Joyce as Philosopher and Theologian of Time

Ruben Borg's The Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida argues that James Joyce's Finnegans Wake must be read as a singular attempt to represent the eccentric structure of post-human temporality. The book relocates the Wake within a long history of philosophies of time as well as recent post-structuralist and information theory. Drawing upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, Borg shows how Joyce's formal and narratological innovations enabled him to present a structure of time that does not obey the linear, humanistic progression of the bildungsroman but instead manifests mechanical temporal economies of production and waste.

Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language (review)

Reviewed by: Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language Dorothy Z. Baker (bio) Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language. By William Franke. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. 232 pp. Cloth $60.00. Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language is a profound and radical study that holds many surprises. The first surprise is that it takes up the important relationship between literature and theology, a relationship that is studiously avoided in contemporary scholarship. Despite obvious religious meditation in the work of such diverse authors as Louise Glück, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, and Fanny Howe, scholars seem to be uncomfortable with the religious arguments in their poetry. Likewise, when reviewers and critics read John Berryman's "Eleven Addresses to the Lord," Anne Sexton's "O Ye Tongues," and Allen Grossman's "How to Do Things with Tears," they broach each poem's metaphysics, transcendence, spirituality, and myth making but shy away from engaging in any discussion of theology or religious practice per se. At the foundation of William Franke's book is the assertion that poetry and theology were inseparable during the earliest stages of culture and that this unity of language and religious experience is fully in evidence in modern and contemporary literature. The second surprise is that Poetry and Apocalypse does not treat lyric poetry closely defined. Rather it broadens its focus to take up the enduring vitality of poetic language in a variety of genres. Paying special attention to Dante's Divine Comedy and, most particularly and extensively, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake as examples of Christian epic, the book argues that the literary modes and themes of Christian scripture provide a structure and a telos for poetic articulation. That is, contemporary literature relies [End Page 674] on the repetitive structure of scripture and enacts typological strategies of scriptural hermeneutics. It does so to articulate the origins of the self and human culture and to give voice to the human sense of divinity and to the ways human beings imagine divinity. The fact that literature continues to evoke and rework scriptural types asserts its investment in religious thought and its goal of rendering the unity of human experience. Franke does not examine the scriptural passages in which Job repeatedly questions God, biblical assertions of power in the figures of Miriam or Judith, statements of the desire of Lot's wife, or New Testament revelations of the simultaneous humanity and divinity in the person of Jesus, all of which appear and reappear in modern and postmodern texts as evidence of the bond of theology and poetic expression. Rather, he identifies rituals of blood sacrifice and death as the center of Christian theology, this being yet another surprising turn within the book. Looking to the studies of Gian Balsamo and J. J. Altizer, the book asserts, then, that the typological pattern of sacrificial death that engenders life is repeated throughout literature as the ecstatic and liberating transformation of death into understanding, self-sacrifice into love, and pain into the full experience of the body. Literature preserves and manifests the sensual immediacy of blood sacrifice and the human experience of terror of violence to a human being and the simultaneous awe of the gift of life. Consistent with his theoretical understanding of the form and function of the literary text, Franke understands Joyce's fragmented, inventive, and frequently irreverent language ("God becomes man becomes fish") as a literary means of resurrecting otherwise dead religious types or metaphors as visceral and potent assertions of a new community. His language arrests and appalls the reader in his attempt to enact the experience of the Crucifixion. Ultimately, Poetry and Apocalypse is a book about radical Christian thought, and this, too, is an interesting surprise. The death and resurrection of Christ establishes a pattern of apocalyptic experience for the Christian church that demands that the believer be open to devastating events and horrific ideas within history in anticipation of a transformative and illuminating aftermath. Despair is always attached to the hope of transcendence; death is always attached to the affirmation of life. In this way, the openness to apocalypse becomes a condition of Christian life, a characteristic of the...

Hesitancy in Joyce's and Beckett's Manuscripts

centuries of using tools like the grid to create an illusion of reality, modernist artists started drawing attention to the painting's underlying grid to emphasize the discontinuity between reality and its presentation. Rosalind Krauss therefore regards the structure of the grid as emblematic of the modernist ambition (9). With reference to literature, Joyce's Finnegans Wake exemplifies the metafictional ways in which a text can draw attention to the underlying grid instead of hiding the traces of the writing process. Toward the end of the book, the text mentions the process of decomposition and subsequent recombination that characterizes the work (FW 614.35). To some extent Samuel Beckett has reversed this process in that his main focus is on the element of decomposition. Nonetheless, his writing method is not the complete opposite of Joyce's. Beckett also radicalized elements that were already present in Joyce's Work in Progress to draw attention to the underlying grid and thematize the creative act in an even more explicitly metafictional way than Joyce had done. To investigate this process, the notion of hesitancy in Joyce's and Beckett's works and manuscripts will serve as a focal point. During the writing of Finnegans Wake, Joyce decomposed excerpts from hundreds of source texts in the form of paratactic jottings in the Finnegans Wake notebooks; he subsequently recombined them in the drafts. Especially in the 1930s this process sometimes tended to become remarkably mechanical. For instance, when Joyce asked Mme. Raphael to make a transcription of the undeleted, that is, unused, entries from his notebooks into new ones (the so-called C-notebooks), she copied the original documents in random order. When she was copying entries from notebook VI.B.28 into notebook VI.C.09 and arrived at the last line of the last page, she just took a new notebook (VI.C.10) and continued with the next undeleted entry (green scarlet) from notebook VI.B.28. After VI.B.28 she copied VI.B.26, and then VI.B.23. When Joyce needed an extra paragraph to add to the July 1935 installment in transition 23, he took a notebook,

How Joyce wrote Finnegans wake: a chapter-by-chapter genetic guide

In this landmark study of James Joyce's Finnegans Luca Crispi and Sam Slote have brought together leading Joyce experts to explore the genesis of one of the twentieth century's most intriguing works of fiction. Each essay approaches Finnegans Wake through novel perspectives afforded by Joyce's preparatory manuscripts. By investigating a work through its earlier drafts, genetic criticism grounds speculative interpretations in a historical, material context and opens up a broader horizon for critical and textual interpretation.The introduction by Luca Crispi, Sam Slote, and Dirk Van Hulle offers a chronology of the composition of Finnegans an archival survey of the manuscripts, and an introduction to genetic criticism. Then, the volume provides a chapter-by-chapter interpretation of the Wake, probing the book as a work in progress. This book is the essential starting point for all future studies of Joyce's most complex and fascinating work.

Hermeneutic resistance: Four test cases for the notion of literary uninterpretability

Abstract What does it mean to say that a given text is uninterpretable? While there are always the examples of accidental uninterpretability (cases of works that have suffered severe physical damage, texts in real languages not known by readers, references and allusions that were not kept alive as intertexts for other groups), this is not the focus of criticism or hermeneutics. There is a long and important history of purposeful obscurity, of authors who, for whatever reasons, made their texts difficult and challenging for any reader they constructed. Others did this without regard for the readers' responses, or so it would seem, following their own private visions, compositional or generative rules and constraints, or because they were in some sense writing-under-the influence (to cover a group from Plato's poets to the mescaline-induced writing and art of Henri Michaux). The test cases for this article will be drawn from works by authors with a developed aesthetics of functional indeterminacy (such as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Samuel Beckett's later fiction), practitioners of Dadaism, OULIP0, Surrealism, automatic writing, aleatory approaches, as well as visionary, drug-influenced, and insane authors. My argument will take issue with the idea that any texts remain uninterpretable by critics even if these works have a high degree of indeterminacy or completeness, no matter what rules or motives were being followed by the authors.

Lure of the Fallen Seraphim: Sovereignty and Sacrifice in James Joyce and Georges Bataille

For Georges Bataille, sovereignty and sacrifice are inextricable. The passage to sovereignty requires overcoming the fear of death and a transgressive accession to the un-knowledge (non-savoir) of being.1 Joyce's Finnegans Wake allegorizes a simi lar transgression, with the reviving Finnegan rising from his bier and demanding whiskey for himself, in the impossible ontological maneuver of drinking to his own demise. For Bataille, in one of his only references to Joyce, the ritualized revelry of the wake is paradig matic both of that gaiety-in-armihilation that distinguishes the sover eign and of the need to confront death while remaining conscious: In order for man to be revealed to himself he must die, but he must do it while living (12:336). I contend that the blithe demise of Finnegan is but the final, though greatest, term in an ethos of sovereignty and sacrifice that spans Joyce's entire oeuvre, from the first pages of Dubliners to the final lines of Finnegans Wake, whose consonance with Bataille's mythology of loss furnishes an interpretative tool for understanding the Irishman's artistic trajectory. Although Bataille claimed that Joyce had no influ ence on his work (8:615), the contiguity of their artistic motifs and thematic concerns is sufficient to justify a comparative investigation into their respective texts. Beyond the passing references to the Wake, Bataille's formalized ethos of sovereignty is too close to that of Joyce to ignore. Indeed, it is easy to speculate on the early historical and biographical parallels that might be behind this. As young men, for example, both considered the priesthood. Joyce questioned and final ly abandoned his faith at the same age that Bataille converted. Both men carried with them a profound and unorthodox religious sensibil ity and a debt to Thomas Aquinas, which found repeated expression through their work. It is highly unlikely that the two writers ever met, but both were in Paris during the 1930s?the son of the blind madman with an abortive career in medicine, on the one hand, and the older, near-blind ex-medical student with the schizophrenic texts and a mad daughter on the other2?forging their own artistic praxis along