FINNEGANS WAKE AS A DECONSTRUCTIVE TEXT By ALAN ROBERT ROUGHLEY BA, MA, The ...

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FINNEGANS WAKE AS A DECONSTRUCTIVE TEXT
By
ALAN ROBERT ROUGHLEY
B.A., M.A., The University of British Columbia, 1986
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in
THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
Department of English
We accept this dissertation as
conforming to the required standard
THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
September 1986
@ f Alan Robert Roughley, 1986
In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced
degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it
freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive
copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my
department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or
publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written
permission.
Department of -p^gi -jv,
s
The University of British Columbia
1956 Main Mall
Vancouver, Canada
V6T 1Y3
Date December 5. '...1986
DE-6(3/81)
Supervisor: Elliott B. Gose ii
Abstract
This dissertation considers Finnegans Wake as a deconstructive
writing that exemplifies many of the textual operations that the French
critical theorist Jacques Derrida attempts to define through his use of
such "undecidable" terms and "non-concepts" as " difference," "dissemina
tion," "trace," and "grafting." It argues that the Wake operates much
like the "bifurcated writing" and "grouped textual field" that Derrida
identifies as the only possible site for a deconstructive engagement of
the terms and concepts of the Western metaphysical tradition, the tradi
tion that Derrida terms phallogocentrism. The Wake has been an important
text in the critical formulations of many contemporary theorists, and, as
Derrida has recently acknowledged, his own theories of dissemination and
deconstruction have been considerably affected by the Wake during the
twenty-five to thirty years that he has been learning to read it. In
drawing on Derrida's theories to analyze the Wake, this dissertation
utilizes Derrida's terms to "re-mark" in Joyce's text, the disseminative
textual operations that Derrida has marked as operative in the texts of
the history of philosophy and in "so-called literary" texts like
Finnegans Wake. In a certain sense, it renders unto Joyce's text that
which has always already belonged to it.
Drawing on Derrida's investigation of speech and writing, the dis
sertation considers the Wake's identification of itself as a fusion of
speech and writing that requires a "speechreading" on the part of its
readers. It supports this consideration by employing Umberto Eco's
semiotic methodology to trace the network of metonymic lexemes by which
the Wake identifies itself as a writing for the ear as well as the eye.
Next it analyzes the Wake's tenth chapter as a chapter that exploits the
formula 1+2+3+4=10 and produces a writing that operates as an arith
metical textual machine which problematizes the traditional concepts of
presence and being and which also works towards dislodging the phal-
logocentric organization of writing with such hierarchically organized
binary terms as male/female and central/marginal.
In order to illustrate how the Wake disseminatively disrupts the
binary terms by which phallogocentrism dominates thought, speech, and
writing, the dissertation also considers how Joyce's text functions in an
Intertextual relationship with some of the writings of Blake and
Shakespeare. It does this by analyzing how the Wake dismantles some of
the philosophical paradigms operating in the Blake and Shakespeare texts
and takes important signifiers from those texts in order to set them to
work as signifiers of signifieds that are radically different from those
in the texts of Blake and Shakespeare.
Candidate: Alan R. Roughley
iv
Table of Contents
Abstract ii
Acknowledgements v
Chapter I Introduction 1
Notes 29
Chapter II Making "Soundsense and Sensesound Kin Again":
The Wake's "(con)fusion" of Speech and Writing 43
Notes 97
Chapter III Writing with Arithmetic:
Chapter 10 as a "Columkiller" 120
Notes 166
Chapter IV Two Intertexts in Finnegans Wake 182
Notes 230
Chapter V Conclusion 246
Notes 266
Bibliography 270
V
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the assistance from the Faculty of Graduate
Studies and the Department of English that enabled me to complete the
course work and candidacy examinations for my degree, and the research
for my dissertation. I thank Dr. Elliott B. Gose, Jr. for agreeing to
supervise my dissertation at a time when its completion seemed far from
certain and for subsequently being very generous with his time in
criticizing and discussing my work. Dr. Sherrill Grace and Dr. Graham
Good have been very kind and helpful members of my supervisory committee,
and I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Dr. Good for helping me to
see the overall organization of the dissertation as it emerged during the
course of its writing.
I am very grateful to Barbara Graves for the patience, perseverance,
and humour with which she typed drafts and revisions. To Bob Blair and
Lois Wedderburn-Blair I express my gratitude for their generosity and
hospitality. For Megan, my wife, words are not enough.
1
I
Introduction
This dissertation examines James Joyce's Finnegans Wake in the light
of post-structuralist critical theory and, in particular, from a vantage
point afforded by the deconstructive theory of writing formulated by the
DerridaJ
French philosopher and critic, Jacques The thesis of the
dissertation is that Finnegans Wake, as a practice of writing, is a
deconstructive text which exemplifies such key textual and intertextual
operations as "differance," dissemination," "hymeneal fusion," "trigger
ing," and "grafting," operations that Jacques Derrida details and employs
in his deconstructive strategies. The dissertation analyzes parts of the
Wake in an attempt to show how it functions as what Derrida calls a
"grouped textual field," or a "bifurcated writing" in which the hierarch
ically arranged terms of binary opposition that Derrida sees as the
controlling terms of the Western metaphysical tradition are disrupted,
inverted and reinscribed in a writing that challenges our traditional
notions of the relationship between speech and writing and "the entire
„2
system attached to it.
It is not anachronistic to label the Wake a deconstructive text.
Although the term did not come into vogue in critical terminology until
some thirty years after its publication, Joyce's final work has had a
profound impact on, and functioned as a model for, the formulation of
2
contemporary critical theory. As Gregory Ulmer comments, it is viewed by
both Derrida and the semiotic theoretician, Umberto Eco, as the "touch-
„3
stone for thinking about language in our time. There can be no doubt
that the developments of Eco's semiotic theory and Derrida's practice of
deconstruction owe a great deal to Joyce's innovations in language. Eco
sees the Wake presenting itself "as an excellent model of a Global
Semantic System" that "posits itself, quite explicitly, as the Ersatz of
the historical universe of language." Finnegans Wake, he contends, "is
itself a metaphor for the process of unlimited s e m i o s i s . E co also
agrees with David Hayman's assessment of the Wake's pedagogical value as
5
an "open" or, to use Roland Barthes's term, "writerly" text. Hayman
believes the Wake is valuable because it "invite[s] the reader to perpet-
uate creation. Eco states:
The search for "open" models capable of guaranteeing and found
ing the mutation and the growth and, finally, the vision of a
universe founded on possibility, as contemporary philosophy and
science suggest to the imagination, encounters perhaps its most
provoking and violent representation—perhaps its anticipa
tion-- in Finnegans Wake.
The impact of the Wake upon Derrida's deconstructive theory was,
until recently, a l i t t le harder to establish because, unlike Eco, Derrida
has written l i t t le directly about the work. An indirect influence
through the work of Philippe Sollers--the French writer whose work owes
so much to the Wake--is apparent in Dissemination, but Joyce's influence
upon the leader of the deconstruction movement was, as J. Hillis Miller
comments, a direct if unacknowledged influence:
3
There is l i t t le that deconstructive theory of narrative knows
about the undecidability of words or of story lines which Joyce
did not already know . . . the work of Jacques Derrida has been
much influenced, though rather covertly, by his reading of
Finnegans Wake during a crucial formative year he spent at
Harvard during the mid 1950s.
In 1984, however, Derrida allowed the translation and publication of an
extemporary talk that he gave in Paris during November of 1982. "Two
Words for Joyce" is remarkable as an example of how the major figure in
deconstructive theory analyzes parts of the Wake, but it is, perhaps,
equally remarkable in revealing how much impact Joyce's Wake has had on
Derrida's work:
Our admiration for Joyce ought to have no limit, no more than
should the debt owed to the singular event of his work . . . .
You're not only overcome by him, whether you know it or not, but
obliged by him, and constrained to measure yourself against this
overcoming. Being in memory of him: not necessarily to remem
ber him, no, but to be in his memory, to inhabit his memory,
which is henceforth greater than all your finite memory can, in
a single instant or single vocable, gather up of cultures,
languages, mythologies, religions, philosophies, sciences,
history of mind and of literatures . . .. [E]very time I
write, and even in the most academic of pieces of work, Joyce's
ghost is always coming on board.
It is important to note that the term "ghost" should not be taken as
carrying connotations of shadowy, insubstantial, or unreal in a discourse
organized according to the concepts of subject, reader, theme, writer,
and substance; in Derrida's discourse, the term comes perhaps as close as
any other to signifying a major force, in part because of Derrida's
fundamental, deconstructive technique of problematizing and calling into
question many of the traditional terms that writers—and particularly
4
"literary" writers--take for granted. The most obvious of these is
"being," a term that, Derrida insists, should always be placed "under
erasure" and written as U&H*cp10 Along with this term, all terms that
are traditionally used to signify some sort of presence are suspect. "To
Be," for example, becomes a problematic sign. Once capable of assuring
"the West of the validity of all of its fantasies of mastery (including
the mastery of its fantasies)," "to be" becomes, for Derrida, a "oneness
[that] designates neither undifferentiated (con)fusion nor identity at
..11
perfect rest; the is^ that couples . . . must rip apart. Similarly,
many of the terms traditionally used in the study of literature are, for
Derrida, part of an "old theatrical organization [that] has become un
justifiable . .. the author, the reader . .. the actor, the characters
. . . have no single, unique, fixed place . . .. Any attempt to return
toward the untouched, proper intimacy of some presence or some self-
12
presence is played out in illusion." "I," for example, ceases to be
the signifier of a speaker and becomes, instead, a textual function, a
"pure passageway for operations of substitution . . . not some singular
and irreplaceable existence, some subject or ' l i f e ', but only, moving
between life and death, reality and fiction, etc., a mere function or
phantom."^
For Derrida, "ghost" and "phantom" are signifiers of textual opera
tions. Because "the outside [of the text] is the inside," and because
there is no outside to the text, no final signified that will arrest the
play of the sign, these terms, like all other signs, have no referent
outside of language, but reference only within it: