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Originality and Repetition in Finnegans Wake and Ulysses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Jennifer Schiffer Levine
Jennifer Schiffer Levine*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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Abstract

Recent poststructuralist criticism argues that language cannot be understood merely as a name-giving system and that reading is not a process of deciphering language in order to pass through it to the experience it communicates. If words are part of a larger articulation, then the question of origins, and of originality, must be recast. Finnegans Wake and Ulysses play on, and with, the dilemma of originality and repetition in literary discourse. The Wake involves us in the appeal to a source, and although the origins of knowledge, authority, life, and language may remain unlocatable we continue to search for them. The Wake suggests, too, that discourse binds us to a wheel of repetition. The complex use of cliché in Ulysses draws us even more specifically into the uses of repetition. Stereotype is more than the butt of Joyce's satire: it shares in the whole process of deconstruction that characterizes the text.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 94 , Issue 1 , January 1979 , pp. 106 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

Notes

1 Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel (New York: Harper, 1961), p. 275.

2 Hugh Kenner, “The Portrait in Perspective,” in Joyce's Portrait: Criticisms and Critiques, ed. Thomas E. Connolly (New York: Appleton, 1962), pp. 34–35.

3 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1969), p. 189.

4 See, e.g., Weldon Thornton, Allusions in Ulysses (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1968), p. 4, who argues that Joyce's use of allusions “is distinguished from other authors' not by its purposes, but by its extent and thoroughness” and that his uniqueness and complexity lie in nothing more than in “accepting the challenge of an Olympian use of his chosen methods.” Joyce's language, in other words, is essentially like that of other novelists—only more so. Thus the critic can safely adopt the usual critical posture— again, only more so. The standards are higher, but neither the reader's nor the writer's position need be questioned.

5 Philip Pettit, The Concept of Structuralism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975), p. 5.

6 Quoted from Course in General Linguistics (London: McGraw Hill, 1966), p. 65; by Pettit, p. 5.

7 For a fuller discussion see Jacques Lacan, “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Yale French Studies, No. 36-37 (Oct. 1966), pp. 116–18.

8 Colin McCabe, “Readings in French,” Cambridge Review, 95, No. 2219 (1974), 89.

9 See Stanley Fish, “How Ordinary Is Ordinary Language?” New Literary History, 5, No. 1 (1973), 41-54, for a useful summary and critique of this position.

10 This is, of course, a profoundly Romantic view that nevertheless remains powerful in our own time as well. See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958), and Robert M. Currie, Genius: An Ideology in Literature (London: Chatto and Windus. 1974).

11 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 225–26.

12 “The Work of Art …,” passim. 13 Quoted by F. R. Lea vis, “Joyce and the Revolution of the Word,” Scrutiny, 2, No. 2 (1933), 197-98.

14 Time and Western Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927), pp. 108, 109.

15 “The Three Provincialities,” The Tyro, No. 2 (1921-22), p. 213.

16 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber, 1971), p. 181. Subsequent references will be noted in the text.

17 Within a briefer historical context but in a similar vein, Hugh Kenner has written of the changing sense of the world, and of the word, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See The Pound Era (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), p. 126.

18 See Margot Norris' perceptive “The Consequence of Deconstruction: A Technical Perspective of Finnegans Wake,” ELH, 41 (1974), 130-48, which briefly explores the notion that “language is never a private property” but that it is a form of debris, and the author a junk merchant, a forager.

19 The importance of this question was first pointed out to me by Stephen Heath, in a lecture on Finnegans Wake, Cambridge Univ., 1973. Heath's work on Joyce has been published in French and remains, unfortunately, not very well known to English-speaking scholars. See “Ambiviolances: Notes pour la lecture de Joyce,” Tel Quel, No. 50 (Summer 1972), pp. 23–41, and No. 51 (Autumn 1972), pp. 64–76; and “Trames de lecture (à propos de la dernière section de Finnegans Wake),” Tel Quel, No. 54 (Summer 1973), pp. 4–15.

20 Bloom “Asquat on the cuckstool” at the end of “Calypso”; his ejaculation in “Nausicaa”; and his long drawn-out “Prrprr… . Fff… . Rrpr… . Pprrpffrrppfff,” finally “Done” (and neatly superimposed over the patriot's “final epitah”) are the most obvious examples. But consider too the ejaculations recalled by Molly at the end of “Penelope”; the baby's birth culminating “Oxen”; and in our last view of “Eumaeus,” “The horse … rearing high a proud feathering tail … letting fall … three smoking globs of turds.” And in analogous, though rather more oblique images of human creation and human wastes, there is “Nestor's” Mr. Deasy, whose “coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a rattling chain of phlegm,” and “Proteus' ” Stephen, placing “the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock, carefully.”

21 Burgess, Joysprick (London: Andre Deutsch, 1973), p. 133; and Fritz Senn, “Insects Appalling,” in Twelve and a Tilly, ed. Jack P. Dalton and Clive Hart (London: Faber, 1966), p. 39.

22 “My Friend James Joyce,” in James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, ed. Seon Givens (New York: Vanguard, 1948), p. 13.

23 Norris, “The Consequence of Deconstruction …,” p. 142.

24 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 662.

25 The most obvious example is Thornton's Allusions in Ulysses. Far more interesting, however, are Frank Budgen's James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972) and Robert M. Adams' Surface and Symbol (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962).

26 James Joyce, Ulysses (London: John Lane, 1949), p. 437. Subsequent references will be noted in the text.

27 The Educated Imagination (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corp., 1965), p. 50.

28 In “Nausicaa,” however, Joyce has a joke at our expense precisely because we have not taken a cliché literally: “Edy Boardman prided herself that she was very petite but she never had a foot like Gerty Mac-Dowell's, a five … with patent toecaps and just one smart buckle at her higharched instep. Her well-turned ankle displayed its perfect proportions beneath her skirt …” (p. 334). The irony here is rather cruel, but we remain oblivious to it until a second reading, when, knowing Gerty's secret, we recognize that the clichéd euphemism of referring to legs in the singular is, in this instance, all too literally true: a way of exposing rather than protecting Gerty's privacy.

29 Robert Adams has written at some length on Joyce's use of unmodified materials drawn straight from life and has linked the technique to contemporary developments in the visual and musical arts (Surface and Symbol, pp. 247–8).

30 An exception is Michael Riffaterre, “Fonction du cliché dans la prose littéraire,” in Essais de Stylistique Structurale, ed. and trans. Daniel Delas (Paris: Flammarion, 1971).

31 As an extreme example of this approach see Thornton, Allusions in Ulysses.

32 We have already considered the complex play in Finnegans Wake on writing as theft, language as spewed-up food, etc. More generally, we might also think of the Viconian cycle of repetition in the Wake, the Odyssean return, and the father-son relationship in Ulysses. Joyce's poem “Ecce Puer,” marking the death of his father and the birth of his grandson, movingly expresses the cycle of repetition: “Of the dark past/ A child is born; / With joy and grief / My heart is torn. / … A child is sleeping: / An old man gone.”

33 Selected Essays and Articles: The Look of Things (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1972), p. 119.