Late Joyce and His Legacies: Teaching "Finnegans Wake" and Its Aftertale Author(S): Paul K
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
University of Tulsa Late Joyce and His Legacies: Teaching "Finnegans Wake" and Its Aftertale Author(s): Paul K. Saint-Amour Reviewed work(s): Source: James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Fall, 2001), pp. 123-134 Published by: University of Tulsa Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25477847 . Accessed: 05/07/2012 12:04 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Tulsa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to James Joyce Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org Late and His Joyce Legacies: Teaching Finnegans Wake and ItsAftertale Paul K. Saint-Amour Pomona College Martin Describing Finnegans Wake, Amis recalls the warning "tell a lose a dream, reader," then marvels at the fact that Joyce devoted an entire book to dream-telling, undeterred by the number of readers he might thereby lose.1 Writing about teaching is a little like a dream: relating you hold your reader hostage to your account of a one fleeting experience, whose immediacy has long faded even for Your yourself. presumption of the reader's willingness to near draw to your vanished experience is the dreamer's presump tion in the retelling dream. To write about teaching Finnegans Wake, should be a a then, doubly interdicted. It is like telling dream within dream: you risk compensating for the listener's double removal from raw the event by resorting to hyperbole, the mode of the hustler and mountebank. You would be better off selling twice-chewed gum. not a But it would be quite accurate to say Joyce "told" dream in same the Wake the way we relay the fragments of our own dreams to some trapped listener who feigns interest. However much it succeeds in inflicting on its reader a dreamlike dislocation of the familiar, the Wake was composed with awful deliberateness and powers of atten tion; if it demands an "ideal insomnia" of its reader (FW 120.14), it seems also to have resulted more from its writer's wakefulness than own we from his passive rendezvous with his dreamwork. The Wake, might say, is the sand that precipitated out of Joyce's sleepless eyes; cast in the eyes of the reader, it brings more irritation than sleep. What is more, our readerly engagements with the Wake's dreamlike attrib a utes are at least partly repeatable and transferable in way dreams themselves are not. We cannot decide to re-dream the dreams of oth ers, or even our own dreams, but we can reopen the Wake. These traits and deliberateness with of partial repeatability, shared attentiveness, in limits are also exhibited by the scene of teaching. This should give us we the Wake with an not hope: might talk about teaching eye only encounters with it but for the futuri for singular and irrecuperable past be transmissible to that future. ty of its teaching and for what might its insomnia to another. One encounter might communicate particular 123 The course I have been asked to write about here is an advanced I have now twice at Pomona undergraduate seminar taught College. The course meets once a week for three hours and is entitled "Late a name I owe to Victor whose Joyce and his Legacies," Luftig, senior I as an seminar "Late Joyce and his Legacy" took undergraduate at we read most of Yale University in 1991. In that seminar, Finnegans Ohio Flann O'Brien's Wake along with Samuel Beckett's Impromptu, At Swim-Two-Birds, and poems by Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland. an for the Wake Luftig's course constructed Irish literary legacy while and also introducing students to Joyce's book?a worthy admirably a But in own difficult project for semester. my subsequent thinking about the Wake and the problem of its legacy, I found Luftig's course had led me to ask additional questions: might the Wake's legacy be or more multiple? What other national supra-national legacies could one locate with respect to Joyce's book? What non-literary work had one it inspired, soured, influenced, or made necessary? Might read the Wake, the work of a self-styled "outlex" (FW 169.03), as interro a gating the conventional concept of legacy rather than encouraging its replication? And how might one connect lateness, in its dual sens es a of decease and untimeliness, to the concept of legacy? were These questions about lateness and legacy revived for me when I read George Steiner 's kakangelical 1961 essay "The Retreat from theWord."2 There Steiner laments "the fact that the image of the world is receding from the communicative grasp of the word" with the result that "the instrument available to the modern writer is threatened by restriction from without and decay from within" (25, an 27). Mobilizing extended military metaphor, Steiner goes on to cite work as the first of "a Joyce's example number of brilliant rearguard actions" the invasion of fought against the word's former turf by "such non-verbal as languages mathematics, symbolic logic, and for mulas of chemical or electronic relation" (31, 24): No doubt the most exuberant counterattack any modem writer has launched the of against diminution language is that of James Joyce. After and literature has known no Shakespeare Burton, greater gour mand of words. As if aware of the fact that science had torn from lan guage of its former and outer many possessions provinces, Joyce chose to annex a new below kingdom ground. Ulysses caught in its bright net the live tangle of subconscious life; Finnegans Wake mines the bastions of work, more than since recalls to the sleep. Joyce's any Milton, English ear the wide of its magnificence legacy. Itmarshals great battalions of words, back to the ranks words or calling long asleep rusted, and new ones stress of recruiting by imaginative need. Yet when we look back on the battle so decisively won, we can attribute to it little and positive consequence, scarcely any wider richen 124 There have been no successors ing. genuine to Joyce in English; perhaps there can be none to a talent so of its own exhaustive potential. What counts more: the treasures which Joyce brought back to language from his wide-ranging forays remain piled glitteringly around his labors. They have not passed into currency. They have caused none of that gen eral quickening of the spirit of speech which follows on Spenser and I not Marlowe. do know why. Perhaps the action was fought too late; or perhaps the privacies and parts of incoherence in Finnegans Wake have too obtrusive. As it a proved stands, Joyce's performance is monument rather than a living force. (31-32) a The passage crystallizes familiar view of the Wake, in particular: that an a it is not the way forward but engrossingly dead end; that it is brilliant and even necessary failure, a beautiful corpse. Steiner has trouble accounting for what he sees as the Wake's fascinating sterility. Perhaps Joyce's "rearguard action" was fought too late to win back any of the territory language had ceded to science, or itmight simply have been too obscure to win subsequent practitioners to itsmethods. Either way, the book is, in Steiner's view, essentially without a legacy and or legatees; having produced 'Tittle positive consequence" One "scarcely any wider richening," it is fundamentally barren. over turned in might point out that Steiner, writing forty years ago, his verdict before certain key moments in the Wake's critical reception and evaluation. He could not have predicted its celebration by post late nor the demilitariza structuralist critics, beginning in the 1960s, and science New tion of the relationship between literary language by Historicism. Nor could he have foreseen the range of experimental as those collected in David and imaginative writers, such Hayman who Elliott Anderson's 1978 compilation In theWake of the "Wake," with the would constitute part of the book's creative legacy, along a source both of numerous composers who would find the book to set to But even outside its inspiration and of texts music.3 today, devout but circumscribed academic readership, the Wake largely one Steiner it: as an unreadable and retains a reputation like the gives as a beloved and child that unrepeatable work of genius, precocious no of its own. produced issue been Most first-time readers of Finnegans Wake, I find, have pulled ever into the force field of the book's complex reputation before they For the Wake has the or lay eyes on page 3. them, already glamour case. It is either a messiah-text stigma of an extreme (generous, or a scriptible, aperta, revolutionary, emancipatory) pariah-text (solip As a result, sistic, self-regarding, elitist, unreadable, alienating). my a course has in its short life acquired similarly polarized reputation: as a model of as extreme students seem to regard it offering reading either to advocate this model or to contest sport and enroll prepared 125 In to this at least to defer it until it energetically. order dispel agon?or read students Steiner's it can be met more productively?I my evalu course. I do this neither to affirm nor ation at the beginning of the to a name to of a book refute it, but to give the problem reading whose so extreme that it seems to one to decide on the reputation is compel one book, as well as on the course inwhich it is read, before has real with the text.