Late Joyce and His Legacies: Teaching "Finnegans Wake" and Its Aftertale Author(S): Paul K

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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

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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. I to them that we will need ly begun wrestling suggest decisive to avoid spending all semester making pronouncements about what the Wake is or what it isworth and instead do our best to or execration wait until our read the thing, letting genuflection encounters with the text have at least partly taken the place of pre conception. most effective to read" One might think that the way "just Joyce's book would be to devote an entire semester to the Wake alone, or to a of the Wake with from lightly supplement reading excerpts tributary texts such as The Book of the Dead, the Bible and the Koran, works by Giambattista Vico and Giordano Bruno and Jonathan Swift and Lewis as Carroll. Surely even a whole semester with the Wake sole or pri mary text is barely enough to introduce students to the book's chief we owe at methods and preoccupations; surely the Wake least that amount of attentiveness and our students that degree of immersion. My course, however, proceeds from the observation that spending an entire semester on the Wake alone at this level can exhaust and over whelm first-time readers, particularly during the final third of the course when, as one student put it, "the initial freak-value interest wears off, since so many of the chapters seem so similar." Instead, I a begin with the hypothesis that livelier and more enduring kind of can attention be paid to the Wake by looking frequently away from it on toward other objects of scrutiny, and then returning to gaze the Wake with a refreshed critical vision. Instead of accomplishing this by excerpting the Wake, though, I teach what amounts to a portmanteau course: two senior seminars?one on the Wake and the other on pre dominantly post-Joycean "collateral" works?collapsed into the and time of a space single semester (see the syllabus?p. 134). Such excess as sounds if itwould only overwhelm students further, but so far I have found in the that, skewed pedagogical economy produced by Joyce's book, only too much is enough. Of such an course, approach entails sacrifices. For example, asking students to read Christine Brooke-Rose's experimental novel and H?l?ne Amalgamemnon Cixous's essay "The Laugh of the Medusa" alongside "Anna Livia Plurabelle" reduces the raw number of ! Lirs for available discussing the Joyce text, at least if one takes the time tomeet the collateral texts on their own terms and not in a mere relation to ly ancillary the Wake.^ But having read both a theoretical

126 on ?criture a manifesto f?minine and fictional work whose portman teau words ("mimagree," "diregnosis," "dehauntological"?-16, 18, are the 128) part of spurned Cassandra's "utterly other discourses" are more (143), students richly equipped to consider both the Wake's a relation to feminine writing and the ways in which later writers in the a interested project of counterpatriarchal literature have adopt ed, modified, and rejected Joyce's methods. Encountered in this way, the Wake unfolds simultaneously in its openness toward future writ uses ing and in its and limitations from the vantage of that future writing. The list of collateral texts that I have paired with various Wake as a chapters is offered here not foolproof recipe nor, to be sure, as an exhaustive list of the primary and secondary texts that matter in respect to the Wake. As with any living syllabus, it remains a work in progress and changes substantially from year to year. What I have found most valuable is the simple underlying concept that the Wake's idiosyncratic and conventional traits become dramatically visible are when they set off against, and also set in harmony with, other works of imaginative literature, including imaginative theory. The as a reverse is also true: that the Wake acts, reciprocally, foil to the col lateral texts whose eccentricities the pairing foregrounds. So, for example, the found-object manipulation of Tom Phillips's A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel points up the collage-work and radical intertextuality of the Wake's "Shem the Penman" chapter.5 At the same time, "Shem," with its obsessive self-representational and into historicizing drives, brings subtle aspects of Phillips's book in which A Humument works all greater relief, particularly the ways at once as autobiography, diary, and history of the twentieth century. as as Yet the two books achieve their status portable infinities, world these dif containers, in wildly different ways, and the discussion of ferences can lead us back to both with renewed curiosity. A David Ives's "The Universal Language" and Anthony Burgess's descends from Clockwork Orange, texts whose language undeniably as a scene of initiation?into the Wake, depict the teaching of language ones in erotic social relations in Ives's play and tiltraviolent Burgess's one novel.6 Paired with "Night Lessons," A Clockwork Orange prompts and institu to consider what sociopolitical, historical, ideological, into the tional ends are served by the twins' induction topographic induction of the reader?that mysteries of ALP's body and by the per the Wake's Discussions of the manent neophyte?into language. have a of on the class erotics and violence of pedagogy way rounding us to ask itself in ways that can be uncomfortably productive, leading the lineaments of both a seduc how a course like this might exhibit us what tion narrative and a cult initiation, helping talk about might

127 Wake's of be erogenous and/or coercive in the redisciplining its read ers. Stuart Moulthrop's marvelous hypertext novel Victory Garden con time in tinues the thread of reader-reprogramming, this relation to a It us enter the changed technological interface.7 helps formalist con versation about whether the Wake is in some way a precursor of in whether the hypertext?is already, fact, hypertextual?or differ ences between codex and hypertext have been exaggerated by theo rists and enthusiasts of the latter. More interestingly, its ergodic treat ment of the Gulf War raises the question of how innovations in nar rative form might alter the conventions of historiography, conven tions the Wake also distorts and renovates through its own formal ruptures. With its seemingly inexhaustible lexia and itsmultiple end ings, Victory Garden asks, too, what kind of community might be same text but seen formed by readers who have read in the have dif a ferent parts of it, or have encountered the same parts in different sequence?a question clearly germane to readers of the Wake. Toward the end of the semester, both O'Brien's The Third Policeman us and Beckett's Ohio Impromptu return to the Irish literary itineraries own of Joyce's legacy while also enacting their ineluctable cycles in tandem with the Wake's? The "Tiers, tiers and tiers. Rounds" (FW 590.30) that end book 3 of the Wake chime with the infernal concen trisms of O'Brien's novel about the afterlife, whereas the inter scene minability of the of reading?and of reading Joyce?in Beckett's more play is ambiguous, offering possibilities of consolation through a encounter an shared with impossible textual object. Together, the Beckett and O'Brien turn two texts facets of Joyce's book to the light: the Wake as hell and the Wake as limbo. In several cases, the main collateral text is accompanied by a theo retical Week course essay. four of the brings together the "Questions and Answers" of the chapter Wake with Arthur Conan Doyle's "A Case of and Identity" Slavoj Zizek's "Two Ways to Avoid the Real of an Desire," essay that explores the relations between detective and analyst and the differences between classical and hardboiled detec tive fiction.9 The a Doyle story, which relates case of quasi-incestuous seduction as a of way exploring the vulnerability of identity to mim and is icry writing, alluded to in the chapter of the Wake with which it is "I paired: should like to ask that Shedlock Homes person who is out for the roofs of our criminal removing classics by what deductio ad domunum he de tacto to hopes detect anything unless he happens of movibile to a himself, tectu, have have slade off" (FW 165.32-36).10 The Zizek a double in essay performs gesture relation to the day's prima texts. On the one it a ry hand, makes strange familiar genre?the detective it into a story?by turning parable about epistemology and

128 on the desire; other, it brings the Wake within the orbit of the familiar us to ask what by permitting energies Joyce's book might share with detective fiction, particularly given that its interrogative "Questions and Answers" seems to chapter identify Doyle as a patron. To what "lust for in Zizek's enjoyment," words (66), might the Wake give rise or its readers to And one tempt give way? how might begin to locate the death drive within the book? A later meeting takes up one apoca to this lyptic response question: reading the "Scene in the Pub" along side Jacques Derrida's "No Apocalypse, Not Now" and Russell Hoban's it Riddley Walker,n poses the question of how Finnegans Wake a might be considered nuclear text, one whose self-described "abni hilisation the of etym" (FW 353.22) might respond, at least proleptical ly, to the possibility of "a total and remainderless destruction of the as Derrida archive," characterizes the nuclear catastrophe (27). Having tackled Hoban's linguistically contortionist novel set in a are postapocalyptic future, students prepared to wrestle with Derrida's preposterous and haunting contention that "the nuclear is more epoch dealt with 'seriously' in texts by Mallarm?, or Kafka, or Joyce, for example, than in present-day novels that would offer direct a and realistic descriptions of 'real' nuclear catastrophe" (27-28).12 This cluster of readings also offers a specific example of the Wake's for state gift uncanny premonition, its weird of seeming pocked with the shrapnel of the future. The works of imaginative literature and general literary theory I have discussed so far are not, of course, the only kinds of writing to emerge in the wake of the Wake. Joyce's book has given rise to at least one specific subgenre of critical writing: Finnegans Wake criticism. Considered alongside experimental fiction among the course's collat eral texts, readings in Wake scholarship by Joyceans such as Derek Attridge, John Bishop, Vincent Cheng, Christine Froula, Margot Norris, and Robert Polhemus assert, in part, that the so-called sec on one one ondary literature the Wake is of its legacies?that is, of the many kinds of hubbub the book has helped catalyze.13 These readings in Wake criticism accompany the sections of the book to which they seem most relevant, but their function is illustrative as well as analyt ical. As students face the daunting prospect of writing about the Wake for the first time, they are introduced to the wide range of ways on about the Joyceans have addressed the problems attendant writing to Wake. The scholarly texts provide embodied responses questions is most effective scale at which already on students' minds: what the or at which to view it? to approach the text the best critical resolution book afford Must one write differently about the Wake? Does Joyce's a different sort one the opportunity, if not the necessity, of producing of critical discourse? Such questions, and the student papers they

129 its as make these first-time readers of the Wake legatees help shape, their about what such an well, while also encouraging circumspection identity entails. work that existed in some rela Earlier, Imentioned the nonliterary with the Wake. these lines, tion of continuity or even filiation Along which is the course touches on the Wake's musical legacy, remarkably Pierre varied and extensive.14 Two giants of the postwar avant-garde, claim to have been influenced Boulez and Gy?rgy Ligeti, conceptual and Albert, Samuel Barber, ly by Joyce's book, composers Stephen Marsh are those Fred Lerdahl, Tod Machover, and Richard among wrote four who have set texts from the Wake tomusic. Toru Takemitsu whose titles were taken from the last and first pages of major works riverrun for and orchestra uses a motif the Wake. Among these, piano notes S-E-A akin to the Wake's three-letter formulas, deploying the (e and device. But because a flat, e, a) as an initial theme generative be for students to crash-course inmusicology would necessary grap in save the most cursory ple with the above-mentioned pieces any Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on way, I have instead selected John Cage's a whose methods are better "Finnegans Wake," piece compositional the of the than approached through history literary avant-garde The backbone of the through conventional musicological analysis.15 text to the Second Time piece is the Cage's Writing for through carved out of the Wake a combina "Finnegans Wake" which he using choice. Read tion of mesostics, aleatory selection, and aesthetic by a a of vocal modes and the text is Cage onto tape in variety registers, Irish music and accompanied by traditional liberally punctuated by Wake and to the cor recorded sounds from places named in the keyed in the libretto. Roaratorio is in some more responding moment ways than other work on the deeply indebted to the Wake any syllabus, it both its text using Joyce's book as the source from which quarries and its sequence of found-sound locales. But if Cage's composition so to discom takes up residence in the Wake, it does partly in order and pose and even decompose Joyce's book from within, spatializing a to its own sensualizing text it has made unrecognizable according sense immanent logic and of play. Roaratorio suggests the inadequacy with the of the term "legacy" to describe work that is in dialogue but Wake. Something is transmitted from Joyce's book to Cage's piece, Roaratorio seems less concerned to receive Joyce's difficult signal intact?whatever that would entail?than to transform it into a gen one erative form of noise. Of all the works on the course syllabus, the that most openly affiliates itself with the Wake bears, paradoxically, the least resemblance to its stated precursor. The model of literary legacy with which we began?the kind that Steiner allows Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, and John

130 but denies as a Milton Joyce?operates closed economy: its "genuine successors" would carry off the treasure Joyce had amassed and put as a it into circulation "general quickening of the spirit of speech"; or, alternately, they would inhabit and defend the territory Joyce had "so decisively won" from science, mathematics, and the culture of the are pure unparaphrasable image. Treasure and territory both a metaphors that imagine literary legacy circulating like property?as fixed, scarce, and strangely alienable from its original possessor. There is no such Wakean school?not even in Joyce scholarship?that has inherited Joyce's legacy intact, no one who has responded to the Wake as T. S. Eliot predicted writers must respond to Ulysses,16 pursu ing its methods after Joyce. And itwould be too much to say that the has a of English language experienced "general quickening the spirit a of slavish of speech" as result of the Wake. But perhaps the absence or imitators?of mere disciples practitioners of its methods?is, in of the fact, a sign of the health of the Wake's legacy. As most collater al texts in this course illustrate, there is no shortage of imaginative work flourishing in various relations of filiation, appropriation, and creators contention with Joyce's book. That these works and their to it is a have been inspired by the Wake without needing replicate "exhaustive of its sign that Joyce's talent has not, pace Steiner, proved but both fresh creation and own potential" has instead provoked describes the Wake as "amonument fresh critique. And where Steiner that exist in con rather than a living force," the richly varied works versation with the Wake attest to a force Steiner does not consider: the for artists whose work does not resem vitality of monuments. Even a on fresh cre ble or revisit the Wake, Joyce's book exerts lively effect a set extremes. the borders of the ation by embodying of Holding pos a within which sible more widely open, it has helped produce space and critics have been free to subsequent writers and composers or it in the of their own aims and adapt, condemn, ignore pursuit that Wake in its a extremes. It is even possible the contains, pages, it been countermodel to the calcified notion of "legacy" by which has dismissed and stigmatized. Let me conclude with a few words about the seminar's more prac for the course are its tical elements. The major writing assignments to submit about most conventional aspect: I ask students twenty-five me end of the semester and them the pages of writing to by the give or two shorter The choice of writing one long term-paper papers. and its critical literature, but I also writing must engage the Wake book in circuit with the encourage students to write about Joyce's other texts in the course. I call attention to both the writing process that all and the collaborative nature of our reading by requiring one round of before are sub papers undergo at least peer editing they

131 of the Wake's interest in and mitted. Partly in recognition orality the as well as voice, the course is speaking-intensive writing-intensive, and communication in addition to multi emphasizing oral physical Each student is for two oral ple draft writing. responsible presenta a and for tions, one on the Wake and one on collateral text, facilitating the I ask students to stand the discussion generated by presentation. which must be from while delivering their presentations, improvised notes rather than read verbatim, and I encourage them to be mindful in the room and of the full vocal and of the dispositions of their bodies have at their Both times I have gestural repertoire they disposal. have Wake of to one taught the course, students glossed passages up off the aloud page in length, and have led by reading passage before it. seen both Paul O'Hanrahan and unpacking However, having the Wake from Adam Harvey perform parts of onstage memory, I have become excited about the book's kinetic possibilities in the class room and about how new dimensions of both the text and our critical memorization and responses to itmight be opened up through per formance. The next time I offer the course I plan to stipulate that stu a as can memorize and to dents gloss only as long passage they ask before it. them to perform the passage from memory they gloss Such an assignment might seem to ask that students uncritically venerate so to insist the text by reciting it, Iwill be careful that by inviting the we our text into the body need not relinquish powers of circumspec a tion, adaptation, or dissent. In fact, fearless and considered perfor a a mance might play host to kind of criticism?and to kind of radical sympathy not mutually exclusive of criticism?that analytical writing or is hard put to welcome even to recognize.

NOTES

1 Martin "The War Amis, Against Clich?," review of "Ulysses": The Correct ed Text in Atlantic Monthly (September 1986); reprinted in Amis, The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000 (New York: Vintage Internation al, 2002), p. 446. 2 George Steiner, "The Retreat from theWord," Language & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (1961;New York: Athenaeum, 1976), pp. 12-54. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. 3 David Hayman and Elliott Anderson, eds., In theWake of the "Wake" (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978). The contents of the volume had originally appeared in TriQuarterly, 38 (Winter 1977). 4 Christine Brooke-Rose, Amalgamemnon (Manchester: Carcanet, 1984), and H?l?ne Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa/' New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1980), pp. 245-64. Further references to the Brooke-Rose work will be cited parenthetically in the text.

132 5 See Tom Phillips, A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1980). 6David "The Universal Ives, Language," All in the Timing: Fourteen Plays York: (New Vintage Books, 1994), pp. 31-52, and Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (London: Heineman, 1962). 7 Stuart Moulthrop, Victory Garden: A Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Eastgate Systems, 1991). K Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1967), and Samuel Three "Ohio Beckett, Plays: Impromptu," "Catastrophe," "What Where" (New York: Grove Press, 1984). 9 Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Case of Identity," The Adventures of Sherlock Oxford Holmes (Oxford: Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 30-48, and Slavoj Zizek, "Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire," Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer (New York: Longman, 1.998), pp. 48-66. Further references to the Zizek essay will be cited parenthetically in the text. 10 The passage alludes to the famous opening of "A Case of Identity/' an early Holmes story inwhich the great detective tells Dr. Watson, We would not dare to conceive the are mere com things which really monplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hover over this remove hand, great city, gently the roofs, and peep in at the which are the the queer things going on, strange coincidences, plan the nings, the cross-purposes, wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outr? results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable, (p. 30) 11 Jacques Derrida, "No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven seven trans. Porter and missiles, missives)," Catherine Philip Lewis, Diacritics, 14 (Summer 1984), 20-31, and Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker: A Novel (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980). Further references to the Derrida essay will be cited parenthetically in the text. 12 Building on "No Apocalypse," I offer a nuclear reading of Ulysses inmy "Bombing and the Symptom: Traumatic Earliness and the Nuclear Uncanny," Diacritics, 30 (Winter 2000), 59-82. 13 See, for instance, John Bishop, "Vico's 'Night of Darkness': The New Science and Finnegans Wake," James Joyce:A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mary T. Reynolds (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993), pp. 180-95, Afraid of and Derek Attridge, "Unpacking the Portmanteau, Or, Who's Culler Finnegans Wake?" On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan (Oxford: Blackwells Publishers, 1988), pp. 40-55. 14 Brazen offers extensive Allen B. Ruch's Joyce website, The Head, to accom descriptions of classical and popular music indebted Joyce's work, works. See themod panied by a wealth of resources on these http://www. ernword .com /Joyce /music / chamber_music.html 15 the Second Time John Cage, "Roaratorio"; "Laughtears"; "Writing for N.Y.: Mode Through 'Finnegans Wake'" (1979; Kew Gardens, Records, 1992). 16 480 See T. S. Eliot, "Ulysses, Order and Myth," Dial, 75 (November 1923), 83.

133 SlavojZizek, "Two Ways Realtheto of Desire"(1991) Avoid DerekAttridge, Portmanteau"the Robert (1988)Polhemus, and ChristineFroula Lewis Carroll, Looking-GlassfromArthurof Conan"Unpacking Doyle, Identity"Case of"A (1891)Cheng, (1872) Susan Stewart, the Simultaneity""The Essays on John Shemby, forMargotCage, Vincent (1979)JacquesNorris, Derrida, "No NotNow" (1984) interview (1978) H?l?neJohn Bishop, "Vice'sIn-seminar Cixous,discussionDarkness'" of TheBook ofKells(1986)(CD-ROM) Anthony theBurgess, Joyce, OrayigeA early draftsMedusa"(1962) andof Isolde"text; (1971)vignette 'Night Flannexample,David Ives, of O'Brien,Language""The Apocalypse,(1993) "Tristan The (1940/1967) of Christine AmalgamemnonClockivork(1984) et Policeman TomPhillips, (1970-Present)A (1979) Through StuartBrooke-Rose, Laugh Universal Garden (1991) Uses Humument Roaratorio Samuel Beckett, (1981) Joseph "TheRussell Hoban, Walker Iseult(1980) Victory Third Impromptu(1900) Riddley Moulthrop, Ohio Tristart LATEJOYCEANDHISLEGACIESCOURSE?SYLLABUS COLLATERALTEXT(S) B?dier,

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