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 -j sv, 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 French philosopher and critic, Jacques DerridaJ 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 semiosis.Eco 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 little harder to establish because, unlike Eco, Derrida has written little 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 little 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,