HJS

THE SLUMBER OF REASON

The phenomena of hearsay, curiosity and ambiguity have brought into view a particular movement in Dasein's Being, which (as noted above) Heidegger calls Verfallen. Verfallen can be regarded as a way in which Dasein is able to be-in-the-world by disowning itself; by its own fore-throw of possibilities, understanding or reason, constantly daring itself to stray away until if finally becomes estranged from itself (Being and Time 177):

Dasein plunges out of itself into itself, into the groundless nullity of inauthentic everydayness. But this plunge remains hidden from Dasein by the way in which things have been publicly interpreted, so much so, indeed, that it gets interpreted as a way of 'ascending' and 'living concretely'. [178]

We could say that this Dasein enters what Bataille terms "the slumber of reason" ('L'experience interieure' 140n1), recalling somewhat the form of the fallen, sleeping or dead figure of Blake's Albion, or of an aspect of Joyce's HCE ("Hush! Caution! Echoland!" [FW 13.05]). This slumber is described by Derrida as "the slumber that engenders monsters and then puts them to sleep". Accordingly, "thus slumber must be effectively traversed so that waking will not be a ruse of dream. That is to say, again, a ruse of reason. The slumber of reason is not, perhaps, reason put to sleep, but slumber in the form of reason" (Writing and Difference 252).

For Heidegger, the disclosure of Dasein's Being-in-the-world through idle talk (Gerede) is marked by a "tranquillising" and "groundless floating" (Being and Time 177). Language becomes a slumber in the guise of "living concretely" -- or rather, Dasein misrecognises in language proof of its own concretion. The fallen Dasein is thus situated as "everywhere and nowhere" (177) in a kind of "Nemoland" (FW 318.33), its constant falling and thrown-ness in a sense inscribing a transversal whose discursive trajectory will have returned to it in advance and at every instant as the very possibility for Being. Heidegger writes:

... if Dasein, in idle talk and in the way things have been publicly interpreted, presents to itself the possibility of losing itself ... and falling into groundlessness, this tells us that Dasein prepares for itself a constant temptation towards falling. [177]

Moreover, "the alienation of falling -- at once tempting and tranquillising -- leads by its own movement, to Dasein's getting entangled with itself" (178). In Finnegans Wake the movement of falling as an illusion of ascending, and the alienating self-entangledness of Dasein, provides a possible context within which to approach Joyce's deployment of the image of the Phoenix.

HEARASAY IN / PARADOX LUST

The approach to what is signalled by the image of the Phoenix is a precarious one. It so easily slips away from us, and yet we encounter it everywhere. One would be tempted to say that it is the image of the Phoenix which is the hypertextual symbol par excellence, if it were not for the fact that such an assertion would barely have been made before simply becoming another part of the Phoenix's disguise. In such a way Finnegans Wake itself is also a type of "Phoenix Park," its textual fabric woven "from spark to phoenish" (322.20) by the "onanymous letters" (435.31) which circulate, Phoenix-like, around an indeterminate event, a fall, in a sense, situated in an-other "Phoenix Park," whose limits are henceforth inflated to the nth plus one degree through a certain libidinal economy of self-engendered dissemination.

We can find a demonstration of this economy in a short marginal note in the "Nightlessons" episode -- "Hearasay in / paradox lust" (263.R4) -- which resonates with the possible significations of "hearsay" or gossip and the "heretical" nature of, say, Arianism as it pertains to the consubstantiality of the father and son; the "paradoxical" nature of HCE's, or Dasein's, fall (as an affirmation of Being); "lust," or desire, as the indeterminate force behind the disseminating movement of hearsay and idle talk (viz. the serpent's seduction of Eve); the fall of "Eve and Adam's" in Milton's epic, Paradise Lost, as an allegorical rendering of the sublation of desire as "will to knowledge" ("Phall if you but will" [4.15]), and as another textual site of mythification; and the elusive incident of "Phoenix Park."

The filiation of signifiers here -- from "hearsay" to "idle talk" (Gerede) and the Verfallen of Dasein, to the fall of Spirit (Geist / anima), to the concept of metempsychosis, to the fall-resurrection of the Phoenix (as its own ghost), to the dissimulation of the Phoenix Park incident ("circumveiloped by obscuritads" [244.15]) -- involves us in an intricate process, whereby what Hegel wanted to regard as self-conscious Spirit, coming to itself as absolute knowledge, is rendered rather in terms of sham knowledge and solipsistic duplicity: "Las Animas! ... we're umbras all" (214.07-08).

According to its Latin etymology, the word "umbra" can signify "shadow," "phantom," "semblance," "ghost" or "spirit," thus locating the "essence" of the Phoenix, Dasein, and of (telepathic) communion and communication, within a framework -- according to Platonism and the rule of logos -- of falsehood and negativity. However, what becomes evident in Finnegans Wake, as it does in Nietzsche's concept of the eternal return, is that this apparent "negativity" is actually an "affirmation," and that this affirmation comes before logos, it gives logos, organising it within, and according to, the limits of discourse ("wooving nihilnulls from Nemoland" [318.32-33]).

IDLE TALK

In Finnegans Wake the Heideggerean notion of idle talk provides a possible means of approaching the recurrent metaphors of Joyce's "gossipocracy" (476.04) of "triffid tongues" (281.17), whose base currency of "hearasay" circulates like "lots of lies" and "flashy foreign mail" (281.F3) in a "postchased" (405.01) game of "gossiping and passing the word along" (Heidegger, Being and Time 168). We see that it is upon this foundation of significatory play that the institutions of folklore and myth are raised. For example, what at one time in Finnegans Wake could be regarded simply as "a cad's bit of strife" (38.09) re-emerges, at another, as an integral part of a socio-cultural fabric, for instance in the form of the "Ballad of Persse O'Reilly" (44.22ff.), and even as the allegories of the fall in Genesis.

According to Heidegger, we "will never be able to decide what has been drawn from primordial sources with a struggle and how much is just gossip" (Being and Time 169). Thus in Finnegans Wake, the bible , for instance, is no longer a proof of authenticity or originality. It is just as likely as not that the book of Genesis is derived from the events in Phoenix Park. But the notion of derivation is precisely what it at stake. What we have called a transverse, and the way it is at work in the formation of the quasi-infrastructures of a text, is such that there need not be any outward connection whatsoever between different events, myths, etymologies and so on. The transverse creates "similacrum" links which are no less "real" than those chance events it brings together. Moreover, the "narrative thread" brought about by this transverse is such that it is no longer possible to isolate the supposed events that "preceded" it -- "Or whatever it was that they thread to make out he thried to two in the Fiendish park" (FW 196.09-11).

We would, in fact, no longer be able to speak of events preceding the transverse, since our experience of these events can in no way be closed off from the inventions of the transverse in the first place. Thus we can say that the transverse marks, in a sense, the relativity of structural events, keeping in mind that every "event" is already "its own" simulacrum. As Margot Norris has pointed out with regard to the Phoenix Park incident in Finnegans Wake:

At no point does the account of the Phoenix Park incident qualify as the real or factual event, the "true" account of what happened that day. Instead we merely receive different versions with unmistakable similarities ... The lack of an authentic source, of a "true" version, suggests that ... the original trauma, was itself experienced as a fiction or myth at the moment of its occurrence. [The De-centered Universe of Finnegans Wake 26]

What we are confronted with is a textual effect wherein the desire for truth is itself anticipated, assimilated, and set to work as a structural device. We are placed in the situation where it is no longer possible, with any level of certainty, even to assert that "[a]t no point does the account of the Phoenix Park incident qualify as the real or factual event," simply because, as with Heideggerean Dasein, it is only through an experience of "dissimulation" that we configure our horizon of "truth" and concrete Being. Indeed, the fact that there are "unmistakable similarities" in the way an "event" is, so to speak, re-told, is precisely what gives mythologising its possibility (for instance, through simile as an elision of metaphor). Rather than to assume that these similarities point towards a mythification which has already taken place, we would say that they belong to a myth-in-process. Hence we would not properly be able to talk about something "experienced as a fiction or a myth at the moment of its occurrence," unless that "moment of occurrence" were already a repetition. Mythologising is not how a discourse relates to a so-called originary event -- even to an event that has never taken place as such -- but how a discourse marks itself as the recurrence of its own event.

This Phoenix-like nature of the mythical "event" is already suggested in Norris' text through an invocation of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle and what he terms "the repetition compulsion". Freud writes:

The patient cannot recall all of what lies repressed ... not even the essential part of it, and so gains no conviction that the conclusion presented to him [by an analyst] is correct. He is obliged rather to repeat as a current experience what is repressed, instead of ... recollecting it as a fragment of the past. [17]

In fact, the whole metaphorics of a "repressed" can be seen to emerge as a function of this mythologising "repetition" (substituting for "recollection") and the failure of the ego's genealogical will to recognise its own desire.

This failure of the "genealogical will" -- the recurrence of a "repressed" as the "contradictorily coherent" signifier of "origins" or of an originary "factual event" -- gives rise to an-other kind of intelligibility. According to Heidegger, the groundlessness of idle talk provides "the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing one's own" (Being and Time 169). We can see how this avoidance of "making the thing one's own" empowers, in a way, the Wakean gossip of Anna Livia, HCE and the incident in Phoenix Park. The means by which these "proper names" are displaced and substituted throughout the text, thus placing a question mark over such concepts as identity, ownership, responsibility and so forth, provide us with certain insights into the nature of textual production as an elision of metaphor or of the naming of the event.

For Heidegger, idle talk guards itself against the possibility of the proper name gaining ascendancy or bringing it within a totalising system. "Idle talk," he says, "is something which anyone can rake up; it not only releases one from the task of genuinely understanding, but develops an undifferentiated kind of intelligibility, for which nothing is closed off any longer" (Being and Time 169). As a necessary possibility of discourse, idle talk thus marks what is "prior" to any ground to which a discourse of reason, or intelligibility, could lay claim to, either now or at any point in the future. Like the perpetually returning inter of the death-birth or falling-resurrection of the Phoenix, the will to limit the force of idle talk -- by making recourse to a concept of origin or through the agency of a proper name -- is necessarily accompanied by further, irreducible structural contingencies. Hence in Finnegans Wake, it can never simply be a matter of establishing, through some sort of inquest, the truth of what allegedly "took place" in Phoenix Park (as if such a thing were possible), since the very notion of "inquest," by itself, depends entirely upon a determination of limits such as those, for instance, which would allow us to define what we call with a mixture of complacency and irony "Phoenix Park".

INADAEQUATIO

Signification, in its relation to "truth," breaks down -- it defines itself, in fact, over against this continual possibility -- as other and contrary meanings emerges through the inflationary movement of idle talk: "shadows shadows multiplicating ... totients quotients, the tackle their quarrel" (FW 181.18). Like Deleuze and Guattari's "desiring machines" which "make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to" (Anti-Oedipus 151), the more signification "breaks down," "the better it works" to orientate a will to knowledge. This inflationary movement derives force from the paradoxical will to derivation and truth, expanding and spreading out like a differential equation in which every term has the possibility of becoming a variable, without ever offering up a solution that is not always already plugged back into the same or another equation:

Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters ... [U 28:11-12]

nought time *[INFINITY SYMBOL]*, find, if you are literally coefficient, how minney combinaises and permutandies can be played on the international surd! [FW 284.11-14]

The equation on the page ... began to spread out a widening tale, eyed and starred like a peacock's; and, when the eyes and stars of its indices had been eliminated, began slowly to fold itself together again. The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes opening and closing were stars being born and being quenched. The vast cycle of starry life bore his weary mind outward to its verge and inward to its centre, a distant music accompanying him outward and inward. What music? The music came nearer and he recalled the words, the words of Shelley's fragment upon the moon wandering companionless, pale for weariness. The stars began to crumble and a cloud of fine stardust fell through space. [P 102-103]

This (genealogical) will to derivation and truth is parodied in Ulysses by Stephen Dedalus' theory of consubstantiality in Hamlet: "He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father" (18:10-12). This ghostly filiation takes on an added significance if we consider that in Shakespeare's play the father is neverin fact present, and that at the "origin" there is only a spectre, a signifier of Hamlet's mourning for the absence of the dead king. Moreover, at the beginning of this equation, we can never be entirely sure whether the name "Hamlet" refers to the ghostly father or to the son who is nevertheless also a ghost. This relationship is complicated in Ulysses by the way Stephen himself is constantly haunted by the spectacle of his mother's death. The fort/da game that Stephen plays with his mother's ghost, and the quasi-Lacanian tableau played out in the "Circe" episode, re-enforce the notion of a lack or division in place, not of the mother, but of the father.

Thus the equation marks the way in which the filiation of the logos is closed-off or cut-off from derivation -- in the same way as Stephen's riddle in the "Nestor" episode ("The cock crew/The sky was blue:/The bells in heaven/Were striking eleven./Tis time for this poor soul/To go to heaven" [26:33-38]) is logically unconnected to its apparent solution ("The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush" [27:08]). According to Helene Cixous, Stephen's answer reveals "not a positive knowledge, but the gap in knowledge, the knowledge of non-knowledge ... experienced as the subterfuge of castration" ('Joyce: The (r)use of writing, 20-21). And yet we can also say that this gap is a necessary possibility within any epistemology, it is in fact what gives the episteme its chance at the same time as it invests this chance with the (Platonic) determination of doxa. This same investment will remain to haunt Heidegger's concept of idle talk and the (dis)closedness of Dasein.