A definite article calling attention to itself



Although he would agree that this part of speech is essentially "colourless," G. Rostrevor Hamilton, in his 1949 study of modernist poetry, maintains that there is a distinct affective difference between the definite and the indefinite article in poetical syntax. Both types of article serve as "pointers," according to Hamilton, although the indefinite article normally points to a "terra nova or incognita," something new to or unrecognized by the reader, rather than an "object, imagined or conceived, which can be recognised, whether or no it has been mentioned before" (8). Hamilton feels that the definite article has been overused in modernist poetry, and this proliferation of "the" often gives:

a first impression of writing for an inner circle, and pointing with the definite article to what only the few will appreciate. A knowing glance passes between the poet and the elect reader ... [W]ith a mannerism, a gesture, which is distinctly modern [these articles] point to ... unusual ideas and comparisons as though implying that the intelligent reader will recognise them as familiar: it is, above all, this eccentric claim to our recognition of the far-fetched which forces the definite article upon our notice (40, 45; my emphasis).

Although Hamilton surely does not have Finnegans Wake in mind, the poetic nature of that work's discourse and the relative incoherence of the text do suggest just this kind of conspiratorial relationship between the author and the reader of Joyce's text, especially in regard to articles followed by unexpected nouns, other parts of speech, or in the case of the novel's last word, nothing at all. Joyce would certainly have disclaimed such subliminal elitism, however.