In defining "Joyce's Uncertainty Principle," Phillip Herring mapped out some of the problems of reading Joyce with which Joyce's current readers must still contend. According to Herring, this uncertainty principle has several effects: "to make readers think harder, to question what is missing, and with absence in mind to interpret what is present in the text." (Herring: 203) Before the publication of Herring's study in 1987, uncertainty and the indeterminacy which it produces were recognized by critics like Jacques Derrida as a powerful force in the aesthetic and philosophical play of Joyce's texts as well as in the play of writing in general. Derrida approaches uncertainty through the metaphor of the roll of dice and the "hymen," the space where inscription takes place and is itself inscribed. This hymen, "composed of chance and necessity," is a writing which "prepares to receive the seminal spurt of a throw of dice." (Derrida, 1981: 285) Herring's view of uncertainty is more limited than Derrida's, and his assertion that Joyce's uncertainty principle is primarily "responsible for obfuscation" seems restrictive, to say the least, but his exploration of Joyce's incorporation of uncertainty as a heuristic device for his readers offers insights into the effects of Joyce's writing that remain useful tools for investigating the reader–text relationships and for identifying important textual patterns in writing.
In spite of the vast amount of theoretical work that has been done on the nature and the role of the reader in the reading process, the relationships between texts and their readers remain highly problematic, and the various theories about these relationships have done little to resolve the essentially philosophical difficulties of trying to establish how a text can help to create a narrative space in which an innumerable series of different readers can situate themselves. Some of the difficulties of exploring the nature and the role of the reader, as that reader is created by the text or at least provided with a narrative space in which he or she can situate themselves as readers within the text, are explored by Jacques Derrida's interrogation of the "voice" "that is addressing you."
The traditional approaches to the problems of the author–reader and text–reader relationships within criticisms of literature focusing primarily upon texts written in, or translated into, English have tended to focus upon the status of the reader as a constructed reader. Ruth Anne Reese explores these constructed readers in her work on Writing Jude, and she summarizes these constructed readers and their creators. Exploring what these constructed readers "should look like," she uses Elizabeth Freund's reassessment of the reader-response criticism to demonstrate how "each theorist has christened the reader with his or her unique name. Thus the constructed reader bears the following titles: 'the implied reader' (Booth, Iser), 'the model reader' (Eco), 'the super-reader' (Riffaterre), [...] 'the narratee' (Prince), 'the ideal reader' (Culler), [...] 'the actual reader' (Jauss), 'the informed reader' or 'the interpretative community' (Fish)." (Freund: 1987: 7. Cited in Reese, 2000: 6) The fact that these models are still extensively used in criticism reveals that many critics and readers still find them as valuable ways of approaching the problematic nature of the reader and his or her roles in creating the text, but for a writer like Joyce, who, particularly in Finnegans Wake, interrogates the nature and the roles of the reader from a philosophical as well as a literary perspective, Derrida's more philosophical investigation of the reader–text relationships offers a valuable, alternative way of opening up an engagement with these relationships.
Investigating Joyce's first work, Herring considers the function of the term "gnomon" which occurs on the first page of "The Sisters" in Dubliners. He argues that Joyce used the term to evade censorship by controlling "perspectives" on the text so that "a maximum of political and moral impact could be attained with a minimum of censorship." Herring argues the term gnomon can "also be seen as an early endorsement of a kind of reader response theory that assumes that readers will bring to the text a range of perspectives": "readers brought their perspectives, but they confused mysteries with problems, mostly believing that mysteries were simply more complicated problems having real solutions." (Herring: 203) What Herring cannot consider is that the term triggers off a more detailed account of the reader–text relationship for Joyce's readers than he could have accounted for at the time he wrote his study. The concept of gnomon offers a model of the relationships between the individual stories in Dubliners and the collection as whole, and it also provides a model which can also be used to investigate the relationships between Joyce's writings and his readers as those relationships are established in those writings.
Herring uses the term, "gnomon" to signify "an incomplete geometrical structure." This reveals that he considers a gnomon as an incomplete parallelogram. Without this so-called incompletion, however, the gnomon would not exist for it is the removal of the smaller, similar parallelogram from the corner of the large one that creates the gnomon. In terms of the geometrical creation of a gnomon, one can in fact argue that a complete parallelogram is an incomplete gnomon, and that the removal of the corner from the parallelogram is the completion of the gnomon.
There are also at least two other semantic values for the term which are relevant to its function in "The Sisters." In addition to its etymological and semantic relationship to the Greek term, gnosis, or knowledge, gnomon also signifies the "pin or triangular plate in an ordinary sun-dial" "which by its shadow indicates the time of day." In geometry the gnomon is "that part of a parallelogram which remains after a similar parallelogram is taken away from one of its corners." (OED) The practical function of the gnomon on a sun-dial is inextricably linked with the concept of time, and in Joyce's short story, the nameless young narrator identifies the death of Father Flynn with the time of the stroke that kills him: "There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke." (D: 1, emphasis added) The first part of the story is also structured between the poles of light and dark which symbolize the boy's life and the priest's death and the poles of the boy's attempts to understand language and to make sense of his relationship with Father Flynn. These poles of light and dark are also signified by the shadow and light with which a gnomon indicates time on a sun dial. With a regular temporal pattern ("Night after night") the boy "had passed the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lightened in the same way, faintly and evenly." (D: 1, emphasis added) Father Flynn's death exists in the narrator's mind as a possibility defined by light and darkness: "If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse." (D: 1, emphasis added) Temporality, light and darkness structure the narrative at both a thematic and narrative level, but these signifiers also regulate the play of the text as an interplay between the time of inscription and the operations of the white, blank spaces and the dark ink of inscription or impression.
The relationship between the boy and Father Flynn is thematically and semiotically constructed around the polarities of light and darkness. The boy visits the priest in "the little dark room behind the shop" where he empties snuff into the priest's "black snuff-box" (D: 4, emphasis added). The source of the oppression which darkens the boy's outlook is of course never revealed in the story, but it is linked with the ambivalence of his attitude towards the priest's paralysis and his death. The word, paralysis, "sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer and to look upon its deadly work." (D: 1) The power that the priest exerts over the boy is linked with the latter's inability to understand and interpret language. When he first hears of the priest's death, the boy is unable to decipher the words of his uncle's acquaintance, old Cotter, when he discusses the priest as "one of those [...] peculiar cases." (D: 2) The boy has to "puzzle [his] head to extract meaning" (D: 3) from old Cotter's words. His reaction to the priest's death is marked by a sense of liberation: "Neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death." (D: 4) This sensation of liberty is linked to the boy's ability to read and interpret language. When he first hears of the priest's death he must try and "puzzle" the meaning of old Cotter's words, and he has difficulty deciphering the priest's "murmured" words. It is reading the card announcing the priest's death that persuades the boy that the priest is dead and as he walks "away slowly along the sunny side of the street," he is able to read "all of the theatrical advertisements in the shopwindows as [he] went." (D: 4)
Herring views Joyce's use of the term, "gnomon," as an "early endorsement of a kind of reader response theory that assumes that readers will bring to the text a range of perspectives," but the term also offers a valuable model of the relationship between the position of fictional readers in Joyce's writing and the positions that Joyce's real readers must adopt in reading his texts. The boy's position as a naive reader who must "puzzle [his] head to extract meaning" from old Cotter's "unfinished sentences" parallels the positions of the readers who tries to decipher Joyce's writings, and the image of the gnomon as that part of a parallelogram which remains after a similar parallelogram has been removed from one of its corners provides a parallel between the boy's reading of language and the multiple readings produced by Joyce's readers. The boy literally introduces the term into Joyce's writing, and the reader adopts a similar position to the boy in trying to follow the boy's attempts at extracting meaning from Joyce's texts. The gnomon can also function as a signifier of the relationships between "The Sisters" and the rest of the stories in Dubliners. "The Sisters" can be read as a smaller parallelogram that can be isolated and temporarily removed from the other stories for critical isolation, leaving the rest of the collection as the gnomon to which the story is reconnected when the reader is finished with temporarily isolating it for critical attention.
The important but difficult processes of deciphering language play a small but significant part in "The Sisters" that finds parallels in several other stories in the collection. These marginal linguistic encounters operate at the mimetic language of the narrative while simultaneously leaving gaps for which the reader can try to account. Mahony's desire to know why boys "couldn't read" "some of Lord Lytton's works" "agitated and pained" the narrator of "An Encounter" (D: 17) and leaves the mature reader to supply an answer that the narrator can never know. Shortly before her failed attempt to leave home, Eveline sits with letters addressed to her father and brother, but as the "evening deepened in the avenue," the "white of [these] two letters grew indistinct" so that they cannot be read in the growing darkness (D: 32). Eveline cannot share the reader's awareness of the fear that paralyses her; the reader who knows or finds access to the Maria's song recognizes the inability to remember language which is the cause of Maria's embarrassment in "Clay" (D: 102). The reader is aware of the combination of fear, loneliness and insecurity that James Duffy strives to hide with his attempts to be an educated reader and writer in "A Painful Case," but Duffy cannot understand the cause of the revulsion he feels upon reading the account of Emily Simco's death in the fictional newspaper report that provides the title for the story (D: 111). Gabriel Conroy's journalism for The Daily Express incurs the scorn of Miss Ivors, who taunts him for being a "West Briton," (D: 190), and it is Gabriel's ability to decipher and "read" Gretta's narrative about Michael Fury, as well as Gretta's grief, that provides him with the painful epiphany that he has never loved Gretta with anything like Michael's passion. In each case, the reading and deciphering process is never fully complete, or if it is, it lacks the sense of completion or satisfaction which is frequently associated with finishing a narrative. In "A Little Cloud," Little Chandler wants to "write a book and get it published," but his attempts to read Byron while holding his son results in the recognition: "It was useless. He couldn't read. He couldn't do anything." (D: 79)
In the bricolage of styles and narrative modes of A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man Joyce's writing test the limits of the novelistic genre. Operating on the border between the sub-generic distinctions of the kunstleroman and bildungsroman, A Portrait challenges its reader's assumptions about traditional novelistic patterns. The styles in the group of textual narratives are well known and imitate: catechism, children's poetry, confession, philosophical dialectic, epistles, oratory, nursery tales, prayer, prose fiction, poetry and song. The text incorporates both realist and symbolist modes of representation, and its narrative structure is also sustained by metaphors like the table, the net, the bird, the tower, the old sow and a variety of religious symbols. These metaphors are all supported by the chain of metonymy that supports the metaphors and provides the reader with an alternative network of paths for traversing the text. Joyce's alter-ego and artist manqué provides the primary model of a subject–language relationship that might be investigated in terms of the relationships between the writing reader and the text. Dedalus might not provide us with many examples of the writer–text relationship, but his role as a subject with a continually changing relationship to language dominates the text's narrative modes.
There are few examples of Stephen Dedalus as a writer in Joyce's narrative, but there are enough to undermine a reading of the text solely as a portrait of a young man who has yet to become an artist. Yet apart from the flyleaf inscription in his geography (P: 14), the essay for which Mr Tate accuses him of heresy (P: 72), the villanelle he writes to EC (P: 197) and the "foul long letters" that he imagines "some girl might come upon" (P: 107), Stephen Dedalus writes very little until he commences his journal towards the conclusion of the text. At this point, where Joyce breaks with the earlier, third-person points of view sustained in his various narratives, Dedalus does begin to write, and his writing coincides with Joyce's break from the traditional, conclusive closure of a novelist formal ending. The narratives of A Portrait terminate with Stephen's present-tense assertions of "I go" and "stand me now" (P: 228). Stephen's first assertion holds open the end of A Portrait as it looks forward to his departure to Paris. The second is the direct address to Dedalus which transgresses the border between the inside and the outside of the text. Addressed simultaneously to Dedalus as his symbolic "Old father" (P: 228) and, simultaneously, to the pronominal referent in the extra-textual citation from Ovid ("Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes"), Stephen's invocation operates on the very border between the text's internal narrative and the external epigram printed on the blank page preceding the first words of the text proper.
In Ulysses, Joyce's writing is structured in part by the paronomasian link between representing Dublin and a writing that is continually "doubling" its subject. This punning, doubling operates extensively in Finnegans Wake, but it is also fore grounded in the well-known doubling of Bloom with Odysseus, Stephen with Telemachus and Molly with Penelope. There are at least two distinct endings to Ulysses: the first, which could be crudely categorized as male ending, is marked by Stephen departing from 7 Eccles Street (and, as a significant character, from Joyce's writing) and Bloom retiring to the bed from which he picks "some flakes of potted meat" (U: 683). A variety of textual clues suggest that Molly and Blazes Boylan ate the potted together in the bed earlier in the day and trigger off another signifying chain from the signifiers, "potted meat." The second ending is provided by the conclusion of Molly's meditative memories of the day, her life with Bloom and her childhood in Gibraltar. Molly's discourse provides the most sustained relationship between the linguistic subject and language in the text. Read from the fold of a mimetic reading, the character of Molly exemplifies the split that occurs in the speaking subject explored by Julia Kristeva in Desire in Language. Molly is simultaneously the enunciating subject and the "subject of utterance." (Kristeva: 74)
Because Joyce imitates, parodies and appropriates an encyclopaedia of writing (and not only so-called "literary") styles in his description of a day in the life of Dublin, the text continually overwhelms its readers, allowing them to experience both a desire to understand and comprehend Joyce's writing while simultaneously experiencing an abjection, or at least estrangement, from that writing. The alternating experience of attraction and estrangement are linked to the two phases of Joyce's modernity. It is the tension between mimesis and the unrepresentable in language or what Jean-François Lyotard terms the sublime of the modern. The name "Plumtree's potted meat" feigns to reassure us with its mimesis of aesthetic solidity. It is, after all, no more than the name of a jar of meat like those one can purchase at a grocery store. Joyce humorously disrupts this reassurance by placing the advertisement beneath a newspaper's "obituary notices," where other, metaphoric occurrences of meat being potted are recorded. He then employs metathesis to destroy the representation of this "proper" name Plumtree and subverts any mimetic reading of it that attempts to move beyond a simple phonetic signification: Trumplee. Montpat. Plamtroo. (636) As Joyce's writing withdraws from mimetic representation to simple linguistic inscription, it allows the reader to experience the "sublime relation between the presentable and the unpresentable." (Lyotard: 79)
Among the numerous models of the relationships between the linguistic subject and language several articulate the essential linguistic constitution of the major characters. Molly attempts to conceal her possible sexual activity by hiding Boylan's letter beneath her pillow, but the personified envelope in which his letter was delivered betrays her: "A strip of torn envelope peeped from under the dimpled pillow." (U: 61) This simultaneous concealment of the letter and the revelation of it by the "peeping" "strip of torn envelope" feigns to mimetically represent the letter from Boylan to Molly that makes Bloom's "quick heart slow [...] at once" (U: 59) while withdrawing from representing it. The reader can only adopt the position of Bloom. Bloom fears what he does not know: the content of the letter. When he asks Molly, "Who was the letter from?" he seeks an answer that he already fears he knows. Molly reveals only that Boylan is "bringing the programme" for the concert at which, ironically, she is to sing Love's Old Sweet Song. (U: 61) The reader may, like Bloom, suspect that Love's Old Sweet Song is also on the programme for the Boylan's visit to Molly, but the visit itself is never directly represented. Joyce's writing keeps it hidden, and the reader, like Bloom, must piece together the textual clues about the series of events that end with Bloom picking pieces of potted meat from the bed that he and Molly share.
The polysemous signifying play triggered off by the advertising slogan, "What is home without Plumtree's Potted Meat? Incomplete. With it an abode of bliss." (U: 636) has been explored elsewhere, but as a guide to the reader and caveat about a solely mimetic reading of Ulysses, the text also uses it to "allude to something which does not allow itself to be made present." (Lyotard: 80) The reader experiences Bloom meditating on the slogan as he eats his infamous gorgonzola sandwich at Davy Byrnes, but after the ironic catechism of the "Ithaca" episode asks about what had "stimulated [Bloom] in his cogitations" during the course of the day, it asks for an example of something that "never" stimulated Bloom (U: 636). Bloom has been trying to forget about the foolish placement of an advertisement for potted meat below "obituary notices," and he has been trying to suppress his thoughts about Boylan's visit to Molly. Nevertheless, he has thought about these events, so the answer to the question of what had "never" stimulated Bloom in his cogitations is ironic:
Bloom's subsequent discovery of flakes or potted meat in his bed and the links this establishes between potted meat and Boylan's visit to Molly doubles the ironic force of the answer.
In terms of its positioning of the reader, the description of the insertion of the advertisement in the newspaper demonstrates the impossibility of fully bridging the gap between non-linguistic objects and the words used to represent them or position them in language. The parallel between the adjectival past participles "manufactured" (modifying the pot of meat) and "inserted" (modifying the advertisement) precisely marks the gap between the "manufactured" physical object of the jar of potted meat and the linguistic signifier of it which can be "inserted" into the language of a newspaper. Opening up this gap, the passage warns the reader against relying solely on mimesis as a mode for reading Joyce's writing: "Beware of imitations." The warning is a useful tool for the reader to employ in a reading of Joyce's final text.
It is now more than twenty years since Stephen Heath remarked on the impossibility of concluding a reading of Finnegans Wake. In "Ambiviolences: Notes for Reading Joyce," Heath contends that "here is no conclusion to be reached in a reading of Joyce's text. (Heath, 1984: 61) In the same collection of essays, Jacques Derrida articulates the impossibility of concluding a reading of the text by using the Wake's own metaphor of its language as a flowing and continually changing river or language, or a "languo of flows" (621.22). He argues that even after "twenty-five or thirty years" of trying to read the Wake, the reader remains on the bank of Joyce's river of language. He or she must "stay on the edge of reading Joyce [...] and the endless plunge throws you back onto the river-bank, on the brink of another possible immersion, ad infinitum." (Derrida, 1984: 148)
In trying to describe the endless circularity of reading Joyce's text and the ways in which it forces its readers to accept the impossibility of finishing or concluding a reading of it, Finnegans Wake demands that we consider the tools with which we try to read it. In one of the multiple narratives wherein the Wake creates a metaphor for itself, the text of the Wake is identified as an "original document" (123.32–33) that was "pierced butnot punctured (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument." (124.01–03) At least two possibilities are offered about how the text came to be pierced. A possibility to which we will later return is that the manuscript was pierced by the beak of the hen who uncovers it while scratching for food in a midden heap. Another possibility is that the manuscript was accidentally pierced by the fork of an academic while he was eating his breakfast. The feigned report of a detective explains: "Yard inquiries pointed out? that they ad bîn "provoked" or made by "the fork of a grave Brofesor: ath és Break - fast - table." (124.8–10)
Because of the spatial temporal disruptions and distortions of the author as a "presence" (the author ceases to be present with, or identical to, his or her thoughts and the language in which they are inscribed as soon as inscription commences) to whom the reader might have had access (but this access can be little more than a dream or an illusion once the process of writing has begun), the interrogation of the force addressing the reader from within the text needs to be carried out within what Derrida terms the "arithmetical machinery" of the text. Within this machinery, the narrative spaces created by pronominal positions become textual passage ways in which the reader can situate him- or herself. The position of the "I" which the author occupies in inscribing the text ceases to be a signifier of any unique presence in the same way that the "you" or "I" occupied by the reader loses its value as a signifier of the so-called "real" identity of the reader (no author, obviously, can "know" in advance all of the identities of each reader who might read her or his text) and becomes a shared textual position that can be occupied by the author and reader alike.
In Derrida's terms, the "I" that addresses the reader becomes "both part of the spectacle and part of the audience." It operates within the textual machine as a position which can simultaneously operate in the staging of the spectacle (whether as part of the plot or within the mise en scene of character, scenery and properties) and as a position a little like the chair within the theatrical chair which the reader as a member of the audience witnessing the spectacle occupies. Both the author and the reader occupy an "I" that can become a "you" in the dialogue of reading, and this "'I' [...] a bit like 'you,' attends (undergoes) its own violent reinscription within the arithmetical machinery."
Drawing on Althusser's concept of interpellation as the call of ideology to the individual, Pam Morris adapts the term to signify the "process by which texts, as it were, hollow out a linguistic space for the reader to occupy." She argues that by "assuming that place we assume also the viewpoint and attitudes that go with it." (Morris, 1998: 28). This interpellation by which the listening or reading subject ("you") is positioned within spoken or writing discourse operates in all writing, but in Joyce's writings interpellation is fore grounded with a frequent articulation and remarking of the readers' ("our"?) positions within certain folds within those writings. This interpellation is not simply an ideological call from the text (or from an imaginary "I" positioned within that text) to the reader, nor only a textual space in which the reader can position him- or herself within the text. It is more like an intertextual space in which the reader as a linguistically-constructed subject encounters and engages the text as another linguistically-constructed subject and experiences the effects of reading the text as well as those which his or her reconstruction of the text produce. Amongst all of Joyce's writings, it is Finnegans Wake in which the reader-text relationship finds its most explicit articulation.
Jonathan Culler's term "ideal reader" is one that is taken from Finnegans Wake. Among the many simulacra of direct addresses to "that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia" (120.13–14), we find the Wake staging questions about our roles as readers of that text. In so doing it creates textual and linguistic spaces in which its readers can position themselves in Joyce's writing through the interpellation which helps to make an engagement with that writing possible. Reflecting upon the relationships between speech and writing, the Wake aligns the potential sound of its language as spoken language with "Irish sense" and the typography of its printed characters with "seen" "English": "Behove this sound of Irish sense. Really? Here English might be seen. Royally?" (12.36–13.2). Sustaining, and sustained by, the semantic links and the paronomasian play with O'Reilly (and hence with the French term for 'earwig' or 'ear piercer'), the passage shifts from 'Really' to 'Royally' to 'Regally' before pronouncing on the relationship between silent, written and printed language and the spoken recreation of imaginative spaces by speech: "The silence speaks the scene." (13.2–3) The text remarks this feigning of a relationship between silence and speaking within writing as a feint and creates the fold in which the feigning is remarked as false, or a "Fake." (13.3) The Wake then directly questions its reader about his or her position within this "scene" spoken by "silence," asking if she or he belongs in the text: "So This Is Dyoublong?" (13.4)
Of course "Dyoublong" is also a punning variation on the name of Dublin, so the question 'do you belong?' is articulated simultaneously with the assertive declaration 'so this is Dublin,' and the declarative statement is simultaneously a question. Such double, "doublin" (3.8) doubling is characteristic of the logic of the Wake's writing and of the puns on which that writing is grounded for the mechanism of the pun requires a phonetic similarity between at least two terms. In Finnegans Wake, the proper name of Joyce's home city is articulated in a writing practice that continually threatens that proper name. This is one way in which Joyce's exploitation of the pun reveals its simultaneously radical and conservative character. Where literary studies frequently treat the pun as a linguistic trope and an adorning supplement to the themes developed with literary and poetic styles, Joyce's writing of the Wake draws upon the fundamentally radical function of paronomasia as a writing against ('para') the name ('nomos') and the logic and laws with which the proper name is used to shore up the capital of certain forms of historical language governed by the model of the line. As writers like Derrida and Hillis Miller have shown us, this model of the line is one of the ways in which logocentrism governs writing and suppresses its polysemous play. As Hillis Miller explains in "Line": "The linearity of the written or printed book is a puissant support of logocentrism." (Hillis Miller: 231)
Derrida notes the necessity of reading and rereading in the wake of previous writers as the "mark[ing] out and read[ing of] a text simultaneously almost identical and entirely other." (Derrida, 1981: 4) Rereading Joyce's Wake and reading in the wake of Joyce--and there is little else we can do when confronted with the demands of Joyce's writings--requires that we situate ourselves in a text where our confusion becomes fused with, or "(con)fused" with the confusion programmed in that text. The reader's confusion becomes doubled and "(con)fused" with the reading and re-writing of the confusion pre-programmed by Joyce (Derrida, 1981a): "You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy?" (112.3) In the very process of articulating the question which asks the reader if he or she feels confused or "lost" in this textual thicket, the text intensifies the notion of being lost by confusing a simple subject–verb agreement and substituting 'is' for 'are' and 'was' for 'were' or 'are.' The substitution of "You is feeling like you was lost" for the more standard grammatical sequence of 'you are feeling like you were [or are] lost' remarks the singularity of being lost. The feeling of being lost can be the same in any number of situations for it entails a similar lack of basic knowledge about the environment (be it textual, physical, urban, rural, arboreal, etc.) in which one finds oneself lost. At the same time that the sequence states that the reader "is" feeling like he or she "was" lost, it moves the feeling from the present ('is') to the past ('was'), thus marking the passage from the present to the past which characterizes the temporal dimension of all reading and writing.
After programming the reader's possible sense of feeling lost with the metaphor of the text's language as a thick bush or undergrowth, the Wake proffers a possible exclamation of confusion on the part of its readers, enlarging and doubling the metaphor of the "bush" to those of a "jungle" and a forest or "farest" in order to imitate a correlative growth in the reader's sense of being lost and confused: "You says: it is a puling sample jungle of woods. You most shouts out: Bethicket me a stump of a beech if I have the poultriest notions what the farest he all means." (112.3–6). The "puling sample" exemplifies the 'whimper' ('pule') or plaintive cry of the reader lost in the text, but it is also puns on that textual whimper as a part of a text that is a 'pure and simple jumble of words' (McHugh: 112). As well a punning on the surname of Samuel Beckett (McHugh: 112), "Bethicket me" draws together the pronoun 'me', which situates the ideal reader in the text, with the 'be' which sustains the metaphor of the text-as-vegetation. The 'me' of the reader is co-inscribed with the being of the text-as-thicket, "(con)fusing" the reader's position in the text with the textual articulation of that position.
Finnegans Wake is a democratic text which invites its readers to share in a recreation which is, literally, a re-creation, and there is little evidence to suggest that it ensnares its readers or draws them into its dense textual thickets only to leave them wandering lost in the middle of its woods. The text feigns to calm and reassure its readers, providing them with advice on the quality needed to survive their traversing of its textual meanderings: "Now, patience; and remember patience is the great thing, and all things else we must avoid anything like being or becoming our of patience." (108.8–10) Although the Wake subverts all attempts to clearly identify its genre, there is a comic impulse frequently reminding its readers that there is "fun for all at Finnegan's wake." This comic impulse is detectable in the text's description of the reader as an "ordinary man with that large big nonobli head" on whom the text is playing a joke by pulling the reader's leg: "Your machelar's mutton leg's getting musclebound from being too pulled." (64.32–33) The transition from the metaphor of the text as a wood or forest in which the reader gets lost to that of the sheet of paper which Biddy Doran discovers buried in a midden heap is inscribed in the tale of the hen. As "Belinda of the Dorans," this hen scratches in the midden heap where she discovers the document with which the text identifies itself, providing readers with a position that feigns to give them more control in terms of reading the text.
As the "missive" (111.31) uncovered by the "lookmelittle, likemelong hen" (111.33), the text has "features" (111.35) some of which have become unclear and difficult to decipher. The Wake informs us that the "farther back we manage to wiggle [it] the more we need the loan of a lens." This lens, which will enable us to "see as much as the hen saw" is provided by the metaphor of the hen who discovers the text. The passage narrating Biddy's discovery of the text is punctuated by the repetition of "Tip." (111.30; 112.2) These two "Tip[s]" signify the full stops punctuating the sentences concluded by each "Tip"; the two "selfsame [...] spots naturally selected for her perforations by Dame Partlet on her dungheap" (124.22–23); and 'tips,' or hints, to the reader about the nature of the lens "we need the loan of" in order to better understand the text itself. The doubling of this "Tip" sustains the doubling, "doublin'" bifurcation of the Wake as it moves between its poles of night and day, life and death, death and resurrection, beginning and ending, ending and restarting, male and female, war and peace, creation and destruction, speech and writing, model and copy, etc.
The transition from the position of a passive reader as a babe lost in the woods of the Wake's words to that of an active reader who participates in remarking the meaning and play of the text is marked by the shift from 'paltry' notions of what the "farest he all means" to a 'poultry' notion of the Wake's textual operations. These 'paltry' and 'poultry' notions are brought together and "(con)fused" in the pun, "poultriest notions," (112.5–6) and the feigned address to the reader shifts from male to female (from "boy" to "Gee up, girly!" (112.3 and 6, emphasis added) and interrogative to exclamation before the text announces that "The quad gospellers may own the targum but any of the Zingari shoolerim may pick a peck of kindlings yet from the sack of old hensyne." (112.6–9) Textual "authorities," like the authors of the four biblical gospels, may possess "authentic" documents like the "targum," or "each of [the] Aramaic translations and interpretations of parts of the Old Testament," (McHugh: 112) but even "Zingari shoolerim," or 'vagrant', 'gypsy' 'scholars' (McHugh: 112) can interpret and mark meaning in the text of the Wake as a letter discovered by the hen, Biddy Doran, in a midden heap. If Biddy Doran can discover the letter and punctuate it with her beak, then human readers can read and interpret the Wake in order to make sense of it: "What bird has done yesterday man may do next year." (112.9–10) Questions of origins and of a concomitant originality guaranteed by authorial authority recede when one realizes that the metaphor of the Wake as a letter found in a "mudmound" (111.34) by a hen who was "kind of born to lay and love eggs" (112.13–14) restages the "at once trivial and philosophical question of 'the chicken or the egg,' of the logical, chronological, or ontological priority of the cause over effect." (Derrida, 1981: 87–88)
The creation of textual positions with which the reader can textually situate him- or herself is only one of the numerous strategies by which the Wake assists its readers, and its use of pronouns for the interpellation of its readers is inscribed in a writing that identifies itself as "prepronominal." (120.9) Although the Wake proffers pronouns with which its readers can identify in order to situate themselves in the text, these pronouns provide only temporary and unstable positions of identity. The impossibility of establishing stable and unchanging identity is frequently reiterated. Identifying itself with a charade and the collection A Thousand and One Nights, the Wake declares "in this scherzarade of one's thousand one nightinesses that sword of certainty which identifide the body never falls." (51.4-6)
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(c) Alan R. Roughley, 2006