Language

THE LANGUAGE IN THE "WAKE"                 The Language of the "Wake" is a composite of words and syllables combined with such a degree of fertile inventiveness that new sounds and new meanings are constantly ingeminated. Joyce involves himself and us in an extremely complex series of translations that are endless because there is no original and no target language to supply a limit to the visual and sonar transactions that are negotiated by the text. Indeed, it may be that the only assumption that permits us to embark upon the activity of translation is itself the source of the work´s conflictual and prolific nature. That the original language is the target language. The book is written in the English language and also against the English language: it converts itself into English and perverts itself from English. In the process it crosses and re-crosses the spectrum from sheer noise, the hundred-letter "word" that signifies the annunciatory thunder that presages the fall into language and culture to poliglottic babbling to lucid and lyric sense. It forces the reader to pay attention to the various genealogies of words and their functions, how they are, in the most basic sense, composed of letters and combined into syllables, how they are heard and how they are seen, what historical weight and valencies they bear, what psychological, political and social functions they perform, their proximity to and their distance from grunts and noises, their liberating and their repressive effects, their dependence upon syntaz and grammar and thewir capacity to generate meaning, wildly and anarchically, when freed from those systems of governance and communication.
                Sometimes a single word, or part of a word, can present the reader with a problem: sometimes the unit that causes trouble may be a sentence, a paragraph, a whole interlude, a section, the relation of one Part to another within the whole work. It may be that the smallest problematic detail is an instance of the largest architectonic problems the work poses. Many readers of the "Wake" prefer to believe that it is so saturated in its preoccupations, so dominated by its own techniqes of presentation and explanation, that the whole is contained within every part. That may be the case: but it is also possible that there are moments in the "Wake" where the text, so to speak, goes in to free fall, where there is unlimited semeioses, where the author is written by, rather than the writer of the language. Further, since it is one of the narrative´s implications that the myth of the fall can be understood as a fall into language, then the secondary, postlapsarian nature of language might be the very thing the "Wake" seeks to overcome by replacing it with that putative directness of communication that preceded the Fall. A language not patrolled by frontier guards, an English Pale not secure from the wild Irish beyond, a writing that is not performed under the shadow of the Censor is, appropriately enough, a species of dream language. The problem with dreams with dreams is that they are always re-presented in language in language: the priority of the dream over the language in which it is narrated cannot be established linguistically. That which is beyond language can only be indicated through language.This crux is absorbed into the "Wake" narratives, always posing a threat that is denied by the very action of posing it.
                But the diffeculties of reading the "Wake" are not separable from the pleasure we take in their enactment. It is a joyous work. Rather than being inhibited by the various problematic issues with which it deals, it is stimulated by their intractability and the opportunities they offer for dwelling upon their capacity to paint themselves into corners. Joyce often renders philosophical and linguistic problems in the spirit of a great slapstick comedian. Some of the "Wake´s" most famous moments are those brilliantly cameoed situations in which large issues are disputed between brotherly pairs that belong more to the comic strip or the early cinema than to the tradition of Socratic dialogue or any other form of philosophical duologue.