peculiar

PECULIAR FEATURES OF THE "WAKE"
James Joyce is consciously refusing to follow the linear impetus of the canonical novel-form, even though this remains as a shadowy presence in his text and as a more substantial one in its interpretations. Boredom is most often occasioned by what many readers experience as a loss of narrative impetus in the "Wake" and also in "Ulysses" . But the impetus has not been lost: it was never there: it was absent from the beginning. As in a dream, where the conventions of time, grammar and plot are elided or unknown, almost in the sense that they have not yet been invented, and where the most astonishing elaborations can be produced around a central obsession, so the "Wake" dwells unrelentingly on a version of the fall. But this is not the dream of one individual. This is a communal dream, a dream of the human family, with the "history" of the world as its memory. Not surprisingly, this is a highly literary version of world history that is remembered. The "Wake" echoes with the sounds of famous phrases and names from world literature. But whatever the canonical status of the writers quoted or named, there is no implied hierarchy of authors in the "Wake" as there is in "Ulysses" , where Homer and Shakespeare, although in quite different ways, assume an ironized patriarchal presence, Giambattista Vico is certainly a patriarchal figure in many important respects but, even though he was being rediscovered during the years of the "Wake" composition, he is not like Homer, a father figure of the classical tradition, so-called, of the west. His New science, as its title implies, inaugurates something alternative to, but not necessarily exclusive of, the classical tradition. Formally speaking, it is such a miscelaneours and apparently disorganized work that it broke every shibboleth of the test that classical form set for art ever since Europe discovered in the Greeks that originary perfection that it claimed for its own. Vico´s presence in Joyce´s work does not signal the presence, intertextuality implied, of a hierarchy or a hegemony of form over delinquency. The reverse is the case. The Viconian presence in the Wake legitimizes the work´s subversion of dictatorial and authoritative modes, the executive orderings of experience that belong to the daylight canon and not to the disorderly and uncontrollable experiences of the night. In the Wake, the Greeks do not get a look-in. The history of the world, as imagined here, is not the history of those imagined communities, in Benedict Anderson´s phrase, that achieved an aesthetic perfection for which Attic Greece was ingeniously invented model. It is , instead, a history of repression both in its political and psychological sense, a history that concedes in Freudian terms, to pay the high price of night-time neurosis for the daytime of civilization. In similar vein, ordered language and novels driven by the motor of plot belong to civilization. Joyce is exploring in the Wake what civilization belongs to, what darkness produced such light, what fertility of experience was sacrified for such discipline thus the world´s great authors have to take their fragmentary chances with many lesser lights, literary language has to live within the market-place, the conscious with the unscouncious English with other languages and all languages with those scarcely articulate sounds out of which they all derived on the way to ht development of civil society.
A refusal of the canon is not a repudiation of order, it is a repudiation of a coercive order. a conception of literature that constructs itself as a historically developed hierarchy is ultimately a defense of necessity. That is to say, it legitimizes the view that what has happened in literature necessarily took the form it did, there is within apparently chaotic realm of possibility, a sequence that makes sence, a sequence that happened because it had to happen, such a sequence can be understood as providencial, the history of a literature or of a nation or of a civilization is thus ratified as belonging to the order of things.So viewed, history is destiny. Canons literary and other, are the narratives that explain the form destiny takes. Joyce as a member of a nation that had for long been a victim of such explanations, sought ways to subvert them and, in addition, to subvert their equally coercive and destiny-bound counter-explanations. He was no more impressed by the Irish Nationalist argument against colonialism than he was by the colonialist argument itself. Both shared the same premisses, each legitimizing itself in terms of a national, providentially ratified story of history. What was true for the British-Irish conflict was also true in a more general sense. Both Britain and Ireland were part of a European system that had established hegemony over others in the same of an historical necessity or destiny for which culture provided the most powerful sanction. Culture and, in this instance, literature in particular, provided an account of historical development that was based on the notion that, independent of particular regional circumstances, European civilization had produced the most fully developed account of the human spirit literature showed what was universal in the European achievement and thereby relieved it of the charge of being culturebound and thereafter only one among a number of possible readings or articulations of human experience. This European claim was threatened by those intramural disputes that endlessly disrupted its ostensibly coherent civilization but it was resorcefully sustained through cultural agencies until the First World War brought it to the point of collapse and with the search for finding systems of authority that would overcome it. But Joyce, unlike T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence and many others, saw that collapse as a disintegration that was to be welcomed because it had been brought about by the coercive exercise of that very patriarchal authority that many other writers wished to rescue and re-establish. The Wake´s fragmentation of canonical names and citations is, therefore, more than a display of Joyce´s learning. The shrapnel of voices follows upon the explosion of culture. Authors have their authority decimated and, as a consequence, narrative becomes problematic. History and culture can no longer provide fumigated versions of human experience. Instead they are to be understood as powerful detergent elements within it, not explanations of it. It is arguable that there are authors referred to the Wake whose presence is , like that of Vico, more privileged because they are themselves subversive presences within the culture, authors who never became quite amenable to conscription into the canonical army. Primary among these would be Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne, also Dublin born, whose Tristram Shandy casts the whole problematic of writingt and its relationship to experience in comic form. But Joyce´s critique of writing has its roots, in the Wake as in his other works, in the phenomenon of the Irish experience of mutilation and catastrophe and the inadmissibility of goahead plot as a form of narration that could encompass or characterize it. By offering Irish experience as a microcosm of human experience, he destabilizes the official version of both Irish and world history, the story told by the victors and ratified by what the victors liked to think was provided. A zoom.lens shot of world history reveals Irish history, History is a strange object for contemplation since it is both a body of writing that has been formed in very specific ways according to the demands of certain principles, objectivity, the need to defend a particular position and so on and yet it is also that unprocessed material that cannot be reached except through the activity of the writing that processes it. Irish historiography is a case in point. The British versions of Irish history and the Irish versions, however different they may be, share the same assumption, that there is a story to be told about the people who lived on the island of Ireland and that each age is an unfoldinf of a chapter in the long saga. The question of periodization is important. It is one of the structuring principles in the Wake and it is the more so because Joyce had seen the transformation of Ireland in the period 1916-22 from a colony and a constitutional part of the United Kingdom into two states, the new Irish Free State and the equally new statelet or providence of Northern Ireland, still a part of the United Kingdom . In other words, the contemporary period of Irish history, from 1922, the date of the Treaty that effected the transformation and the beginning of the second world war, is coincident with and absorbed deeply into the composition of Finnegans Wake. So arcane a work seems, by virtue of its obscure and hermetic nature, to be far removed from history and politics. Yet this is a deceptive appearance. History and politics, especially in their contemporary forms, provided startling examples of the ways in which a miscellaneous series of events could be converted into an historical pattern and could even be regarded as the final completion of a pattern that had been forming slowly over the centuries. In historical writing. as in literature, there are canonical interpretations. Joyce includes these in order to inspect their authority and give voice to their tacit assumptions. The assurance of historical interpretation is destroyed by the disintegration of the language that was both created by and creator of that assurance. Many of the disputes in the Wake involve assaults on and defences of languages, the most important division is that between male, patriarchal language that is always seeking to impose order on diverse materials and female language that revels in heterogeneity and ridicules authority. By transmuting the philosophical problem og historical writing into a gender division, Joyce finds a point of vantage that includes colonial oppression, the canonization of authority and the authorizing of canonicity, the relationship between fully formed language and the inchoate sounds from which it is derived and over which it is constantly reasserting itself. Untimately, he also finds here the comprehensive figure for self-division, for a broken world in which the masculine and the femenine are separated, the first made dominant over the second, with the consequent and subsequent neuroses, rebelions, maimings and nightmares. Still the Wake does not offer a reconciliation between masculine and femenine languages or divisions. Were there to be such, then there would no longer be history or narrative. For then we would not have to suffer any longer the consequences of the fall into language. We would be redeemed back to that original directness of knowledge that preceded languagem, the mark of our inescapable secondariness. The secondariness of language is reproduced in every other form of secondariness of female against male and thereafter all the varieties of oppresion of which this is the most basic and enduring. Given the immense scholarship generated by the Wake since its publication in 1939, the contemporary reader has a considerable advantage over those who first saw it in print. One of the features of modernist literature is its insistent calling upon the monuments of the very culture which it believes the modern readership to have abandoned. It may be that the originality of a work is directly proportional to the ignorance of its readers, today´s reader is at least equipped to overcome that ignorance by adverting to the various guides, corcondances, lexicons and annotations that have been provided for the Wake. Still, it is surely a strange experience to find that a book such as this one is so deeply indebted to earlier writings. In the earlier Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, famous hell-fire sermon in chapter III is so derivative of a standard Jesuit text that it might almost be called a plagiarism. But we tend to dismiss that as a inappropriate charge and replace it with more anodyne or glamorous descriptions such as quotations or intertextuality. It is indeed the case that Portrait deploys an intricate system of quotation throughout and that this instance of the sermon is a tactic in an overall strategy. But the earlier novel reminds us that this issue seemed to exert a certain fascination on Joyce. Ulysses and the Wake are saturated in quotations from and references to writings by other people. If we do not recognize these or their sources, are we in some sense disqualified as competent readers, it seems the answer must be yes, even though our incompetence is itself already incorporated into modernism diagnosis of modernity. We ratify these texts by being helpless before them and then are taught the full range of our incompetence by having the full extent to the plagiarism or system of quotation the texts encompass revealed to us. But since that revelation is one of the characteristic procedures of such works, we are obliged to recognize the high strategy involved in the plundering of the past and rechristen it as one of the forms that intertextuality takes in modernist writing. The problem with this apotheosis of intertextuality is that it canonizes obscurity as one of the signs of Art and institutionalizes those works that very often found in just such obscurity a strategy of subversion. Along with the institutionalizing of the work of art, there is a corresponding institutionalizing of the modern reader as a cultureless recipient. This is part explains the consequent withdrawal of art into a ghetto for specialists whose task it is to translate the work in such a way that the cultural impoverishment of the mass audience can both be confirmed and rekieved. Finally works of art, just in virtue of being so regarded in this context, are politically neutralized. They rejoin the canon they took so much trouble to subvert. This es part of the history of Finnegans Wake as it is part of the general history of modernism in all the arts. The book is a titanic exercise in remembering everithing at the level of the unconscious because at the conscioue level so much has been repressed that amnesia is the abiding condition.