IllIsible: Reading through Thick and Thin Eliot, Duchamp, Joyce, Derrida
p. 217-229
Résumé
How “common” is the “reader” of modernist texts? This essay addresses the question of the politics of reading at the turn of the century in the context of the “revolution of the word” and of the “de-reading” program of Modernism. Taking the “IllIsible” as a prolific modernist object rather than as a negative concept, the essay revises “unreadability” in the light of T.S. Eliot’s “finely filiated platinum” and of Marcel Duchamp’s “infra-thin” differential logic, in order to displace the “illisible” towards the limitrophic, productive forces of “illiterature.”
Texte intégral
1By the end of the 1920s, when “Modernism” had become a critically relevant category, two diverging conceptions of reading seemed to share the map: on the one hand, the defence of the “plain reader,” advocated for example in such a book as Charles Duff’s James Joyce and the Plain reader,1 to which Joyce, as Jean-Michel Rabaté has convincingly argued,2 explicitly subscribed; on the other, a conception to which Eugene Jolas gave voice in his 1929 rallying cry: “the plain reader be damned!”3 Reading may arguably be a field in which what is known as modernism has had the most to say, one which its most inventive energies have addressed.
2Between T.S. Eliot’s “dissociation” of a reader’s “sensibility” and Woolf’s invention of a dreamt-up commonalty of “common readers” (I and II),4 something happened to the reading act at the “turn” of the century, a turn which perhaps can best be read in the vicinity of what began at the other, twin end of the same century under the name of deconstruction, and may be, at present, undergoing the risk of oblivion. Modernism and the alleged “unreadability” with which some of its strongest productions have been charged beckons to be revisited as affecting the reading act, as calling for what could be termed, for want of a better term, a process of “de-reading”—a verbal alloy whose status may be shown to hover (improperly) between the common and the proper, in the improbable space between a de-reader, a derrid-er, a “ridder” and a re/ader. How “plain” can reading get? How does the plainness of a reader’s supposedly “flat” reading habits interact with the evenness of Duchamp’s infra-thin, infra-plain Large Glass, which bears a trace of evenness, too, at the end of its subtitle: the Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even?
3At the latter end of Modernism, or perhaps at one of its ends, four pages of Joyce’s Wake5 chapter “Anna Livia Plurabelle” were translated into “basic” English by Charles K. Ogden, the co-author of The Meaning of Meaning6 in 1932, an act of translation which again brings the “plain” reader to the foreground. Joyce, according to Jean-Michel Rabaté’s exhaustive survey of the concept of reading in and around the review transition, “was not only pleased with efforts like Duff’s or Ogden’s, but also incorporated them into the very substance of Finnegans Wake,” to the effect, he adds, that “the Wake continues the vindication of the plain reader’s rights while exploring the night-world and the pure word” (Rabaté, 2001, 150). Yet a few paragraphs further Rabaté concludes that although Joyce had decided to base his epic on the figure of Everyman, on “Here Comes Everybody,” he wished to make the “new reader, whose forerunner could have been Eugene Jolas, an integral part of his narrative structure.” Whether “plain” or “new,” the reader here seems to be compounded of two incompossible versions for which the characters of Bloom and Stephen in Ulysses seem to stand as mobile, disconnected yet overlapping walking emblems.
4A trace of Hegelianism seems to affect Rabaté’s conclusive comment about the way Joyce metamorphoses reading: “In Ulysses Joyce had postulated the reconciliation of the Citizen and the Artist while leaving to an uneducated female the ‘last word’ of his book” (152)—in triadic fashion, Molly sums it all up, in other words. With the Wake, however, Rabaté’s analysis insists on the emergence of a new reader, a new figure which he names the genetic reader or “genreader,” one invited to approach “the difficult and opaque language less with glosses and annotations than through the material evidence of the notebooks, drafts, corrected proofs reproduced by the James Joyce Archive” (196)—with “litter,” one might add. But a mere infra-thin difference, to borrow Duchamp’s concept-in-progress,7 seems to separate the prone, “plain” figure of Joyce’s semi-literate Molly (in bed, in the dark, a prototypical figure of the Wakean reader suffering continuous insomnia) from Rabaté’s “genreader,” programmed to sift through an archival ocean. Infra-thinness can only be properly approached, however, through a paradoxical, limitrophic thickening of the semiotic process. In an effort to cross boundaries, reading in the age of modernism has found a way, one might argue, of going through thick and thin, of metamorphosing the word into an infra-thin limit, a limitrophe moment—such as can be explored in the poetics of the untranslatable French adjective “illisible.” What follows is an attempt to translate the inventive energies buried beneath the apparently negative surface of the term, to release, in other words, the infra-thin ways of “un” or “on” or “in reading” it gestures towards.
lIllIsible: towards lIllIterature
5What follows rests (restlessly so) on the thesis that modernism is plastically IllIsible—such a typographic recreation escaping the rule of monologic “meaning.” IllIsible will be used, in what follows, as a semi-visual, both hyper-readable and less than readable tool to rearticulate modernism along non-linear lines, as a tool which, with minor typographic changes, mimics the critical force of modernism, its metastable positioning on an infra-thin fault-line, between “text” and “image” (both terms being in need of revision). “IllIsible,” in other words, will be used in what follows as a typographic tool, as a semi-visual, cross-generic rendering or translation of what Derrida has explored in The Animal That Therefore I Am8 as the poetics of the “limitrophe,” as the paradoxically thin yet thickening space of the limit or the frontier.
6Modernism could be reformulated as a poetics of the limitrophe, as that which grows on a limit and makes a limit grow. But what exactly is the limitrophe? What are its connections to the unreadable, to the illegible, to the “IllIsible”? The semantics of “trophein,” its Greek verbal root, have been explored by Jacques Derrida in more than one instance, to the effect that, as he explains, something “grows” in the space of the concept of a limit, a growth affecting not only the course of his conceptualizing in The Animal that therefore I am but also the poetics of Glas.
7The frontier between what can and what cannot be read, between what “reads” and what does not, requires for its formulation the foliated phonetics and confusing graphics of a performative, untranslatable “IllIsible.” Part of the poetic force contained in that wind-fallen adjective rests in the multiple forces at work in its inaugural, reversible pair of syllables -illi-which run a repetitive, sense-free program beneath the negative prefix—syllables whose insistent soundtrack can be traced in a long list of Modernist, literary “Lilies” (from the figure of the growing girl, Lily, in Joyce’s The Dead, to Woolf’s Lily Briscoe and many others) in the title of Ulysses (and its variable, bi-positional stressing), or in Gertrude Stein’s operatic, rhythmic “Lily:” “Let Lucy Lily Lily Lucy Lucy let Lucy Lucy Lily Lily Lily Lily Lily let Lily Lucy Lucy let Lily. Let Lucy Lily,”9 or in Hélène Cixous’ clairvoyant remark that “celui qui écrit tourne autour d’un lit” [whoever writes writes around and about a bed].10 Rich elements of homophony intervene, to the effect that Cixous’ “lit” or bed of writing circulates across an aural spectrum in which the syllable multiplies, runs between the “bed” (in which the literary is embedded), the symbolic flower (lys), the imperative form of to read, the urge to read: lis!, and the sense of a smooth, thin, surface (lisse).
8A “lit” and yet not a “lit,” illisible reads as a word which overflows its own banks, signalling an invitation to read as much as a foretaste of how language can be made to resist reading. An agon rather than a word, “illisible” both posits the negative charge of a declaration of unreadability and poses as an i-ridden signpost begging for attention, a read-me banner. With its two different phonetic actualizations, the double, “wet” l, (similar to the voiced palatal spirant or y sound, as in the French “l mouillé,” which does not apply in this case) and the dry l, illisible is nearly untranslatable into English, since neither “unreadable” nor “illegible” render the force of increase and repetition released by the French adjective. Rather than follow the negative, always already Hegelian implications of “unreadable” or “illegible,” part of what follows attempts to translate or trans/e/late “l’illisible” into English as a non-negative term, as a “de-reading” process which approaches the “proper” noun of Derrida, as a generative term endowed with little or no trace of a lack.
9A differing, counter-linear, surface-sensitive approach to reading as de-reading can be developed from a reading of Roland Barthes’ statements in his 1975 essay on reading,11 “Sur la lecture,” an essay in which the semiologist promotes what he calls “de l’illisible,” and claims that a measure of unreadability always remains, no matter how readable a text is. Such a theory, paradoxically, can be seen to operate in the very sentence in which Barthes advances his theory of unreadability, a sentence in which a repetitive, iterative, less than sense-making strain runs in the semiotic, rhythmic acoustics and prosody of: “au fond de tout texte, si lisible qu’il ait été conçu, il y a, il reste de l’illisible” [no matter how readable a text has been conceived to be, there is and will always remain, at bottom, a measure of unreadability]. The iterative patterns that haunt Barthes’s sentence produce the very unreadability it grants every text a measure of. Haunted by an “-il-” series, Barthes’ text rings the changes, five times, in the space of twice ten syllables, on a phonetic particle which no longer operates as a syllable but becomes a buried refrain that sits across categories: an impersonal pronoun (it in “il ait,” there in “il y a”), a divided phoneme (s/il/risible), an invitation to stutter, reproduce, copy, and proliferate in a reversible, back to front fashion (Lilli-). Barthes’s repeated “ils” liberate a stray phoneme, less than a syllable, which circulates freely throughout his statement, endows it with a less than penetrable form of resonance, less than an echo. Willing to enter whatever random forms of agglutination or of “liaison” French grammar allows, Barthes’ disseminated “ils” and “s’ils” form a nameless crowd (insistently gendered), in and out of which flows a “text” whose status hovers on a thin, perhaps nonexistent borderline between semiotic theory and a “discours amoureux” (a “lover’s discourse”). A thinning boundary stands between text and reader, lover and text, at the “bottom” (au fond) of which a restless “rest” remains.
10From an equally porous point of view, Virginia Woolf, in the last pages of “How Should One Read a Book?,” addresses the possibility of “reading without the book before you” and concludes that a reader’s standards and ways of reading “steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work,”12 a statement in which the dividing line between writer and reader becomes a locus of limitrophic, spectral crossovers and cross-breathings. Reading, in such a statement, literally “lines” writing, doubles it, displaces the boundary line and affects the figure of the author—a collapsible figure for which no better equivalent can be found than Jean-Michel Rabaté’s creative tmesis of “l’auteur” as an “autre lecteur,” the author as an other (an/auther-) reader.13
11Modernism, one might argue, affects, above all, the reading process, in the creative displacements it calls for in the “reader,” in the way it requires the reader to shift ground and enter a process of becoming: becoming a de-reader, a re-ader (a re-reader), or, after Duchamp, a “ready” reader, ready to grasp reader-made ready-mades, or in the steps of Hélène Cixous, becoming what she calls “une lisante,” a word inspired from “une gisante”: a “lay” reader, understood as a reader able to “lie” between, in a floating state of progress or pre-gross, freed from the security of the story-line and the limits of narrative frame and closure.
12According to the linguistic theories discussed in C.K. Ogden’s and I.A. Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning, illegibility per se does not exist: language continues to mean even when it means next to nothing, as in the example they give of “The gostak distims the doshes” (130), in which grammar comes to the rescue of sense. The Meaning of Meaning is literally “read” by Joyce’s Wake, in which it becomes “the maymeaminning of maimmoomeinin” (267: 1–3), a phrase which reformulates the matter of unreadability as a principle of word growth, in which what means literally “means,” happens in the middle. The Wakean word thickens into a word-in-transition, operating along lines similar to Jolas and Gilbert’s conception of a “Revolution of the Word” as developed in transition.14 As Rabaté has shown, such a “revolution” intended to promote “the secondary, non-utilitarian function of language, so as to address the aura, the ‘light vapour which floats above the expression of the thought’” (Rabaté, 2001, 204). Ogden’s and Richard’s refutation of Saussure’s binary mapping of the sign could be extended to refute the gap between author and reader, the space, with caution, of a common “aura.” Such an “aura,” and the spectral associations it conveys, is not dissimilar from Woolf’s sense of a common “air” breathed in and around a “text.”
13One of the ways of deconstructing (or “revolutionizing,” to borrow Jolas and Gilbert’s word) “meaning,” which also involves deconstructing reading-for-meaning, is to resort to “meaning” in its secondary, half buried sense: as a “mean,” a “medium,” as that which grows in the middle. The type of reader this “other” form of mean-ing encourages is one which complicates the author/reader line of separation. To mean: to be in the middle, in the “trophein” of the limit.
Finally filiated Platinum: Eliot and the “shred”
14One of the earlier theorists of the medium of art, of art as a medium, is T.S. Eliot, whose “Tradition and the Individual talent” has recently been re-examined15 as a transgressive essay, which reacts in an interesting way when placed alongside apparently irrelevant contexts, such as the work of Marcel Duchamp. A thin thread runs through T.S. Eliot’s divided text, published in, over, or across two issues (September and December 1919) of the avant-garde “little magazine” The Egoist, the reincarnation of the feminist fortnightly The New Freewoman. The first part of Eliot’s essay commits a double murder in the Rue Morgue of modernism, as Eliot does away with tradition understood as a linear, authoritative handing down from past to present and expresses similar qualifications of the individual talent, the artist having to commit “self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality,” a depersonalization which approaches, he claims, the condition of science. At the end of part one, Eliot invites his reader to “consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide”16—a thread he takes up again in the December issue of the review, where again the mind of the poet is described as unaffected, like a shred of platinum, in the catalytic process of creation:
When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid; this combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. (Eliot, 1953, 27)
15As noted by a number of critics, the last section of the essay contains a curious, freestanding paragraph, a coda which seems to suggest unfinished business. Tradition has to be understood, paradoxically, as a term endowed with the power to resist history, to make way for what Eliot calls “the present of the past,” the “already living” (Eliot, 1953, 30).
16A strange unreadability affects Eliot’s essay, which is, literally, neither about tradition nor about anything individual. No “individual” poet has “his complete meaning alone” (23) but he must be placed “among the dead”—a placement which redefines his role as mediumistic. Yet, on the other hand, the ruling metaphor of the essay is a physical one, a description of the catalytic process in which the workings of the mind of the poet is compared to the introduction of a thread of platinum into a chamber containing sulphur dioxide and oxygen. The analogy is used twice, once in each of the two separate instalments in which the essay appeared. As Stan Smith comments, the first instalment “toys with the reader’s curiosity in mimicry of the cliff-hanger endings of contemporary silent cinema.” Smith adds: “Nor does the second instalment offer immediate clarification, deferring gratification in a series of temporizing digressions before the terse disclosure of what was only coquettishly ‘hinted’ in the first instalment: “the analogy was that of the catalyst.”17
17The severed structure of Eliot’s essay, one might argue, reflects the poet’s (and the reader’s) divided mind, as well as the forking meaning of the word “medium” on which Eliot’s argument rests, for example in his defence of the artist as “only a medium and not a personality.” To the divisive, elastic quality of the essay, which impedes rather than promotes readability, must be added the plasticity of the word “medium,” the hesitation that affects, as in the case of what such a term “means.” Eliot’s medium sits uneasily astraddle the line that separates the mediumistic from modern physics—as is nowhere more perceptible than in the transparent, limitrophe interval which separates the first issue from the December issue. How is one to read Eliot’s clarification—“my meaning is that the poet has not a ‘personality’ to express but a particular medium”—except as an invitation to re-read or de-read the sense-oriented verb “to mean,” and to follow its affinities with what is “intermediate,” what mediates and rests in the middle—a mean, a medium. Eliot’s portrait of the artistic process results in an analogy which is, to quote Stan Smith again, “deeply confused:”
The poet’s mind, that “more finely perfected medium” . . . is at this point regarded as a “receptacle”—not the catalyst itself but the vacuum flask that contains it. The essay then subverts its own tenor by having that receptacle “seize” and “store up” its contents, exert “intensity” and “pressure” to bring about a “fusion,” to “digest and transmute the passions which are its material” . . . Far from inert, Eliot’s volatile analogy contradicts itself, will not stay still. (Smith, 27)
18One might add that such a case constitutes, precisely, an “IllIsible”: out of the stillness of the metaphor readings proliferate, “still,” increasing and multiplying. As theoretical material, Eliot’s text can be approached as an early, pre-Derridean case study of the limitrophe, in which is released a force of growth which occurs, after the graphic proliferation of the non-negative “IllIsible,” in the untraceable space of the “borderline.” In other words, difference gets produced in Eliot’s apparent theory of indifference. Stillness, too, has become an “illisible”: against the inertia of the “shred” of platinum, the loud alliterations of “finally filiated platinum” contribute to the elaboration of another, mobile reading contract, at a distance from the semiotics of the meaningful, left roaming in the vicinity of “mean-ing,” provided the word be taken to imply a nomadic following of phonetic intensities across an acoustic, or graphic, plateau. Meaning errs in the “middle-ground” of what is possessed jointly, in mean or going mean—in a commonalty.
19The notion of the poet’s mind as a finely perfect medium is taken up by Marcel Duchamp, who, as Marjorie Perloff18 and Eric Cameron have shown, quoted Eliot word for word in a talk on “The Creative Act” at a meeting of the American Federation of the Arts in Houston in April 1957. Although any interaction between the conservative, elitist poet and the Dadaist might appear improbable, a touch of Eliotic indifference presides over Duchamp’s choice of “ready-mades,” in which the reader/viewer is granted the right to read/not read—as in Cage’s comment on Duchamp’s Large Glass: “there is nothing in it that requires me to look in one place or another, or, in fact, requires me to look at all. I can look through it to the word beyond” (Perloff, 181).19 Duchamp’s work reads as an infrathin materialization of Virginia Woolf’s open window and the air it lets in, breathed by reader/writer alike.
Ready-made, Reader-made
20“L’illisible” figures just such a medium, a paradoxically infinitely passable and yet opaque area in which sense and nonsense meet on a plateau, “even” to quote from Duchamp’s less than readable subtitle to The Large Glass (both less than readable and the object of countless critical readings): “The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, even.” Like Eliot’s figure of the artist and the non-organic chemical metaphor that goes along with it, Duchamp’s Large Glass has undergone much “pressure”—to breaking point, even. Other “fine filiations,” finely filiated shreds could be shown to disseminate between Eliot and Duchamp, which from the point of view of current academic narratives on Eliot and Duchamp remain nearly unreadable: Marjorie Perloff, in a very convincing “reading” of the figure of Rrose Selavy, sees in it a body double of J. Alfred Prufrock or of Gerontion, thus rendering the limit between the two ends of the Modernist spectrum less than traceable. In terms of gender difference, one might add that what separates Marcel in drag from Eliot’s gender differentials is as thin or thick as “finely filiated platinum,” if, as a reader of the “IllIsible” which operates at the bottom (or the surface) of Eliot’s analogy, one re-reads or de-reads it as “filliated” platinum: a “fille” beneath (as well as on top of) Eliot’s “fil” affects the masked, elitist figure of the poet and essayist whose name can in turn be read as affected by a becoming, when revised into “El(l)iot.” Between a “bearer” of tradition, and a barer of brides, the shred of platinum is thin. An elided “Eli” also affects such a name, tying one prophetic end of Modernism to its other end, resurrected in the limitrophic name of Jacques Elie Derrida, and in the complex futurity of the “already” living (the “déjà” or force of anticipation of Jacques Derrida’s proper name).
Lily, Literature, and Joyce´s “growing girl”
21Another deconstruction of the limitrophe operates in one of Joyce’s early texts in which, from a realistic angle, a “Lily” (whose appearance in “The Dead” coincides with entrance halls, pantry doors, thresholds and doorsteps) portrayed as “a slim, growing girl, pale in complexion and with hay-coloured hair”—a portrait to which is added an eminently readable, meaning-oriented detail in the sentence that follows: “the gas in the pantry made her look still paler.” That “gas” connects Lily to the figure of Gretta Conroy’s dead lover, Michael Fury, whose ghost invites itself at the end of the story, thus blurring the contours that classically define a character. As to the “pantry,” the word pants between two forms of breathlessness (Eros, Thanatos), which adds to the semantic texture of the story and renders closure impossible. The next two lines add a further layer of productive “illisibilité”—no matter how readable they are:
Gabriel had known her when she was a child and used to sit on the lowest step nursing a rag doll.
—Yes, Lily, he answered, and I think we’re in for a night of it.20
22The statement both answers Lily’s earlier question (“is it snowing again?”) and does not, arriving as it does seven lines too late, producing a calculated disarticulation of the body of dialogue. While belonging to the story’s semantic line, it perverts the sense of narrative linearity and immediacy. Something, however, emerges in the process: a “night of it,” a floating, aired “it” shared between reader and writer, an infrathin pronoun waiting to be cleaved to (unread, de-read). What is a night of “it,” once “it” roams out of easy reach of its syntactic homologue? What is “it,” if not an example of the Modernist medium which connects, as I have attempted to show elsewhere,21 “lily” to “literature”? An ever thickening limitrophic moment, Joyce’s punctiform, filiated “it” liberates what Derrida has called the “logic of the limit” and its fil(l)iation:
Limitrophy is therefore my subject. Not just because it will concern what sprouts or grows at the limit, around the limit, by maintaining the limit, but also what feeds the limit, generates it, raises it, and complicates it. Everything I’ll say will consist, certainly not in effacing the limit, but in multiplying its figures, in complicating thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiply. Moreover, the supposed first or literal sense of treph? is just that: to transform by thickening, for example, in curdling milk. (Derrida, 2008, 29)
23In and out of the limitless limit of the “growing girl”’s name, in and out of “li/li” circulates a principle of growth-in-the-middle, of, literally, mean-ing. Lily increases and multiplies, to borrow Derrida’s metaphor, not only into “literally” but also into a spate of Joycean adverbs, into the “faintly and evenly” of the end of “The Dead” to reemerge in the “Stately” on which Ulysses begins and in the collection which follows in the next paragraphs (gently, coldly, gravely, briskly, gaily . . .). The mark of the adverb and its representational weight (the suffixed /-ly/ standing for a former “like”) multiplies into a series of repetitive, non-representational folds, a meaning-less yet mean-oriented series, a force of resistance to meaning conceived as a totalizing, organic construction. Reading stutters into a re-ading, repetitive, serial process.
24The opening lines of Ulysses22 offer readability in excess—along the much trodden forking paths of naturalism and symbolism. Buck Mulligan’s “yellow dressing gown sustained in the mild morning air” reads as a parody of ritual church clothing (while the dactylic rhythms peddled by Joyce’s choice of words mimic Greek versification). An adjective, “ungirdled” momentarily opens up yet another reading option, suggestive as it is of a flasher’s performance, an interpretation which the text leaves ajar and seems to promote in a non-textual, graphic manner: Joyce’s incipit bears the recurrent signature of a dangling “g,” of which the first sentence offers four variations: doubled (in “dressinggown”), hard (in “ungirdled”), palatal (in “gently”), and astraddle (morning/air), a fourfold arrangement which works against the grain of Mulligan’s tripartite dactyls (Mu-lli-gan, sta-te-ly) and threefold blessings. More g’s affect the following paragraph: gunrest, gravely, gurgling, grain, a parade of dangling words forming a growing limitrophic effect, thickening the narrative story-line or semantic threshold with what pertains to the visual, to figuration, while remaining largely unseen.
25Joyce’s series of opening “G-points” cannot be approached along the lines of an Eliotic “dissociation of sensibility.” The force of Ulysses (and in its wake, of late Modernism) rests, rather, on its resistance to binarity and to “dissociation.” Such a resistance is imbedded in what one could call the “g” factor, the g point raised in the limitrophic energies and the generative momentum of what operates both as phoneme and grapheme, in defiance of grids. A generative work such as Ulysses generates “w-readers,” in the sense that it trains its readership to the folded procedure of reading-as-writing—a fold being understood as a one-dimensional surface, a limitrophic space of “cleaving” as well as cleaving-to (at work, precisely, in the resilient phonetics of “illisible”).
Derrida, De-reader
26One of the most widely circulated essays in which Derrida “reads” Joyce is an act of “wreading” as much as an exercise in de-reading. Derrida’s “oui-dire,”23 (hearsay/yes-saying), addressed to a floor of Joycean experts in Frankfurt, operates as what Deleuze and Guattari have termed a multiplicity, as a switchboard, a connecting machine able to rewrite (or to “w-read”) a (semi-hidden) programme which involves a limitrophic phonematic network: a series of oui, yes, hear, phonetic shreds or fine filaments which increase and multiply, “like” the literally out of Lily’s names (in which no readable “likeness,” no representational drive operates), limitrophic elements from Derrida’s own re-articulable name: an “Elie,” a “-da.”
Reading on Lease
27In one of Jean-Michel Rabaté’s early cryptogenetic studies of Finnegans Wake 264: 15, read with one eye on the “final” text and the other on the Archive (Ms. 47478, Archive 11),24 a verb stands out: to lease—an ingredient which as Rabaté shows has been added by Joyce, incorporated to the text’s “self-reizing flower” or flour, to thicken and to starch it—or to make its limit “curdle,” to borrow Derrida’s description and deconstruction of the limitrophe. Joyce adds the verb with an eye on its contradictory, reversible meanings, which involve “to let go” and, contrariwise, “to bind by contract.” Such, one might add, is the re/adding or wreading contract promoted by the textual dynamics of the IllIsible, a contract elaborated in more than one tongue, in which “lease” and “lire” resonate and meet halfway, in the territory of the “lisant(e).”
LIll
28Yet another way of translating—of trans/e/lating, rather, the plastic energies of such a word as “lIllisible”—would be to extract yet another limitrophic English word from its active core, a word awaiting its revolution (in Jonas’s sense) in an obscure corner of the Oxford English Dictionary: “lill.” Lill, the noun, is another word for a “book,” a “gypsy word” imported from Romany. As a verb, to lill incorporates a touch of breathlessness and means to “pant” (in the “pantry,” no doubt, of Modernism). The strength of Modernism belongs, in other words, in the foreign confines of what could be called lilliterature, not so much to a lalalangue as to a lililangue, if, as a read/er, one is quite read/y.
Notes de bas de page
1 Duff Charles. James Joyce and the Plain Reader. London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1932.
2 Rabaté Jean-Michel. James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001, 141–152.
3 Jolas Eugene. transition. No. 16–17, June 1929; quoted in Rabaté, op. cit., 147, 231.
4 Woolf Virginia. The Common Reader, First Series. London: The Hogarth Press, 1925; The Second Common Reader. London: The Hogarth Press, 1932.
5 Joyce James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber, 1939.
6 Ogden Charles K. & I.A. Richards. The Meaning of Meaning. London: Kegan Paul, 1923
7 Duchamp Marcel. Duchamp du signe, suivi de Notes. Paris: Flammarion, 2008, 276–292, notes 1–46.
8 Derrida Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
9 Stein Gertrude. Operas and Plays, Four Saints in Three Acts. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1927, 36.
10 Cixous Hélène. “Vues sur Mer ou la Mère à voir,” unpublished seminar description. Université de Paris 8, 2004, translation mine.
11 Barthes Roland. “Sur la lecture,” Œuvres complètes. Vol. 4, 1972–1976. Paris: Seuil, 2002, 929 (translation mine).
12 Woolf Virginia. The Second Common Reader. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1986, 267–269.
13 Rabaté Jean-Michel. Joyce, Portrait de l’auteur en autre lecteur. Petit-Rœulx: Cistre, 1984.
14 Transition: an international quarterly for creative experiment, ed. Eugene Jolas, 18, Fall issue, November 1929.
15 Canci Giovanni & Jason Harding. T.S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.
16 Eliot T.S. Selected Prose. Ed. John Hayward, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1953, 26
17 Smith Stan. “Transgression and the Individual Talent,” in G. Canci & J. Harding, T.S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition. Op. cit., 27.
18 Perloff Marjorie. “Duchamp’s Eliot” in G. Canci & J. Harding, T.S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition. Op. cit, p. 177–184.
19 See Kostelanetz Richard. Conversing with Cage. New York: Limelight Press, 1988, 179
20 Joyce James. Dubliners. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976, 177.
21 Garnier Marie-D., “Joyce and Deleuze: Pass-words in Dubliners,” Bulletin de Stylistique Anglaise. No. 15, 1994, 117–125.
22 Joyce James. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986, 3.
23 Derrida Jacques. “Oui-dire de Joyce,” Ulysse Gramophone, Deux mots pour Joyce. Paris: Galilée, 1987, 137–143.
24 Rabaté Jean-Michel. “Pour une cryptogénétique,” Genèse de Babel, James Joyce et la création. Paris: Éd. C.N.R.S., 1985, 68–70.
Auteur
Université de Paris VIII
Marie-Dominique Garnier teaches literature and gender studies at the University of Paris VIII at St-Denis. She has published essays on 17th century poetry and modernism, has worked in the field of literature and photography (Jardins d’Hiver, Presses de l’École Normale Supérieure, 1997), and is now co-editing Hélène Cixous Sous X, the proceedings of a conference organized at Paris VIII. She is completing a translation of Madeline Gins’ Helen Keller or Arawaka.
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