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NEGOTIATING IDENTITY:
VOICE AND BOUNDARY IN THE WORKS OF J ANIES JOYCE

by

Francis Constantine Manista

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2000

ABSTRACT

NEGOTIATING IDENTITY: VOICE AND BOUNDARY IN THE
WORKS OF JAMES JOYCE

By

Francis Constantine Manista

This dissertation is, in part, a map of a trajectory that illustrates the weaving
and unweaving of particular subject positions from within James Joyce’s major works
(Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and F innegans Wake)
through representations of voice, focusing on the concept of interstitiality that serves
to negotiate identity, authority, and subjectivity. In the narrowest sense, voice reveals
itself as a portion of the narrative which in turn stands as part of the discourse of a
particular work. A movement to a more broadly conceived view of voice has it
supersede the narrative and function throughout the discourse. Permutations of these
concepts locate voice at nearly all levels of Joyce’s works. This dissertation explores
the myriad of ways that Joyce portrays and negotiates identity through voice and the
conceptualization of boundaries that exist "in between” different and distinct
subjectivities in his ﬁction. I explore those negotiative identities and subjectivities
from within the conceptualization and representation of voice.

I employ Homi K. Bhabha’s theories on interstitiality from The Location of
Culture as an integral aesthetic approach to voice; however, Bhabha’s explorations
reveal his dependence (and mine) on Bakhtin and Derrida to explore issues of the

metaphysics of presence, dialogism, and heteroglossia within a study of the

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indeterminate borders that Joyce constructs. If, as Bakhtin states in The Dialogic
Imagination, "every novel is a dialogized system made up of the images of
’languages,’ styles, and consciousnesses that are concrete and inseparable from
language,” then the means of representing language for the novel, namely through
voice, are likewise concrete and simultaneously diffused: oscillating continuously
between distance and proximity thereby creating multiple levels of discourse and
reading. Voice, as the "place of enunciation" within the novel, likewise possesses a
unique duality in that, like language for Bakhtin, it ”not only represents, but itself
serves as the object of representation" (49).

More often than not, however, a study of voice reveals the inevitability of
speciﬁc identities to merge and ﬂow into one another, despite futile attempts to retain
individuality. The space existing between two seemingly distinct voices blurs in

Joyce’s ﬁction in the din of conversation and in the fuzziness of representation.

 

Copyright by
FRANCIS CONSTANTINE MANISTA
2000

For Bill, Michael,
and Joy

There are small unassailable words
that diminish caesars,
territories of the voice

that intimate across death and generation
how a secret was imparted

--- Moya Canon

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As with any long-term project, the effort is never completed alone, and I
would never want to take full blame for this. Included in my list of accomplices, I
would like to thank: First on my list, Joy Palmer, my wife, who listened to me
whine and fret over this albatross tied around my neck for far too long, was always
ready with encouragement even when I didn’t deserve it, and only recently began to
lose patience. The Department of English for allowing me one semester to study in
Ireland where I encountered a great many inﬂuences that I am still learning to
comprehend. The Department of American Thought and language, who for three
Years supported me with a teaching assistantship and plenty of encouragement. The
Graduate School with their ﬁnancial support, speciﬁcally the Special College Research
Abroad Money, or their humorous acronym SCRAM, which gave me the opportunity
to do some much-needed research at the National Library in Dublin and the British
Library in London. To the members of my committee for their advice and patience; .
especially 1 want to thank William A. Johnsen, my director, and Michael Patrick
GillesPie: their help was by far the most extensive and immeasurable. Senator David
NOI‘I‘is and Ken Monaghan from the Dublin James Joyce Centre and John McCourt of
the Trieste James Joyce School, who provided me with a scholarship and a chance to
study there during the summer of 1999, and experience ﬁrst-hand some of Joyce’s
sec0nd home; and the American Conference for Irish Studies where I have presented

different versions of these chapters for nearly ﬁve years. Thank you one and all!

vi

 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations:
Introduction: ”I’ll begin again in a jiffey”
, Dubliners: Initiating Negotiations

, A Portrait of Stephen (Hero) D(a)edalus:
Identity, Authorship and Subjectivity

. Ulysses: ”Everything Speaks is its own way"
. Finnegans Wake: Voices as "changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns"

. (In)Conclusion: ”who will somewherise for the whole anyhow?"

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To assist with the task of referencing, I have tried to reduce the use of endnotes when
citing Joyce’s primary works, his letters, and Ellmann’s biography. I have applied
the following abbreviations throughout, with page numbers cited parenthetically.
These all conform to the standard usage established by the James Joyce Quarterly

( ] 1Q). For publication information, please consult the bibliography.

gmwa

JJII

Letters 1, 11, III
P

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The Critical Writings of James Joyce
Dubliners

Exiles

Finnegans Wake

Although the Wake is divided among four books, standard
citation includes page number followed by line number within
parentheses, i.e. (FW 18.24-28); the only deviation from this
form is in book two, "Night Lessons" (FW [1.2) where a
slightly different citation method is used to connote left and
rights margins, as well as footnotes.

James Joyce: New and Revised Edition (1982) by Richard
Ellmann

Letters of James Joyce

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Stephen Hero

Selected Letters of James Joyce

The Portable James Joyce

Ulysses: The Corrected Text (1986, Ed. Hans Walter Gabler)
Standard page reference to Ulysses includes the number of the
episode followed by the line number; for example, (UG

18.1510) is a reference to line ”1510” of the ”Penelope”
episode.

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INTRODUCTION

"I’ll begin again in a jiffey" (FW 625.32)

Deﬁning voice in the works of James Joyce is a bit of a contradiction.
Readers often take voice as possessing a material reality or necessarily emanating
from a material body. We tend not to think of voice as free ﬂoating, existing
independently from a bodied point of origination, but voice possesses no materiality;
rather it only suggests the possibility and the plausibility of the material’s existence

(i.e- language vis-a-vis a logocentric conceptualization of the person speaking)
simultaneously undermining that potential, most notably in novels where the material
is already long absent from the signiﬁer and where the process of translation takes the
word even further away from its potentially deﬁned source. Because of this duality,
voice can only be deﬁned as a dislocutory process. Fritz Senn uses the term
"dislocution" as a means to analyze Ulysses’ unruliness. Dislocution, according to
Sen, ”suggests a spatial metaphor for all manner of metamorphoses, switches,
t1'atls fers, displacements, but also acknowledges the overall signiﬁcance of speech and
Writing, and insinuates that the use of language can be less than orthodox. " The
term , as deﬁned, possesses a unique duality that is necessary for an examination of
Voice throughout Joyce’s canon; it is ”reasonably precise, so as to retain some
denCDtative edge, and yet implicatively loose enough to accommodate multifarious
featllres. Dislocation has the advantage of not being predeﬁned. ”‘ My use of the
term to deﬁne voice obviously reveals an almost immediate paradox; it is a spatial
metilphor applied to a concept without space. The existence of this apparent problem,

hoWever, serves my purpose and what I am trying to present. An examination of

 

 

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Joyce’s representation of voice is simultaneously an analysis of the means of entering
into a discussion of Joyce’s collection of tales, as well as the process of storytelling.
Voice allows for and creates an elision of a non-material concept which proposes the
materiality of the reality behind the voice, as well as a term that attempts to ground
the concept of voice in a material existence. Together these two precepts serve to
illustrate the process of representation in these stories. Moreover, Joyce’s dislocution
of voice presents the already hybrid nature of identity and subjectivity, represented
through voice. In this sense, voice is both the cause and result of the problematics
involved with the representation of identity and material presence.

Ulysses, according to Patrick O’Donnell stands ”near the beginning of the
history of voice."2 I will examine Dubliners ﬁrst as Joyce’s early beginning with
voice, and then move through to Finnegans Wake; however I cannot obviously move
in a consistent, linear fashion, because so much of Joyce’s writing refers back to itself
as Well as seems to anticipate its own further development. Finnegans Wake is a text
that is largely about itself and about everything that Joyce said and wrote, while

Simultaneously it is a text that serves to emphasize multiplicity with such a degree of
uncertainty that concepts of authorship and truth mean very little:
The teamestained terminal (say not the tag, mummer, or our show’s a failure!)
is a cosy little brown study all to oneself and, whether it be thumbprint,
mademark or just a poor trait of the artless, its importance in establishing the
identities in the writer complexus will be best appreciated by never

forgetting that both before and after it was a habit not to sign letters

always. (FW 114.32)

 

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A reading a the Wake, which speciﬁcally recalls Joyce’s earliest writing and
experiences, directs the reader to see all of Joyce’s ﬁctions as proceeding via such a
"commodius vicus of recirculation," textually as well as thematically; such a reading
illustrates that Joyce’s canon, from its genesis through to its completion, continuously
went out and returned but never said the same thing twice and never allowed the
reader any degree of certainty regarding the story: is the mark on the page ”a
thumbprint, mademark, or just a poor trait“ of the storyteller? Those supposed
”identities in the writer” are obscured (FW 3.2).

Voice is typically presented as an element of a verbal exchange between two
interlocutors speaking, as if it, too, were a material construct that, like money or
gOOds, is simply passed from one person to the other. This logocentric perspective
Places upon voice and language a deﬁnite, mobile position in space, an elision
between res and verba, as if voice possessed a body. Voice, however, exists within
the interstices of these two potential bodies or entities. Speech, however, is different
from voice, inasmuch as writing is different from voice; all three are certainly
elements of this dislocutory process. Voice, however, disrupts the process, yet
Simultaneously connects these terms, because for Joyce, as for any author who
attﬁrnpts to represent the dialogization of spoken and written language, these three
tet'tl‘ls tenuously conﬂate: speech and voice are represented in written texts which
ins ist that we simultaneously recognize both the appearance and sound value of the
marks on the page. Secondly, voice is also a substitutable term for the style of the
anther-’5 narrative, exclusive of the potential sounds of those marks. Kristeva’s
negativity, as a fourth term of the Hegelian Dialectic, serves to approach this

paradoxical deﬁnition of voice. Negativity is more than antithesis, because it offers a

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space in between existence and its absence; in other words, it is, as Kristeva states, a
process of becoming:
Negativity may be thought of as both the cause and the organizing principle
of the process ﬁgures as the indissoluble relation between an ”ineffable"
mobility and its "particular determination. " Negativity is the mediation, the
supersession of the ’pure abstractions’ of being and nothingness in the concrete
where they are both only moments.3
Kristeva states that negativity is "therefore part of the contemplative (theoretical)
system [which] reformulates the static terms of pure abstraction as a process,
dissolving and binding them within a mobile law. ”‘ In other words, negativity for
Kristeva, different from nothingness and negation, serves to disrupt linear perception
and representation, because it functions as a non-material element within the theses of
the dialectic. Negativity may be the "logical impetus” beneath "negation and that of
the negation of negation" but it is neither, because it is a moving concept whose
POSition is always already relative to the statement made about it.

What I attempt to do is show that Joyce’s concept of voice, as constructed
with in his tales, is similar to this dialectical, disruptive term, and in this sense is
negativity. Voice both suggests a speciﬁc identity and subjectivity while
Simultaneously making their positions uncertain and transitory, a process wherein
language is reactivated. David B. Allison, in his introduction to Derrida’s Speech and
Phenomena And Other Essays on Husserl ’s Theory of Signs, points out that the voice
is " the most ideal of signiﬁers in that it appears to be completely free of any

empirical substance. Only in speech does the signiﬁer seem to be completely

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'reduced’ to its signiﬁed content.” The primacy of speech is illusory, given
Derrida’s ”phenomenological voice” or ”silent speech,” as is its primacy of presence,
because the dual existence, both ideal and reduced, is self—contradictory. Voice is
free from empirical substance, while simultaneously positing materiality through
representation; however, this contradiction is precisely where Joyce begins his study
of voice, where identity is represented through verbal exchanges that are
simultaneously translated into writing, but that writing is often represented as spoken
or something altogether independent of the written. Free indirect discourse allows the
reader access to those interior monologues, where voice is posed as neither spoken
nor written, but often the voice represented cannot be identiﬁed with much certainty.
Derrida illustrates, too, that voice and speech are only possible because a "certain
kind of ’writing’ precedes [them] the invisible and unconscious inscription of
traces, the nonpresent and generative movement of differance that constitutes the
SyStem of language itself."6 Bakhtin, too, conceptualizes a type of language behind
language; Derrida calls it the trace, but Bakhtin considers "the utterance" as that
Wh ich exists behind our common spoken and written discourses.

What becomes apparent for Joyce is that the impossibility of the establishment
of Origins implies voice -- voice as a process of negativity -- as both the cause and
r eSn 1t of writing, and writing as translation of voice. Therefore, the end result is a
goVerning principle based on terms whose deﬁnitions stand as universals to
thelT'lselves, likened to two mirrors facing each other reﬂecting seemingly inﬁnite
i"‘agets of one another. Joyce’s books start at this impasse and delight in this process
that Dre-determines, somehow, the impossibility of their primacy and are examples
the'Tlselves of their own alterity. My position here explains in part why John Paul

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Riquelme, in Teller and Tale in Joyce ’3 Fiction, is erroneous when he attempts to
draw closure on A Portrait and make Stephen both character and author:
When Stephen casts Cranly as John the Baptist because of Cranly’s role as
precursor, Stephen is in the process of writing the journal that makes him his
own precursor [and] When Joyce has Stephen take up his pen he
suspends the narrative between two acts of journal writing that are both the
work’s beginning and its end.7
Riquelme is insightful with his explorations of the movement between intimacy and
distance; however, he falls into a trap set up, not only by Joyce, but by this
phenomenological voice that seems both independent from the signiﬁed and may be
already reduced to its signiﬁed content. Voice disallows this type of certainty,
because it is a mobile process that is intertwined at all levels of the narrative, between
Written and spoken discourse, existence and representation, and reader and author.
Allison’s understanding of Derrida equally applies here in that ”the problem here lies
in ﬁne relation between expression and indication the ideal involves a relation of
idetltity between acts, between a present act and an act that lies outside present
Consciousness."8 Voice, as a contradictory, mobile process, can be considered an
umbrella symbol for Joyce’s tales themselves, because it is that which is responsible
for the cyclic movement within the represented individual’s consciousness, within
ind iv idual stories, as well as across Joyce’s various works.
Joyce’s ﬁction illustrates from Dubliners onward, a weaving of particular
subj ect positions through representations of voice, negotiating seemingly essential

concftpts such as identity, authority, and subjectivity. Joyce’s conceptualization of

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voice in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, but not excluding earlier works, is terribly
complex and convoluted. One must examine more than the representations of voice
in dialogue, because Joyce’s representations of voice are often unarticulated and/or
conﬂated with dialogue. More traditional narratives equate voice with speaker; even
in written texts, verbal characterizations are used to identify the character; for these,
voice directly substitutes for personality and characterization. Joyce does not violate
this initial equation, but he multiplies the number of possible associations, and thereby
alters our approach to reading. Voice substitutes for being and reduces the difference
between seeming and being to a point of irrelevance. From this ﬁrst substitution,
others follow. From the boys’ play in ”An Encounter" where "A spirit of unruliness"
allows them to forget their speciﬁc cultural separations, to Finnegans Wake, where
that unruliness seems to be the paradoxical rule, voice allows for identities to shift
without regard to narrative or speaker (D 20). I examine the myriad of ways that
Joyce portrays and negotiates identity through voice and the conceptualization of
boundaries that exist ”in between” different and distinct subjectivities in both his
narratives and his narrations.

Representations of voice in writing have a rich history, which in one context,
goes as far back as St. Augustine of Hippo. Augustine’s differentiations between
truth and falsehood, or between being and seeming, are inter-related with these issues
of voice. A man in a dream is not a man, Augustine explains, but seems one. The
issue of whether a thing is true is therefore obscured and deﬁned by perception.
Plato’s allegory of the cave says as much as well, but Augustine’s discourses on
signiﬁcation and signs tie in directly to modern and contemporary anxiety over the
slippages of language. Furthermore, in terms of the representations of reading within

7

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writing, Augustine is signiﬁcant as well. In his Confessions, he tells of a point of his
life where he is sitting in a garden and he hears a voice, which lacks distinguishing
representations of physicality: ”And lo, I heard from a nearby house, a voice like that
of a boy or girl, I know not which, chanting and repeating over and over, ’Take up
and read.” The voice, in other words, is free ﬂoating and Augustine interprets it as
a transcendental signiﬁer, "I interpreted this solely as a command given to me by
God." His ultimate response is to go to ”the volume of the aspostle [sic]" which he
snatches up, opens, and reads ”in silence the chapter on which my eyes ﬁrst fell."9
This passage is one of the earliest commentaries regarding the representation of voice
in writing, and as well one of the ﬁrst representations of silent reading. Reading
aloud was the norm, because the sounds of the words were imperative, especially in
prayer, to evoke meaning. This text, written probably in late 386 AD. establishes
the difﬁculties that Joyce would also construct in his stories: the absence of
materiality of the vocal signiﬁer, even in writing, and the discrepancies established, in
terms of representing identity and subjectivity, between spoken and silent discourse.
Representing identity through discourse is a problem with its basis in metaphor
and textual constructions. Leaping forward some 1600 years, M.H. Abrams’ The
Mirror and the Lamp, is also important, because Joyce’s representations of voice
throughout his writing often conﬂate with image and metaphor. In other words,
verbal characteristics, such as Simon’s mimicry, Stephen’s imitation of Simon, or
HCE’s stutter, often serve to represent the character him/herself. This imaging
becomes metaphorical when the voice becomes almost completely independent of any

bodily representation: Blazes Boylan in Ulysses is conjured up by nothing more than

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the sound of the jingling of the change in his pocket and in the Wake the misspelling
of 'hesitancy" represents HCE by the letters within the word and Parnell, whose
character was besmirched by a forged letter whose writer misspelled that word.
Speciﬁc vocal patterns, initially stable, eventually serve to present the reader with a
range of possibilities.

Furthermore, the representing power of voice illustrates, in Joyce as well as
authors such as Dickens, Woolf, Pound, and Eliot, among others, its ability to distort
representations. Abrams states that ”Metaphysical systems in particular are
intrinsically metaphorical systems, and each of the major world views [are] a kind
of prodigious synecdoche, demonstrating the whole of the universe to be like one of
its parts."° Joyce uses voice as this kind of metaphysical reﬂector, a mirror-like
representation representing and possibly distorting what is construed as reality. Recall
that Joyce told Grant Richards, "I seriously believe that you will retard the course of
civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at
themselves in my nicely polished looking glass” (SL 90). Voice constructs image by
reﬂecting portions, not wholes, of what is considered being. However, Joyce’s
images are never complete; they’re often fragmented, ”It’s the symbol of Irish art.
The cracked lookingglass of a servant" (UG. 1.146). These equations with reﬂection
illustrate the problematics of representation, namely that representation within
novelistic discourse is always in transit, to use David Hayman’s term for his analysis
of Finnegans Wake. "Art as mirror,” which is the title of one of Abrams’ chapters,
easily moves to ”voice as mirror" for Joyce’s purposes, because his artistic
enterprises are based ultimately on the representation and distortion of images, and
those images are always already constructed through language, which for Joyce is

9

represented as articulated, unarticulated and reﬂected language.

Joyce’s texts, however, move signiﬁcantly beyond Abrams, because Abrams
failed to consider that Medieval texts, such as Langland’s Piers Plowman or
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and House of Fame had a profound understanding of
existence itself as a type of reﬂection of the Divine order. Books therefore were
already secondary representations of that reﬂection. One of the reasons that the
freedom of Joyce’s texts create problems of reading is that we tend to approach texts
as primary discourses and expect from them total verisimilitude; if the world is
already construed as a type of representation, a simulacrum itself of some other
reality, novelistic discourse is another layer of representation on top of that hidden
reality. Voice within novelistic discourse represents identity and characterization, and
initially seems as if it, too, is part of yet another layer; however, as Bakhtin and
Derrida discuss, voice exists behind novelistic discourse, as either the utterance or the
trace behind the discourse. Joyce chose voice as the representational means to
illustrate existence from within a palimpsest of alternating and moving
representations; voice however offers something closer than mere narration: voice
exists prior to the narrative, and as Newton Garver states ”What makes writing
possible is nothing having to do with the meaning of the spoken signs; what makes it
possible is rather the pattern of vocalizations spoken sound, voix, actual speech in
actual circumstances, is the indispensable basis of all linguistic signiﬁcation.”“

Derrida’s discussions of textual voices are obviously imperative in an
understanding of Joyce’s representations of voice in his tales, but Joyce still goes
further in terms of his use of voice than Derrida. In order to read, we must have on
the page letters that can be interpreted as sounds; in other words, the phonemes,

10

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which are parts of a sound that can be represented by letters, must correspond to the
letters of our alphabet. Derrida’s illustration of dtﬁ'erance has as its antecedent
Aristotle’s '[characterization] of human speech [as distinct] from natural cries” which
makes writing possible; differance, which recalls simultaneously "defer" and ”differ"
has as a basis "the internal segmentation or differentiation of even the simplest
semantic elements. ”'2 Joyce however represents wave speech that Stephen hears and
interprets, cat speech that Bloom interprets and even hears speciﬁc tonal differences,
and ﬁnally something that can be called non-speech, which is often the case in the
Wake where the written and spoken contaminate each other so thoroughly that the
construct of the hybrid seems to be neither.

The concept of free indirect discourse is of great importance in any study of
voice in these works, because the elisions and discrepancies that are a part of reading
Joyce have as their primary source this stylistic technique. It occurs through Joyce’s
writing and "integrates into the dominant narrative voice the linguistic traits of
another, leaving the reader to determine who is speaking."13 This concept serves to
develop further the problematics of the hybrid, an essential component of all
novelistic discourse, that as Bakhtin explained must possess intense dialogization. As
Michael Gillespie discusses, ”Joyce calls into question the primacy of a single voice
assuming the authorial role of transmitting, either directly or indirectly, [Wayne
Booth’s concept of] the ’norms of the work."'“ Gillespie’s reading of Joyce and
free indirect discourse supports Bakhtin’s refusal to allow for the monologic in
novels; it also explains why Riquelme’s thesis that Stephen is both character and
narrative voice of A Portrait is overstepping: Joyce does not afﬁrm any single voice
as dominant. The utterance, for Bakhtin, exists prior to the representation of voice,

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and Joyce disrupts traditional narrative schema by not offering a single perception or
characterization as dominant. The Wake lacks even the semblance of a normative
narrator, implying that the act of narration was too directive to serve Joyce’s purposes
of verbal movement. Without a single perspective in any facet of the narration,
Joyce’s textual aesthetics work to create stories that move in multiple directions
simultaneously, and illustrate the limitlessness of the novel and voice as representative
elements in story telling.

The theoretical perspective of border theory, as presented in Homi K.
Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, is also extremely useful in this exploration,
because of the arguments Bhabha makes regarding the hybridizations involved with
subjectivity and culture. The conceptualization of intersticial space that Bhabha
articulates in his book works extremely well with my notions of voice as a
dislocuted/dislocuting process throughout Joyce’s canon. Voice is not only a
representation in Joyce’s works. The concept of voice, spoken and written, is the
process of representation of and within the narrative. It is not static, because as the
reader reads, the voices of the text are in motion with one another, as well as with the
reader and with Joyce. Voice is always both the process and the product of the
narrative. However, it is ostensibly Bakhtin’s ideas regarding hybridity and
dialogization that inform this study, as well as Bhabha’s; in this sense, though useful,
Bhabha’s analyses are the application of Bakhtin’s and Derrida’s theories.

Bhabha’s ideas do provide me with another layering of my ideas on
movement, on oscillating perspectives. Bhabha’s "Third Space” provides the

discursive conditions of enunciation "unrepresentable in itself that ensure[s] that

12

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the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or ﬁxity; that even the
same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew."l5 I
believe Bhabha’s reading of culture’s lack of unity is connected, via voice, to my
reading of Joyce’s oscillating perspective within his novels.

Bakhtin’s concepts and theories are indispensable to any study of the novel,
narrative, and voice, and I do not feel that I could perform any study of modernism
and James Joyce without additional exploration and use of the utterance and the
theories behind heteroglossia, polyvocality, and dialogism. As I expressed above,
Joyce’s texts continuously refer to themselves, to past incarnations, to early texts, to
their author, and to prior and contemporaneous texts. The notion of voice and
dialogism are, for all intents and purposes of my study, irrefutably relevant, simply
because Joyce’s own concept of creation relied heavily upon such ﬂuidity -- especially
in the context of allusion, which Joyce relied heavily upon from Stephen Hero
onwards: initially as a means of performing for the literati and eventually presented as
a perfect example of dialogism. Although Bakhtin never cited Joyce, many critics
and scholars have illustrated the necessity of using Bakhtin to explore the intricacies
of Joyce’s canon: R.B. Kershner’s Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Culture: Chronicles
of Disorder and M. Keith Booker’s Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition:
Toward a Comparative Cultural Poetics are two ﬁne examples.

Bakhtin’s ideas are immediately relevant as early as Dubliners where
constructions of voice create unique problems with identity. Mr. Duffy in "A Painful
Case" fails to recognize his own voice while he is speaking and has an odd habit of

narrating himself in the third person. Although he poses himself above the majority

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of people he sees, he simultaneously lacks subjectivity; he is verbally absent from
himself in a sense. His personal authority is unmitigated, and his voice remains
singular and uncontested; in other words, his voice is silent because he does not enter
into dialogue. David B. Allison explains that ”something is only insofar as it is self-
present, present to itself in the immediacy of a conscious act."16 For Bakhtin, such
monologic and unquestioned authority are useless, because discourse is alive in the
performance and interaction with other voices.

Primary for Bakhtin and Joyce is the representation of double-voicedness; such
is imperative to novelistic discourse, because the novel is about voices in dialogue.
Double-voicedness is hybridization of spoken and written language; it creates the
problematics of reading that Joyce toys with, namely that through free indirect
discourse, it becomes impossible to conﬁrm the proximity of the narrative voice to the
characters. The character zones become infected as does the narrative with qualities
of undeﬁned discourses; the elisions grow to enormous complexity in the Wake where
one does not have speciﬁc voices and identities to start off with. The result are texts
that are in motion in terms of their representations of experience. Even in cases with
Mr. Duffy or Lily in "The Dead," simple idiomatic expressions reveal that the
perspectives telling the stories are clouded and overlapping, creating what Bakhtin
called ”a shifting diversity of tones and accumulating ’already-bespokenness."”

The oscillating perspective that is so much involved in the study of Joyce’s
writing is clearly present in Dubliners, as presented in John Paul Riquelme’s Teller
and Tale and Hugh Kenner’s Joyce ’s Voices. From the ﬁrst story included in that
collection, ”The Sisters, " Joyce is already moving away from standard and traditional
modes of representation. The subject position of the little boy in that story is already

14

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unstable, because of the mode of telling the story, as well as the style of language
used to represent the boy’s thoughts. The story is told from the ﬁrst person; however
much as it seems to be the narration of the young boy, through the use of memory:
the entire story is in the past tense. "There was no hope for him this time: it was the
third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and
studied the lighted square of window ..." (D 9, italics mine). Immediately from the
opening sentences of this story, one is faced with the juxtaposition of two voices:
present and past. It seems to be the narrator, who was the boy, telling the story.
The movements create a tension, obvious in many of the Dubliners stories, and this
tension is reﬂected in all of Joyce’s literary endeavors; Joyce’s ﬁction, as Bhabha
states of much of contemporary literature, refuses ”a smooth passage of transition and
transcendence [they are] process[es] of displacement and disjunction that [do] not
totalize experience. ”‘8 The representations of voice in Joyce’s works serve to
displace the certainty behind events and identity. The trace is obscured, because he
does not strictly assign voice, and therefore the means of moving through or reading a
text become increasingly convoluted. We may be able to identify Gabriel’s pompous
voice, but we cannot satisfactorily align all the verbal characteristics of that story.
Free indirect discourse helps a great deal, but soon even the narrator’s voice is
negotiated and ﬂuid.

These disruptions in story-telling, as well as discrepancies of voice and place,
gain a name in Ulysses, speciﬁcally in the ”Cyclops” episode. David Hayman calls it
”the arranger” -- an odd literary device that Hayman uses to explain the problems of

reading that belong to that episode. The arranger disrupts, but simultaneously he

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creates a cohesion to the story. He usurps the narrator’s position and adds voices to
the text that are not linear nor logical: ”Our greatest living phonetic expert has left
no stone unturned in his efforts to delucidate and compare the verse recited and found
it bears a striking resemblance (the italics are ours) to the ranns of ancient Celtic
bards" (UG.12.720-23). It is never explained who or what adds the italic appearance
to the page or who calls attention to it. The arranger also can provide a simultaneity
to the events unfolding, as he does in "Sirens”; he forces the reader to recall Bloom
and place him into a context where the primary narrative did not represent him:
”Sweet tea miss Kennedy having poured with milk plugged both two ears with little
ﬁngers. ’-- No, don’t,’ she cried. ’-- I won’t listen,’ she cried. But Bloom?”
(UG.11.129-133, italics mine). Bloom is not in the bar at the Ormond Hotel nor has
anyone mentioned him, but his presence is felt because Ulysses is Bloom’s story and
because this arranger continues to force him into the context. If the arranger is a
”nameless whimsical seeming authorial projection,” as Hayman considers him, he also
creates a tenuous dialogue between the book and the reader; furthermore, as a textual
anomaly, his quirky disruptions also advances Ulysses as a rather unconventional
soliloquy -- the book not only quotes itself, it seems to be having an entire
conversation with itself.

In Joyce’s stories, narrative intrusions do more than interrupt the progress of
the tale; they often cause mutual contamination of the narrative and character voices.
In the early Dubliners stories, often an older presence blurs with the younger
representation, disallowing any certainty about the teller. The boy, in "The Sisters,"

enjoys saying the words: "simony," ”gnomon," and "paralysis,” and he has an odd

16

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comprehension of their meanings. However it is Joyce who speciﬁcally has intents
for the meanings of those words throughout the collection of stories and for the
readers of Dubliners. Therefore, already by the writing of ”The Sisters, " Joyce had a
sophisticated approach to narration that would become the arranger, further deﬁned as
"a single impulse if not a single persona, a resourceful clown of many masks.“9
Already by Dubliners, Joyce is performing the doubled perspective, whereby identity
is paradoxically intimate and distanced simultaneously from the events and from the
reader. The perspective of the characters not only oscillates, the intimacy the reader
shares with the text moves in a similar cyclic fashion. This ambiguous movement can
be thought of as akin to Bhabha’s "The Beyond” and is deﬁned as ”proximate self-
presence ...[which] comes to be revealed for its discontinuities, its inequalities, its
minorities."20 Like a partial ﬁngerprint, the oscillation provides moments of the
trace, allowing an incomplete portrait to form, made up of pieces and fragments of
parts that only circumstantially ﬁt together.

Voice also becomes the conﬂation of represented dialogue, with narrative and
narration, most often complicated with the use of the dash as opposed to the inverted
commas which Joyce disliked, and narrated thoughts, interior monologues, stream of
consciousness, and soliloquy. The differences among all of the these concepts
become blurred and/or paradoxically remain distinct depending upon Joyce’s intent:
therefore the representation of voice can be analogous to the nature of the pun, where
the original necessarily must remain intact simultaneously as it is distorted in order
for the pun to work. In so doing, Joyce not only questions language, itself, but calls
into question anyone’s potential for representing and consequently sharing any
experience. This blurring creates multiplicity as well as a polydirectional movement

17

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in the discourse. It remains unclear who is telling the story, as well as where the
narrative perspective resides in relation to the story and characters. What prevails
often is a paradoxical simultaneity, suggesting the voice as distant and proximate to
the stories. This paradoxical duality of immediacy and distance gets played out most
often in the various and often contrapuntal representations of voice. The articulated
as well as unarticulated (sometimes even the disembodied) voice can be understood as
both immediate, close, and intimate and simultaneously as distant and removed.
Voice destroys the simple differentiation between subjectivity and alterity.

According to Bhabha, the recasting of the Other creates an interesting paradox
for the colonizing subject. The desire for the Other means that the self must remake
the Other in the gaze of the self, speciﬁcally through language. Therefore, the
authority of the perspective inhabits the mindset initially, only within the self. The
power struggle that begins is in terms of the self attempting to ﬁx the Other into
place, to recreate the self with no ability for the Other to move, leave, or attempt
deﬁnition through his/her own agency. The paradox that it creates is as Bhabha
explains, a disturbance of the "voyeuristic look" which

enacts the complexity and contradictions of your desire to see, to ﬁx cultural

difference in a containable, visible object. The desire for the Other is doubled

by the desire in language, which splits the diﬁ’erence between Self and Other
so that both positions are partial; neither is sufﬁcient unto itself the very
question of identiﬁcation only emerges in-between disavowal and designation.

It is performed in the agonistic struggle between the epistemological, visual

demand for knowledge of the Other, and its representation in the act of

articulation and enunciation."

18

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Joyce’s works reveal the impossibility of ﬁxing any identiﬁable trace of an-Other.
Voice, which precedes writing, remains ﬂuid, and therefore affects the condition of
the written, regardless of the mindset that projects that voice and identity can be
uniﬁed. In Finnegans Wake, we recognize certain idiosyncratic speech patterns that
belong to HCE or Issy, but these recognitions fail to provide us with a deﬁnitive
characterization. The voices of the Wake appear more certain than the
characterizations assigned, but the absence of the suggested materiality keeps those
representations ﬂuid and undeﬁned.

The act of the reader is always voyeuristic, as well; the reader is not
acknowledged generally by the characters within the construct of a given story. As a
reader, too, one attempts to transform the various characters and voices into things
relative to oneself. It is the reader’s voice that activates and enlivens the textual
voices, contaminating them with his/her own relative discourses. One attempts to ﬁx
difference in some static form, but singularity is never an option. However, as
Michael Gillespie has already illustrated in Reading the Book of Himself, Joyce casts
the reader in the position as arbiter: he acknowledges the reader before one begins to
read, and anticipates without anxiety the power play that will continue through the
duration of the reading/writing process. In other words, Joyce builds into the stories
the reader’s difﬁculties with the paradox of attempting to ﬁx some Other -- a process
which always already creates instability, movement, and uncertainty. One’s ability to
articulate difference and identity only ”emerges in-between disavowal and
designation" and so too the reader’s ability to read Joyce’s ﬁction exists somewhere in
between our desire to attain and ﬁx all the answers and our wish to become part of
the process of creating the story. If it is the text that is presented as Other or whether

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the characters are so, the reader must negotiate with the impending paradox of
imposition and desire. The emergent position is always incomplete: the positions of
difference between Self and Other, between the reader and that which is read are no
longer self-sufﬁcient. The identity of the reader, for the duration of the process of
reading, as arbiter becomes dependent upon the doubled positions of text and author,
since Joyce himself works the dual position of reader and author -- co-reading and co-
creating with the reader existing outside the text.

Underlying the problematics of representation of both reality and voice is the
concept of authority, both the authority of Joyce as author and the range of authorities
that exist within his texts: the narrators’, the characters’, and ﬁnally the readers’, who
become co—conspirators with Joyce in the creations of the texts themselves, making
each of Joyce’s major works writerly, to use Roland Barthes’ term. This idea
becomes all the more prevalent and problematic when the reader begins to participate
more fully as the narrative grows more ambiguous and complex, as the voices of
character and narrator often merge and separate to create movement and confusion.
The opening lines of "The Dead” as Kenner explains in Joyce’s Voices, illustrate how
swiftly and seamlessly the narrative tells the story already from the perspective of one
of the characters by the simple intrusive word "literally.” This type of disruption
occurs again in "Eveline," for instance, where suddenly in the course of what appears
to be an objective narration the reader is jarred by an intrusive, unidentiﬁed voice:
”She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise? She tried to
weigh each side of the question” (D 37, italics mine). The question presented seems
to be a question Eveline poses to herself as she tries to consider her potential actions;
however it could also be the narrator putting forth a question to Eveline or to the

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reader. Kenner calls this intrusion The Uncle Charles Principle, and as such it is
useful to examine these narrative intrusions, as examples of those ”proximate self-
presence(s). " Free indirect discourse gives a more deﬁned concept to these narrative
abilities than Kenner’s Uncle Charles Principle; however, free indirect discourse
recognizes a pattern that eventually breaks down in the stories. What begins as a
profound blurring of narrative with character collapses into an inability to assign any
speciﬁc, rational identity to the representation of voice. There is little textual
evidence to identify the voice speaking as either narrator or character, because it does
not seem to function as either construct. Obviously Ulysses and Finnegans Wake do
this, but even the focalizations that are a part of Dubliners and A Portrait obscure the
position of the story-teller.

Such intrusions become all the more problematic with A Portrait, because it is
often read as an autobiographical novel of James Joyce’s own life, and, as Riquelme
suggests in Teller and Tale, a suspect autobiography of Stephen Dedalus. The book is
about a young man’s realization of his desire to be an artist; this realization is
incomplete at the end of the novel, but it is in process--a ”process of enunciation. "
Because this process is incomplete it allows for a deeper investigation into what
Bhabha calls ”the process of signiﬁcation," which is part and parcel of the task before
one, when turning to Finnegans Wake, an incomplete, circuitous and repeating work
in progress. From within this place in between, this unﬁxed point of reference,
Stephen and Joyce can and do make remarks regarding cultural differences which, as
Bhabha explains, "differentiate, discriminate, and authorize the production of ﬁelds of

force, reference, applicability, and capacity. ”22 Joyce valued the concept of the

21

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process much more than any ﬁnished product, because the process in unﬁnalized and
yet already discriminatory. Therefore, again it is the continuous movement of
proximity to distance, and in Stephen’s case, from failure to success in each of the
ﬁve sections of the novel, that drive A Portrait.

A Portrait initially suggests itself to be spoken discourse: it begins with a story
about a Moo—Cow, which is Simon Dedalus’ story to his young son. However, that
speciﬁc story could be told by Stephen himself, narrating in the third person, like the
boy in ”The Sisters. " Like the stories of youth in Dubliners, Stephen could be the
much older narrator telling the story. Therefore, speech becomes the medium
whereby Stephen could possibly play dual roles: he is both character in this novel and
he is the narrative voice telling about himself in the guise of the immediate language.
The various representations of voice in the novel make the portrait itself much more
complex: it is not simply the artist in portraiture. This idea, put forth by Riquelme in
Teller and Tale, is an interesting line to pursue, because of the issues it raises
regarding voice’s multiple roles; double-voicedness, as Bakhtin explains, is the
attempt to represent the idea of voice within the narrative, because all voices are
always already hybrid. Ultimately it fails to explain the narrative distance from
Stephen. Riquelme certainly examines where the voices of character and narrator
elide in A Portrait, but he cannot explain the problematic movement that allows the
narrative to treat Stephen ironically. However, Michael Gillespie’s analysis in
Reading the Book of Himself of Joyce’s use of free indirect discourse, and M. Keith
Booker’s exploration that Joyce never supplies an authoritative viewpoint from which

to judge the perspectives presented, in Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition, do

22

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help with this impasse by recognizing Joyce’s refusal of the necessity of a single,
dominant perspective.

The designs of the novel are much more ambiguous as Stephen develops both
in maturity and in ability. Each of the ﬁve sections, each which begin with Stephen
having been defeated only to rise through the narration of the section, present the
theme of incomplete aspiration. We never witness Stephen in fulﬁllment; he is
always on his way and his ability to succeed is continuously more suspect, as is the
voice narrating. The uncertainty of who is telling the story of Stephen in A Portrait
also provides an impetus to explore the novel in a variety of ways: for example,
exploring the conceptualization of voice as represented by Joyce or as possibly
represented by Stephen. The two are seemingly contrary stances, but explored
together, they offer a valuable insight into the unﬁxity of identity. Joyce allows for a
great deal of overlap between himself and Stephen, an overlap that often creates the
sense that authorial voice and character voice are joined. If Stephen is also the
narrator, then we have a type of Joycean Trinity of multiplicity within singularity.
However, Joyce and Stephen obviously diverge, as does narrator and character.
Stephen’s own voice remains in progress in A Portrait, and to elide these identities at
any point with certainty is to assign speciﬁcs where Joyce refused them.

Exiles is invaluable for its contribution to the developmental tension between
certitude and circularity, so prominently played out and obscured in Ulysses. Richard
Rowan’s inability to claim certainty over Bertha’s ﬁdelity obviously becomes a key
theme in Ulysses with the pivotal relationship of Leopold and Molly Bloom. Exiles

was also Joyce’s ﬁrst attempt to create a more realistic female voice, which later, in

23

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Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, lends itself to the dissolution of such simple gendered
and linguistic binaries of male and female.

Language in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake is obviously more ﬂuid and
circumspect than it had been in Joyce’s previous stories. Translations of language
and gender are distinctly prominent in the "Circe” episode, where Bloom and Bella
transform in gender, and confuse reality with represented experience, rendering from
within the conﬁnes of what appears to be an hallucination, a story in movement,
taking place, not in dialogue, but in the imagination -- in the intersticial spaces among
voice, the representation of dialogue, and the articulation/creation of a ﬁctional
character. For example, in terms of the third space residing between articulated voice
and experience, well into the episode, Bloom’s fantasies, textually, conﬂate with his
and our ability to detect what is meant to be ”real. "

Mutability, oscillation, indeﬁnitiveness, unﬁxedness, and disunity are the
accepted norms of Joyce’s story telling, and they are present in his books via the
representations of voice. Voice remains the means and the site whereby identity and
subjectivity are ﬁgured and disﬁgured simultaneously. In Joyce’s ”word world"
misunderstandings and mishearings are two of the most intense and important means
of the progress and process of the narrative; it is through these errors, those ”portals
of discovery,” as Phillip Herring explains through Stephen’s explorations of
Shakespeare, since they suggest the possibility of meaning between displacement and
illumination,23 that Joyce co-creates his novels with the reader, making us all willing
accomplices. Error, translation, metaphor and the mirror function through voice,

allowing for rich and distorted images that refuse any deﬁnitive and ﬁnal answers.

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Notes:

1. Senn, Fritz. Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation. Ed. John
Paul Riquelme. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1984: 202, italics his.

2. O’Donnell, Patrick. Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative. Iowa
City: University of Iowa P, 1992: 65.

3. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. NY:
Columbia UP, 1984: 109.

4. Revolution in Poetic Language, 109.

5. Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl ’s Theory
of Signs. Ed. John Wild. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973: xi.

6. Speech and Phenomena, XI.

7. Riquelme, John Paul. Teller and Tale in Joyce’s Fiction: Oscillating Perspectives.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1983: 67,69.

8. Speech and Phenomena, xxv, italics his.

9. Augustine. The Confessions of St. Augustine. Trans. John K. Ryan. New York:
Image Books, 1960: 202.

10. Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical
Tradition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1953: 31.

11. Newton Garver’s preface in Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena: And
Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Ed. John Wild. Evanston: Northwestern
UP, 1973: xxiv.

12. Speech and Phenomena, xxv.

13. Fargnoli, A. Nicholas and Michael Patrick Gillespie. James Joyce A to Z: The
Essential Reference to the Life and Work. NY: Facts On File, Inc., 1995: 90. For a
more complete discussion of free indirect discourse in Joyce’s writing see Gillespie’s
Reading the Book of Himself: Narrative Strategies in the Works of James Joyce.

14. Gillespie, Michael Patrick. Reading the Book of Himself: Narrative Strategies in
the Works of James Joyce. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1989: 91.

15. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994: 37.
16. Speech and Phenomena, xxxii, italics his.

17. Bakhtin, M.M. Creation of a Prosaics. Ed. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl
Emerson. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990: 338.

25

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1987: 9.

18. Location of Culture, 5.

19. Hayman, David. ”Cyclops." James Joyce’s szsses: Critical Essays. Berkeley:
University of California P, 1974: 265.

20. Location of Culture, 4.
21. Location of Culture, 50, italics his.
22. Location of Culture, 34.

23. Herring, Phillip F. Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1987: 93.

26

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References:

Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical
Tradition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1953.

Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. NY: The Seabury Press, 1973.

Augustine. The Confessions of St. Augustine. Trans. John K. Ryan. New York:
Image Books, 1960.

Bakhtin, M.M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas P,
1986.

Bakhtin, M.M. Creation of a Prosaics. Ed. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.

Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist.

Trans. Caryl Emerson and David Holquist. Austin: University of Texas P,
1981.

Bakhtin, M.M. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael
Holquist. Trans. Vadim Laipunov. Austin: University of Texas P, 1993.

Bakhtin, M.M. Problems of Dostoevsky ’s Poetics. Ed./Trans. Caryl Emerson.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1984.

Bakhtin, M.M. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin.
Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Trans. Vadim Liapunov.
Austin: University of Texas P, 1990.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. NY: The
Noonday Press, 1975.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. NY: Hill and Wang,
1974.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Bishop, John. Joyce ’s Book of the Dark. Madison: University of Wisconsin P, 1986.

Booker, M. Keith. Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition: Toward a
Comparative Cultural Poetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan P, 1995.

Booker, M. Keith. ”Joyce, Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg: A Relativistic Quantum
Mechanical Discussion of Ulysses.” JJQ. Spring 1990: 577-86.

27

Catalan

Derrida.

‘-

Duszenl
I

Diszei‘l‘
E

Ellmann

Fargnoli
E

fish. St:
(

GillESpic‘
l

S

0

Cahalan, James M. "Dear Reader’ and ’Drear Writer’: Joyce’s Direct Addresses to
His Readers in Finnegans Wake. ” Twentieth Century Literature. 41 (1995):
306-18.

Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl ’s Theory of
Signs. Ed. John Wild. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973.

Duszenko, Andrzej. ”The Joyce of Science: Quantum Physics in Finnegans Wake."
Irish University Review. Fall/Winter, 1994: 272-82.

Duszenko, Andrzej. ”The Relativity Theory in Finnegans Wake." JJQ. Fall, 1994:
61-70.

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce: New and Revised Edition. NY: Oxford UP, 1982.

Fargnoli, A. Nicholas and Michael Patrick Gillespie. James Joyce A to Z: The
Essential Reference to the Life and Work. NY: Facts On File, Inc., 1995 .

Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in this Class: The Authority of Interpretive
Communities. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.

Gillespie, Michael Patrick. Reading the Book of Himself: Narrative Strategies in the
Works of James Joyce. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1989.

Gillespie, Michael Patrick. "Certitude and Circularity: The Search for Ulysses."
Studies in the Novel. Summer 1990: 216—30.

Gillespie, Michael Patrick. "Paralactic Criticisms: Contrasting Views of the Works
of James Joyce." Studies in the Novel. Winter 1983: 364-75.

Hayman, David. "Cyclops. " James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays. Berkeley:
University of California P, 1974

Herman, David. ”The Mutt and Jute Dialogue in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: Some
Gricean Perspectives.” Style: Fiction. Summer, 1994: 219-41.

Herring, Phillip F. Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987.

Johnsen, William A. "Toward a Redeﬁnition of Modernism.” Boundary 2. 1974:
539-56.

Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. NY: Penguin, 1984.

Joyce, James. Exiles. The Portable James Joyce. NY: Viking Press, 1947: 529-
626.

28

Joyce.

loyce.

Joyce.

l0}C€.

loyoe, .

Joyce, ,

Joyce, ,

Kenner.

Kenner.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. Ed. Robert Scholes. NY: Penguin Books, 1976.

Joyce, James. The Letters of James Joyce. Vol. 1 Edited by Stuart Gilbert, 1965.
Vols. 2 and 3 Edited by Richard Ellmann. NY: Viking Press, 1966.

Joyce, James. The Selected Letters. Ed. Richard Ellmann. London: Faber and
Faber, 1975.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. Chester G. Anderson.
NY: Penguin Books, 1985.

Joyce, James. Ulysses: The Corrected Text. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler, with
Wolﬂiard Steppe and Claus Melchoir. NY: Garland, 1986.

Joyce, James. Stephen Hero. NY: New Directions, 1963.

Joyce, James. The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ed. Ellsworth Mason and
Richard Ellmann. NY: Viking Press, 1959.

Kenner, Hugh. Ulysses: Revised Edition. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.
Kenner, Hugh. Joyce’s Voices. Berkeley: University of California P, 1978.

Kershner, R.B. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Culture: Chronicles of Disorder.
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina P, 1989.

Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. NY:
Columbia UP, 1984.

McGann, Jerome J. ”Ulysses as a Postmodern Text: The Gabler Edition. " Criticism:

A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts. Summer, 1985: 283-305.

O’Donnell, Patrick. Passionate Doubts: Designs of Interpretation in Contemporary
American Fiction. Iowa City: University of Iowa P, 1986.

O’Donnell, Patrick. Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative. Iowa
City: University of Iowa P, 1992.

Power, Arthur. Conversations with James Joyce. Ed. Clive Hart. NY: Barnes and
Noble Books, 1974.

Riquelme, John Paul. Teller and Tale in Joyce’s Fiction: Oscillating Perspectives.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1983.

Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. NY: Vintage, 1994.

29

 

Said, Edward W. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1983.

Senn, Fritz. Joyce’s Dislocations: Essays on Reading as Translation. Ed. John Paul
Riquelme. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1984.

Staten, Henry. ”The Decomposing Form of Joyce’s Ulysses." PMLA. May, 1997:
380-92.

30

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Dubliners: Initiating Negotiations

later in Joyce’s career, the representation of voice becomes more ﬂuid and
unstable, often postponing even basic interpretation while the reader attempts to ﬁgure
out what is being said. In Dubliners, this slipperiness begins with the earliest stories
but is no way tantamount throughout the text; by ”The Dead” there is certainly a loss
of individuality and autonomy, as the characters recognize by its close that they are
not only "creatures driven and derided by vanity," but ”ludicrous ﬁgure[s] nervous
well-meaning sentimentalist[s] idealising [their] own clownish lusts” (D 35, 219-
229). At the narrative level, the representation of voice grows less deﬁned and more
ﬂuid, often blurring the qualities of narrator and character. At the level of character,
however, voice remains seemingly concrete, disallowing movement or
communication, while silencing those who are unfortunate enough to be born in a
lower station. For the Dubliners themselves, ﬂuidity of voice is inversely
proportional to class structure, which accounts for much of the conﬂict and frustration
portrayed. Voice in these stories reveals Joyce’s attempt to illustrate Ireland’s (and
reality’s) dual existence, occupying the space of the hybrid subject, and the use of
mimicry, speciﬁcally, allows for voice to dominate as the master metaphor, disrupting
representations across the contexts of these stories. Mimicry is vocal hybridity,
because it dislocates the source from the representation in a potential act of ridicule.
The hybrid nature of mimicry, which highlights the doubling quality of voice, is
present in every part of the story-telling process in Dubliners, from the narrative
voice reconstituting the stories to the authorial position, which includes and blends
author and reader, which translates and mistranslates content, style, and context.

Mimicry, for the Joyces, was also an interestingly personal and familial

31

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activity; Joyce, himself, was not the only mimic of his immediate family, according
to The Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce. Not only was John Joyce known for his
vocal abilities, but Joyce’s mother was ”an excellent mimic of certain people. "
Charlie Joyce, the youngest of the male children who lived, was also skilled at
mimicry; Stanislaus comments that "Charlie is an absurd creature. He is foolish, a
vain and stupid boaster and very sentimental, and has a habit of imitating people he
knows."1 Thus voice, as well as imitated voice, was deeply personal part of Joyce’s
upbringing and certainly well prepared his ear to the intricacies of how voices sound
coming both from their originators, as well as their imitators: a duality that allowed
Joyce to construct ﬂuid and moving voices in his ﬁctions.

Homi K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture discusses this ﬂuidity among
voice(s), within the interstitial places, wherein authority and subjectivity are always
already negotiated. Bhabha’s political readings, moreover, work well to interrogate
Dubliners, because, although Joyce boasted that he was never interested in politics,
the political element always found its way into his work, as Richard Ellmann’s
biography points out. As with all of Joyce’s writing, but speciﬁcally this collection of
short stories, one "overhears" a great many voices within the text itself, both spoken
and unspoken. In dealing with issues such as identity and authority, problematically
based upon the discursive, Bhabha’s critical reading of the existence of the
autonomous subject, his demand for a ”discursive strategy of the moment of
interrogation” reveals that identity and authority are bound up, a priori, with "a
response to other questions of signiﬁcation and desire, culture, and politics."2

Although I am indebted to Bhabha’s reading of culture and politics, obviously
the most important basis for my study is Mikhail Bakhtin, whose ideas and theories

32

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necessarily inform Bhabha’s. The voices within Joyce’s texts are already in motion,
not only in spoken dialogue, penetrating at various levels the gamut of
characterizations and perspectives. Authority and identity are represented and
negotiated in the space of the hybrid subject, within and between the voices of self
and other, a confusing matrix of reality and representation. Already by Dubliners,
Joyce insists that the interplay of languages is more signiﬁcant than the various
characterizations represented; moreover, these languages, complicated by multiple
voice positions inside and outside the text, take on ever expanding valences, because
they are in dialogue with one another. Thus, both heteroglossia and intense
dialogization are present, making the language of Dubliners ”truly novelistic. ”3

The lack of ﬁxity, because of heteroglossia and dialogization, reveals itself at
the boundaries between seemingly distinct characterizations within the text. Bhabha
comments that presence begins in the spaces between persons, characteristics, or
entities, but Bakhtin points out that hybridization of languages presents us with a
prosaics, or poetics of prose, with regard to novelistic discourse, which can be
considered ”a style of styles, or more accurately the dialogization of styles.“
However, the problematics involved in deﬁning those styles begin in those interstitial
spaces, where Joyce constructs presences within his characterizations. Derrida
explains, in a similar fashion, that all such problems are problems of ”the borderline"
where one seeks to determine difference and origin:

This difﬁculty [situating the advent of an auto-biographical récit] crops up

whenever one seeks to make a determination: in order to date an event, of

course, but also in order to identify the beginning of a text, the origin of life,

or the ﬁrst movement of a signature.’

33

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Paradoxically, what makes the boy in "Araby" distinct, this moment of self-
realization, is likewise the moment he loses an essential self; the border between
himself, as subject, and others blurs as he, too, is paralyzed by the experiences of
Dublin. The boy is ”The Sisters” chooses silence and thereby retains, at least for the
moment of the narrative, some stability. "1 crammed my mouth with stirabout for
fear I might give utterance to my anger" (D 11). The boy remains outside the
discussion of the priest and children’s impressionable minds that Old Cotter brings
up, and outside of the world where voices are dialogized and relativized; however,
the fact that he silently mouths 'gnomon,” "simony," and ”paralysis" does not mean
that he remains outside the relativized discourse. Those words, despite his lack of
understanding, have contexts; in spite of his seeming singularity, his own spoken,
everyday discourse is being 'reaccentuated" in Bakhtin’s terms, via their encounter
with the speech of the adults surrounding him and with those words whose sounds he
appreciates.

Dubliners6 can be said to stand as the beginning of Joyce’s career as a
modernist writer, and therefore one must begin a study of Joyce’s voices here, even
though simultaneously with its creation, he was writing Stephen Hero and revising it
into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Within a context of these stories, voice
is working in seemingly contradictory ways, simultaneously representing and
deconstructing representation for the various scenes and characterizations. Voice
within Dubliners, by virtue of Joyce’s reasons for writing his ”dark mirror"
represents speciﬁc characterizations with speciﬁc identities; however, voice is

simultaneously the means whereby those characters’ relative agencies are reduced to

34

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shadows, void of sympathy and human compassion, paralyzed by their very attempts
to rise above their situations. As the stories begin and move, the spirit of unruliness
that governs the boys’ play in the early stories, which allows for a lack of distinction,
gives way to heightened divisions and categories, which simultaneously reduce the
older Dubliners to less than their less—deﬁned youthful counterparts.

What voice does for these stories is to call the reader’s attention to the loss of
agency inherent in attempting to deﬁne oneself against abstractions like authority and
individuality, and underscores that conﬁrmation of the person lies somewhere beyond
the seemingly concrete differences of self and other. The hybrid subject in Dubliners,
represented through voice, exists as a testament to the tenuousness of authority and
identity. Characters, as well as the narrator, are relatively represented as hybrids of
the various vocal characteristics via free indirect discourse. The creation of
Dubliners, from its inception, was based on the elision of real people whom Joyce
knew with his ﬁctional creations; as well the processes of rejection and publication,
which included other exterior authorities, such as Grant Richards who objected to
earlier versions of the stories; these all served as impetus for further verbal
relativizations. Joyce’s numerous attempts to get Dubliners published, agreeing to
alter speciﬁc qualities of voice, accent, mannerism, and word choice, reveal that the
form and the content of the text is constructed through a range of voices, including
Grant Richards, the printer, English censorship, as well as his own. Despite the fact
that Joyce is their writer, his voice becomes dialogized and reaccented, as Bakhtin
suggests, by virtue of its participation with all the other active voices of the text.
These stories illustrate an "inﬂux of sense" from one voice to another, from one
hybrid to another, showing a loss of individuality, because there are too many layers

35

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of hybridization ”for the voice to register with precision."7

Voice becomes a principle, as well as the result of these dislocutions, and
voice remains the major break of the metonymic chain, if not the chain itself, that
allows for story telling in the ﬁrst place. This duality inherent within the construction
of voice represents a touchstone of western metaphysics, namely that presence is often
recognized in a body’s absence: recognition of existence is based less on the
manifestation of the physical than it is on the acceptance of the physical based on
metaphysical elements: one does not see a body when one speaks on a telephone, but
the assumption is there; a similar kind of assumption must be made when reading a
novel. Dubliners toys with these cognitive and linguistic shifts, often presenting itself
as a strange mirror, that both reﬂects and distorts the ﬁgure standing in front of it,
never authorizing one image or another, but allowing for a play of multiplicity.

Within the collection, the reader immediately faces the problematic
discrepancy of time and place by way of the dualistic perspective of the narrator/boy
in "The Sisters,” suggesting that time and place are also mere constructions within the
text that also can lose precision, just as voice can. In other words, the reader of
Joyce, already by this initial story, must contend with the demand for arbitration
between subject positions that can include but are not limited to the characters and
narrators of these stories. The reader of Joyce, already by Dubliners, must decide
which voice is most important, since even with "The Sisters” it is unclear whether the
narrative voice, recollecting events from an unspeciﬁed past, knows any more now
than he did when he was younger. Furthermore, in later stories like "The Dead” and
"A Painful Case," whose narrator is not directly involved in the events, the narrative
voice can move in so close to the character that it possesses qualities of a ﬁrst-person

36

perspective.

In ”A Painful Case" for instance, the narrative mimics Mr. Duffy’s habit of
thinking of himself in the third-person; the style of the story, i.e. word choice,
presentation, and tone-of-voice, reﬂects his attempt to perceive and interpret the
world objectively, while he remains at a certain distance to it and to himself.
Paradoxically, this quality of narrative voice reﬂects an intimacy with Mr. Duffy, and
reveals that his perspective only constructs a pseudo-objective voice: this kind of
”double voiced” narrative, as Bakhtin calls it in Problems of Dostoevsky ’s Poetics is
revealing, through free indirect discourse, how Mr. Duffy thinks of himself and the
world around him.

In discussing this seemingly objective quality in the narrative voice, it is
integral to note that the same type of voice narrates portions of other stories, such as
"Grace" and ”After the Race.” The newspaper-tone—of-voice, as an ironic signiﬁer of
greater intimacy with a particular character, is pursued, in part, in R.B. Kershner’s
Joyce, Bakhtin and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder. Although an
interesting study into Joyce’s use of the popular literature of the time, a more
thorough stylistic study of free indirect discourse, which accounts for this type of
narrative shift, is in Michael Gillespie’s Reading the Book of Himself. As well, the
oscillation of intimacy and distance, although not necessarily of voice as I consider it,
can be found in John Paul Riquelme’s Teller and Tale in Joyce ’s Fiction. However,
Riquelme’s thesis often attempts to sustain too great of an overlap between text and
character or author and character, such as his problematic position that Stephen goes

on to write A Portrait after the novel’s conclusion, which fails to account for some

37

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the ironic tone that narrative has toward Stephen.

To extend part of the argument presented by Weldon Thornton in The
Antimodernism of Joyce ’s Portrait of the Am‘st as a Young Man, part of Joyce’s
problem in writing Stephen Hero was that the story was still too close to the writer;
the voices were much too similar to allow for the creative liberties that he would take
later: ”in writing Stephen Hero Joyce’s focus (wittingly or not) was upon exploring
and learning about his own development, rather than (as in Portrait) upon presenting
an interpretation of a type.” For Stephen in the later novel, the story is likewise
much too close to allow him to become his own creator and narrator, a persona who
could critically comment upon ideas and beliefs that are very dear to his heart.
Furthermore, Thornton illustrates that Stephen’s voiced and unvoiced theories are so
integral to his sense of himself that ”if he were to achieve total self-awareness, his
life would become deracinated and trivialized. "3 Although older, the narrators of the
stories of youth in Dubliners still Jack to a certain degree the self-knowledge that
would allow the liberation from their situations.

In Dubliners, as in all of Joyce’s ﬁction, free indirect discourse, deﬁned as "a
stylistic technique [that] integrates into a dominant narrative voice the linguistic traits
of another, leaving the reader to determine who is speaker"9 proves a more effective
means of pursuing a reading, as well as discussing the range of negotiations occurring
in this text. This stylistic shift on the surface appears to remove the character from
his immediate position, and yet, in terms of perspective, it brings him closer. This
oscillation continues from the earliest stories in the collection, forcing one to revise

continuously prior determinations regarding authority and voice. "The Sisters,” "An

38

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Encounter,” and ”Araby" also present the reader with examples of Bakhtin’s vari—
directional discourse, because of the elisions between narrator and character. What
takes place is an internal dialogization, that on one hand moves toward splitting the
hybrid constructs into two separate discourses, and on the other, fusing the hybrids
into a single discourse. ”Between these two limits ﬂuctuate all manifestations of the
third type. ”‘0

As close as Joyce, the author, is in the lines of his books, one must continue
to insist on trying to draw distinction between entities in the texts. In Dubliners,
Joyce constructs multiple personae to tell the stories, personae who share many
qualities with Joyce, but not all. Just as Joyce and Stephen Dedalus are closely
related but separate, so too is Joyce familiar with these narrators, as an echo can be
said to be familiar with the sound that it returns. Not to remove agency from Joyce,
Patrick O’Donnell, in Echo Chambers, deﬁnes the author speciﬁcally, as a
transcriber, ”[a] medium or a cultural ﬁlter whose task it is to strain out a ﬂood of
received discourse. "“ The author exists as a conduit for a range of discourses that
get played out in ”an assemblage of pieces of other texts that offers literally hundreds
of ’voice transcriptions.”12 In Bakhtinian terms, this assemblage is the novel itself,
populated not with people but with voices. As well as thinking of the author as a
conduit, one must also contend with the dissipating and indeterminate borders among
these voices, which allow vocal qualities to bleed into one another, just as the mimic
becomes contaminated by the qualities of the voice s/he imitates.

I distinguish the voice of the narrator from the overall controlling presence of
the author speciﬁcally in that the narrator is likewise a presence within the text, but
not the presence of the one who created the text. The difference is important because

39

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of Joyce’s self-consciousness as author, constructing a text that is, in part, based on
his own collection of epiphanies, which like Joyce’s father and siblings, are found
wholesale throughout these stories. The narrator may present us with the events of
the stories, but his/her voice is likewise constructed by the presence of Joyce. This
difference is relevant to my greater discussion of voice, because the author-narrator
relationship alters as Joyce matures as a writer, for example in Ulysses, with its
multiple narrative voices and characters who may seem to appeal directly to the
exterior author: "0 Jamesy let me up out of this pooh sweets of sin" (UG.18.1128).
For that novel, David Hayman’s "arranger"13 is just one attempt to grapple with a
similar movement between distance and intimacy that is ultimately based on qualities
of voice. Such an initial critical placement creates from the very ﬁrst page of the
collection a movement--an oscillation of perspective from within the position of the
narrative voice that the reader cannot readily identify or naturalize. This oscillation
creates an uncertainty in the mind of the reader, who must not only interpret the
stories, but, in Michael Gillespie’s thesis in Reading the Book of Himself’, become an
arbiter, whose task is to navigate among an uncertain sea of conﬂicting, yet possibly
and potentially valid interpretations. That decision is continuously forestalled because
no single voice possesses authority over its contenders: heteroglossia and intense
dialogization.

Dubliners is a rich pastiche of voices, many of which are inaccurately
overheard and some mysteriously bodiless, in a collection that focuses so much on the
corpus of the Irish identity. Inhuman voices are audible, as well, in the sounds of the

pianos, the din of the machines, and in the echoes that ﬁlter through the narrative.

40

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The construction of voice in these stories, and in all of Joyce’s ﬁction, signiﬁcantly
develops reﬂecting powers, as alluded to with the idea of mimicked voices.

Voice can mirror accurately or deceitfully the identity and authority of a
speciﬁc person; it can conjure of the presence of a character in Joyce’s stories, as
well. Farrington imitates Mr. Alleyne and Mr. Alleyne appears at an inopportune
moment. The collection itself is a scrupulous volume of imitated voices, accents, and
persons.

Joyce intended the stories as a dark mirror for those who had misjudged the
potential of the young artist, and so voice becomes the reﬂecting and refracting
mirror, representing and distorting authority and identity. In a letter to Grant
Richards, dated June 1906, with the possibility that the collection would never be
published, Joyce wrote: ”I seriously believe that you will retard the course of
civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at
themselves in my nicely polished looking glass" (SL 90). In Lacanian psychoanalytic
terms, voice is both the analyst as well as the analysand speaking both parts
simultaneously; voice is also a mirror which represents this circular examination. We
assume voice to emanate from a body but it remains representationally and
dialogically ungrounded --- voice exists before the body speaking.

As an overview, one of the most striking things about Dubliners is the
movement of the narratives’ points of views; it is seldom static, within a speciﬁc
story and between stories. There is an initial intimacy with the boy of ”The Sisters"
that shortly disintegrates as the perspective grows older, as it moves out of the private
sphere, providing, at various points, almost no direct discourse.

There are ﬁfteen stories; their grouping is not necessarily clear, except that it

41

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follows the stages of life and levels of maturation. In a letter to Grant Richards,
Joyce commented "I have tried to present [Dubliners] to the indifferent public under
four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. The stories are
arranged in this order” (Letters II, 134). With this arrangement, not only does the
reader perceive the movement from childhood to maturity and from private to public,
but s/he can witness the oscillation of perspective as constructed through voice: the
"I" gives way to a third-person narration, and is ﬁnally constructed as a unique
hybrid, where character and narrator are mingled, at points indistinguishable, for
purposes of creating a story where the main character falls somewhere outside the
action taking place.

The progress of the early stories possesses a self-contained movement from
innocence to the initial tremors of mature self-consciousness. The ”I” of "The
Sisters" and "Araby," with their themes of recollection, and the direct discourse of
"An Encounter" gives way to the indirect discourse of "Eveline," which possesses an
hybridity of character and narrator, a position recalling a past and a longing for an
uncertain future; this shift marks a distinct change in the narration for the rest of the
book. The movement toward and away, from intimacy and distance, that these stories
explore, is, indeed an oscillation between distinctive identity or voice and loss of self.
Although the reader can distinguish the uncle’s voice, in ”The Sisters” from other
voices in the room or in the story, it is ostensibly malleable and simultaneously
indistinct: its characteristics change depending upon to whom the uncle is speaking.

Initially, the uncle expresses that the priest and the boy were " great friends.
The old chap taught him a great deal, mind you; and they say he had a great wish for

him. After Old Cotter’s response, which expresses a simultaneous admiration and

42

disnust of
him learn
the exerci
consequen‘
'they say'
with the bl
or reach
sisters. 11
contexts 0;

'Ai
110132 'A 5
differences
“Plains in
absence of
0lllcblllcolt
lily “'llhir
'EHCOUmEI
lOSSer; hm
Ekhmds

re31111185. 1

distrust of such a man as the priest, the uncle says, "That’s my principle too Let
him learn to box his corner. That’s what I’m always saying to that Rosicrucian there:
take exercise” (D 10—11). The entry into adulthood is coupled with a loss of play and
consequently, a loss of a determined self consciousness or agency; the ambiguous
"they say”, a free-ﬂoating and unnamed authority who gave the priest some credence
with the boy and the family, alludes to such a loss, because neither the priest’s ability
as a teacher nor the boy’s desire to learn are of much concern to the uncle or the
sisters. This mysterious voice speaks from an unspeciﬁed place seemingly outside the
contexts of family and story.

"An Encounter" begins with recognized but suspended differences among the
boys: ”A spirit of unruliness diffused itself among us and, under its inﬂuence,
differences of culture and constitution were waived" (D 20). Play, as Derrida
explains in Of Grammatology and later again in The Ear of the Other, ”[is] the
absence of the transcendental signiﬁed as limitlessness of play as the destruction of
onto-theology and the metaphysics of presence. Here one must think of writing as the
play within language.“4 The boys create false identities for themselves, as in
”Encounter” when the narrator and Mahoney give pseudonyms to the queer old
josser; however they know the identities are false and part of the game, but these
falsehoods are indeed signiﬁcant to the game itself as well as to the boys’ relative
realities. Ironically, the older Dubliners fail to recognize their own falsity.

"The Sisters,” "An Encounter,” and ”Araby" are stories that are told in the
ﬁrst person. The narrative voice in ”The Sisters” and "Araby, " however, are more
removed from the scene represented, while simultaneously retaining a ﬁrst person
point-of-view; word choice, style, and tone allude to an older presence than the boys

43

in the stor
no doubt z
The expre-
since he al
oondemnat
narrative s
hybrid volt
this voice 1
tone. The
allows for .
mimicry. :
Mature sc
loss” (D 31
i’OUttgemlc'
The
the b0)"; ur
3th his 0W1
writable dc‘
Wilma}. am

I Said

in the story: in ”The Sisters,” the boy muses "[Old Cotter] began to puff at his pipe,
no doubt arranging his opinion in his mind. Tiresome oldfool" (D 10, italics mine).
The expression, ”tiresome old fool" seems out of place for the boy to say, especially
since he also acknowledges that he keeps silent; its similarity to Hamlet’s
condemnation of Polonius as a "Tedious old fool," suggests that either the boy or the
narrative voice is perhaps mimicking Shakespeare. The expression represents an
hybrid voice-over, perhaps of the boy a few years older than in the story; we assume
this voice over because of the self-conscious and critical attention to vocabulary and
tone. The narrative voice mimics the young boy’s voice, but the hybridity of the two
allows for some qualities of the older presence to come through as well, a quality of
mimicry. Similarly, in "Araby' the boy describes himself, but his vocabulary reveals
a mature sophistication: ”I imagined that l bore my chalice safely through a throng of
foes” (D 31). Again, as in "An Encounter," the recollection reveals a dislocution; the
younger-older hybrid possesses uncertain qualities of both voices.

The ending of "The Sisters” illustrates an elusive epiphanic structure behind
the boy’s unique revelation of his position, not only with the priest and his family, but
with his own ability to narrate himself. ”The Sisters" begins by announcing the
inevitable death of the priest, and potentially has the boy already questioning physical,
spiritual, and scientiﬁc authorities:

1 said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in

my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the

Catechism. (D 9, Joyce’s italics)

The ambiguity of these isolated words is never relieved in the story. The

words are
to Euclidi
unique pl:
sounded s
disjointed
and sinful
upon its d
his thildh
'mw' bet
Church, f.
moved be:
Satisfacrm
dﬁloglzau

Thi
50‘ the tea

Eli.

-.l

words are pronounced outside of any represented context (save for the silent allusion
to Euclidian geometry and the Catechism, but the boy doesn’t seem to know their
unique place in the story) initially for no apparent reason than that they ”always
sounded strangely," but the two voices potentially merge into a single present with a
disjointed indicator of time, so that ”now it sounded like the name of some maleﬁcent
and sinful being. It ﬁlled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look
upon its deadly work" (D 9, italics mine). One expects that the narrator is reporting
his childhood habits for some reason, but one never knows to whom or to when that
”now" belongs; and certainly Joyce’s voice, knowing his considerable opinions of the
Church, for example, is heard in these silent words. These stories have already
moved beyond holistic and unifying aesthetics, and so these words are never
satisfactorily contextualized, but they are not empty potentials either, because of the
dialogization with Joyce’s language.

The conclusion of the story, likewise, never comes to any acceptable closure
for the reader, nor for the narrator/boy:

Eliza resumed:

---Wide awake and laughing-like to himself So then, of course, when they

saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with

him.... (D 18)
This ending offers nothing to the reader except the demand to attempt more
interpretation, and with each attempt to interpret, the situation reveals a lack of a
ﬁxed ﬁeld of reference; it may be different for each reader and with each attempt, as
Reader-Response would exemplify. We know from Ellmann that the priest is based
on a member of Joyce’s own family, on the Flynn side, who "went horribly insane

45

ted lost }
multiplie:
thinner
Tl
something
tint Eliza
strong wi
ellipses?
that these
ideas, Th
instability
The Spoke]
fllJIt’lllatiOr
Same ct)"mt
[he COllecui

and lost his parish;" however, the gapped presentation of the priest in ”The Sisters"
multiplies the number of potential voices in dialogue, contributing to the
characterization (III! 20).

The ellipses, which occur twice in this single passage tenuously offer
something existing in between, in the moments unspoken between the written dialogue
that Eliza is delivering: was the priest drunk? was there in fact something mentally
wrong with him as the sisters seem to allude? is something said in the silence of the
ellipses? is it out of decency to cultural mores, lack of knowledge, or faded memory
that these ellipses are represented? Obviously they potentially allude to all of these
ideas. The missing answers, as well as the missing words, add to the story’s
instability by increasing the possibility of other voices in motion within this story.
The spoken words are no more assistance than the incomplete narrator’s/boy’s
explanation, since the accuracy of his knowledge is doubtful (doubt comes from the
same etymological root as "double”). This unreliability becomes more apparent as
the collection continues, only the reasons for the narrator’s lack of knowledge grow
more suspect. Ultimately, the reader, too, becomes tainted by the inability to move,
a major theme in this collection, as Joyce stated to Grant Richards, ”I chose Dublin
for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. " Furthermore,
after ”Araby, " we no longer have narrators who were present as characters observed
with a ”scrupulous meanness," and so our basis of interpretation continues to shift
(Letters II, 134). We accept the narrator of ”The Sisters" as unreliable, in part,
because, like the reader, he is left in the dark; however, this explanation fails to
account for all the dislocutions in the story.

Bhabha calls for a ”third dimension" in order to attempt to read from the

46

'edge of
identity."
subjectis'i
and uncer
seemingly
possesses
Chiracter,
Ba
which to 1
their own
Wlive i
heteroglog
Shifting di
other w0n
lllh‘lln 35 ‘
as a J'Ollng
Kfeper he
he Story‘ ‘
if“ and hi
huge the
for}: with :
This
Examine

he .

"edge of meaning and being from this shifting boundary of otherness within

identity. ”‘5 If articulation of the subject remains bound to the negation of that
subjectivity as an Hegelian form of unity, its construction remains skewed, dislocuted,
and uncertain. Voice remains the only means that can offer a commentary on this
seemingly paradoxical inside/outside form of being. The boy in ”The Sisters”
possesses this interior/exterior verbal position, since he is both the narrator and the
character, simultaneously highlighting both relative positions.

Bakhtin’s discussions of character zones also problematizes a position from
which to study textual identity. Through free indirect discourse, characters can affect
their own character zones in their absence, through the inﬂuence of a relative
narrative voice, and through the interaction of voices outside the text. With
heteroglossia and the intense dialogization, one also encounters in Dubliners ”a
shifting diversity of tones and accumulating layers of ’already-bespokenness.’"16 In
other words, voice allows for even hidden hybridizations to inﬂuence the text from
within as well as outside the text. We know from Ellmann, for example, that Joyce
as a young boy went to the Araby fete, but according to Stanislaus in My Brother ’s
Keeper he altered details for the story. The narrator constructs his former self to tell
the story, while the elevated language of the boy calls attention to the elision between
him and his teller. These layers-of-layering of hybridity create imprecision, and
increase the ambiguous relationship between the narrative voice and the boy, and the
story with authorial discourse.

This ”inside/outside" structure parallels the movement into the stories of
adolescence, a period of development characterized by profound identity crises where
the person is neither a child nor an adult. ”Eveline," ”After the Race,” "Two

47

Gallants
narrative
youth. is
the telle:
dutaneei
perspeCt.
longer d
Stories. 2
degree 0
sise?‘ (,
or if it is
POtential

has lean

Gallants," and "The Boarding House" belong to the stories of adolescence. The
narrative voice in ”Eveline" alters the previous pattern of blending from the stories of
youth, but retains its hybridity; Eveline is the subject under discussion, but she is not
the teller. This striking difference will ﬂip with ”A Painful Case,” where the
distanced, objective tone of the narrative voice shows itself to be closer to the
perspective of Mr. Duffy. In ”Eveline," there is still a mixing, but the reader can no
longer determine if speciﬁc intrusions are hers or the narrative’s, whereas in earlier
stories, shifts in vocabulary or sentiment revealed a different voice with a greater
degree of certainty: ”She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that
wise?" (D 37, italics mine). It is unclear whether the narrator is asking the question
or if it is a soliloquizing Eveline. It could be a type of mimicry still, only the
potential imitation has become seamless, as the narrative’s vari-directional discourse
has learned to parrot the characters’ voices so well, no one can tell the difference.

”Eveline” is an even more tragic portrait of this loss of identity. Her life is
not her own, and in the course of the story, she has no present audible voice; her
only bit of dialogue with Miss Gavan comes from memory. She has no voice even as
Frank commands her to come with him onto the ship to Buenos Aires and the
possibility of a new life; "No! No! No!”, despite its presence in the text and
implication that it is Eveline’s voice, is not represented as spoken. She has no voice
with which to refuse Frank directly; she passively allows the ship to sail with Frank
yelling for her to jump aboard. Her paralysis has more to do with the fact that she
already has no sense of identity and consequently no agency; Eveline has no voice
with which to assert or deny herself, and the narrative reﬂects this by having little
contact with Eveline’s direct discourse.

48

exterio
hottest
adolesc

such as
weech'
confour
distance
that the
consciOi
mas de
meme
the Spee
iﬁluatisi
Wrath-“t
dimly

Simulmr

”After the Race" erases the ”I” too, and the narrator again occupies a space
exterior to the characters and simultaneously intimate with them. The narrative voice,
however, becomes more unpredictable by the close of the stories of youth and
adolescence; the narrative voice excludes, for instance, seemingly important details,
such as Jimmy’s speech in "After the Race," but tells us ”it must have been a good
speech" (D 47). This sudden gap between character and narrator is meant to
confound interpretation about the nature of the narrative voice, who seems rather
distanced from the action taking place; however, the nature of the gap and the way
that the event is circumstantially described, in fact, could reﬂect Jimmy’s state of
consciousness. Jimmy is drunk by the time he makes his speech, and therefore one
may deduce that he is not quite sure what he may or may not have said. The reader,
nonetheless, cannot accurately ascertain whether the statement regarding the quality of
the speech is Jimmy’s or the narrator’s. Whether one or the other, the uncertain
valuative statement reveals that Jimmy’s focalization may already be occupying the
narrative space to an uncertain degree. There is a paradoxical movement from the
directly personal, ﬁrst person account to the ostensibly impersonal, while
simultaneously the narrative alternates between this distance back to an intimacy.

"After the Race" complicates things further, as I have already discussed,
because the narrative seems to lose its ability to speak along with Jimmy, which may
or may not make it closer to Jimmy’s perspective. "After the Race,” as well, asserts
comparative class structures and class differences, which have always been there but
up to now were ignored by the narrative --- Jimmy will never be fully accepted by
Ségouin and Routh (a Frenchman and an Englishman, respectively), because he is
descended from Irish workingclass -—- money and education can only provide so much

49

V

mohili
spoken
'Andrt
beautif
the rep
conscic
said or
arbitrar
bounda
the con
Charade
Snap bar
his. her '
t
Cilitacte
lml’Oten'
baa p,

Si

br

hfn he

mobility among them. Furthermore, in this story, Joyce removes almost all the
spoken voices of the characters, except for a few examples of fragmented dialogue:
"Andre It’s Farley Fine night sir! Ho! Ho! Hohé, vraiment! It is
beautiful Daybreak gentlemen” (D 47, 48). The narrative voice has control over
the representation of the characters, disallowing any free expression. Jimmy’s
consciousness is open to the reader, insofar as Jimmy, himself, can recall what he has
said or done. This mingling of the voice of the narrator and characters conﬁrms, as
arbitrary, certain boundaries that exist ideologically among the characters, as well as
boundaries that exist between the text and the reader. This reading, too, ﬂips within
the context of ”Grace,” where the narrative loses its ability to speak along with its
character’s speech impediment; however that story reveals that the narrative can also
snap back and begin telling details about the character under scrutiny, independent of
his/her vocal abilities.

As the text moves away from the initial qualities belonging to youth, the
characters reveal their own potentially irrational biases, molded into inﬂexible and
impotent precepts for living. Jimmy accepts, as does his father, class differentiation,
based predominantly on monetary wealth, acknowledging that some people are
worth ier than others:

Jimmy found great pleasure in the society of [Ségouin] who had seen so much

of the world and was reputed to own some of the biggest hotels in France.

Such a person (as his father agreed) was well worth knowing, even if he had

not been the charming companion he was Villona was entertaining also -—- a

brilliant pianist --- but unfortunately poor. (D 43-44)

When he gets drunk enough, instead of voicing his own views of the world and his

50

pohnc
mﬂuei
torpid
intoxic
creatin
dnnkir
he opi
the enc

mthet

governs
hhérer
TERHUs

’Eg0Uar

politics, once again Jimmy parrots his father’s terms, ”Jimmy, under generous
inﬂuences, felt the buried zeal of his father wake to life within him: he aroused the
torpid Routh at last” (D 46). His father’s words do not serve him well, because
intoxicated and misdirected, Jimmy only succeeds in getting his company angry and
creating a ”danger of personal spite," to which Riviere must try to dissuade by
drinking a toast to Humanity. Jimmy lacks an autonomous voice with which to speak
his opinions or to defend himself. He may be the ”inheritor of solid instincts,” but in
the end, ”the greater part of his substance a serious thing for him" is his next bet
at the poker table (D 44).

Despite the progress of Jimmy’s personal wealth, that spirit of unruliness that
governed the boys in the ﬁrst three stories, and allowed for a certain loss of
difference, is gone. Jimmy associates with those who are better born, but the
narrative shows that he is not one of them. The representation of class, as a
negotiative principle of identity, calls into question differences along monetary and
social scales, as representation, via the construction of voice, reﬂects the perception
of position in society. Juxtaposed with this reﬂection is that the dialogization of the
relative characterizations in Dubliners reveals very little distinctiveness among any of
them: they can all easily substitute for one another. Joyce levels the playing ground a
bit by reducing spoken discourse to a mere six lines, with no resonation of accent,
which will become more problematic in later stories --- we cannot yet "hear"
distinctions of class and status in any of the characters’ voices; the representation of
the spoken voice has yet to take on qualities of difference and separation. As the
stories are progressing, representations of voice, as a governing principle for identity
and authority, are becoming more strict; as the perspectives age, no spirit of

51

unrulii

presen
atlco
heginn
upon d
self-lo;
loathin‘
b0th in
contirrr
brings .
PYOgres
inllocen

Well as

Vanity '
recOgni.
milling

become

unruliness can survive.

”A Little Cloud,” ”Counterparts," "Clay,” and ”A Painful Case” move from
presentations of youthful and naive experience to situations suffused with deception
and condemnation -- the stories of maturity. These stories move beyond the
beginnings of self-knowledge, so apparent in ”Araby,” for example, and the insistence
upon difference, as in "After the Race," to the representation and comprehension of
self-loathing. The steps or movements involved between self knowledge and self
loathing for these stories are Biblical and historical, and I think Joyce is referencing
both in this "moral history of [Ireland]" (Letters 11 134). The Tree of Knowledge
conﬁrms our mortality and our unworthiness in the eyes of God, and knowledge
brings questions and discontent. Joyce’s move in Dubliners reﬂects this theory of
progress and all-too-Catholic perspective of the human condition. The loss of
innocence is compounded with a deeper understanding of the stagnation of origin, as
well as the impossibility of resolution.

"Araby" revealed a young boy who was a ”creature driven and derided by
vanity," but the later stories characterize people who are "suffused with shame;" they
recognize their own paralysis rather than mouthing that word without knowledge of its
meaning. The narrative voice that represents these older Dubliners, thematically, has
become interiorized by the characters. As the collection progresses, furthermore, the
narration becomes more obviously critical in its representation of the Dubliners. The
problems brought to light are worse than those of the younger Dubliners: deceit,
greed, manipulation, envy, and despair have replaced the foolishness of youth, the
fear of change, and the desire to be accepted by one’s peers. The narrative voice is
brutally honest in places, sounding more like a petty gossip in ”The Boarding House":

52

'[Pollj
glancii
pervert
contidi
be see;
side ol
his set
wornai
bring 1
family
Small 1
deSCrir
511er i
10 Ihei
are [m
tslhfin
TEmajr
is 30m

> {

milks

'[Polly’s] eyes, which were grey with a shade of green through them, had a habit of
glancing upwards when she spoke with anyone, which made her look like a little
perverse madonna" (D 62). In "Two Gallants,” the narrative voice surreptitiously
conﬁdes certain scandalous details about Lenehan and Corley: ”[Corley] was often to
be seen walking with policemen in plain clothes, talking earnestly. He knew the inner
side of all affairs” (D 51). There is no mention that Corley exhibits pangs of guilt for
his seduction of the slavey, and we are also told that he may have gotten another
woman pregnant, forcing her to become a prostitute: "Cigarettes every night she’d
bring me and paying the tram out and back I was afraid, man, she’d get in the
family way [she’s] on the turf now” (D 51, 53). The narrative’s glance at the
small gold coin at the end of the story is as much a condemnation as the entire
description offered throughout. The characters in this section, as it progresses from
story to story, are initially represented mercilessly by the narrative and seem to come
to their own realization, internalizing the condemning voice of the narrative. They
are trapped by their circumstances with little hope of ever moving beyond the
conﬁnes of their mundane experiences, their poverty, or their frustrations. They
remain oscillating hybrids, but it becomes more difﬁcult to determine if the narrative
is condemning them for their own false representations, or if they are condemning
themselves, with the narrative allowing the reader to ”hear” their inner
confessions.l7

The point of view of these stories of adolescence oscillates in its proximity, as
well, from story to story. The narrative, itself, continues to move further from the
action of the story, no longer a "person" involved in what is happening, rather a
persona who seems to be at odds with his/her task of telling the tale. The narrative,

53

althou
very s
inform
little f
simult;

reader:

anticip

Sif-‘H

twice

..
1"» .
\s.’\
. I
. .1 1‘

although possessing a more removed presence within the story, ironically can give a
very subtle portrait of the characters, as it simultaneously reveals intimate, personal
information about the characters and their lives. ”The Boarding House" possesses
little ﬁrst person point of view (four lines), leaving the reader faced with a
simultaneity of intimacy and distance. Direct discourse disappears, and instead we, as
readers, are voyeuristically privy to the characters’ most intimate perceptions,
anticipating scenes like Bloom on the jakes or his masturbation at Sandymount Strand.

An example of this contrary simultaneity is in the following quotation from ”A
Boarding House.” It is obviously not Polly’s voice nor is it her language. What had
been hybrid vocalizations in the stories of youth has altered to become hybrid
focalizations: ”Polly knew she was being watched, but still her mother’s persistent
silence could not be misunderstood” (D 63). It could either be her consciousness
fusing with the narrative presentation or the narrative knows what she is thinking and
feeling selectively. The voice presents us with an image, allows us in for a glance,
but keeps the character removed. The hybrid context of the example seems to have
sidestepped Polly’s discourse for the moment, allowing the narrative to perform a
voice-over through Polly.

If the narrative possesses an omniscience, it is not telling everything. Shortly
thereafter, Bob Doran is described as he waits to be called by Mrs. Mooney; he
thinks of the nights when he would come home late and Polly would warm his dinner
for him: ”Perhaps they could be happy together ..." (D 67). The ellipses reveal
Bob’s consciousness and apprehension. But unlike Mrs. Mooney’s comprehensive
silence, we cannot be sure of what Bob Doran feels or even if he is actually guilty of
anything. With Polly, the narrative told us what Polly was thinking, but not in her

54

idiom

discoc

of ma
mingli
indiret

Dead.

idiom or tone; with Bob, we are not only reading what could very well be his
discourse, but we are privy to his pause but not to his inner thoughts.

In ”A Little Cloud,” which follows ”A Boarding House,” and is the ﬁrst story
of maturity, there is more dialogue, and the narrative voice and Chandler’s are
mingled more deliberately than the previous stories, in a similar degree to the free
indirect discourse we see in "A Painful Case,” the last story of maturity and in "The
Dead," the last of the public life stories. The narrative focuses also on unvoiced
movements, such as Gallaher’s ”Catholic gesture,” his vulgarity, his Orange tie, or
the meanness in Chandler’s wife’s eyes in the photograph: things that Chandler would
notice are detailed through the narrative. We have a great deal of personal
information at hand, because the narrative voice tells us how petty, arrogant, and
disappointed Chandler has become: ”[H]e felt himself superior to the people he
passed. For the ﬁrst time his soul revolted against the dull inelegance of Capel
Street" (D 73). And at the story’s conclusion, his brief superiority complex crumbles
about him: ”Little Chandler felt his cheeks suffused with shame and he stood back out
of the lamplight tears of remorse started in his eyes" (D 85).

Despite the proximity of the narrative voice, characters are not as deﬁned as
they had been in the earlier stories; they are becoming types, in a sense. The
representations of voice for the speciﬁc characters reﬂect this lack of deﬁnition; the
characters lack authority and ability, reduced as they are by circumstances, to assert
will and determination, and as this process of individual deterioration continues, direct
discourse diminishes, as well as representations of unvoiced perceptions, as if the
narrative can no longer get very close to the characters. Bob Doran is trapped and
paralyzed by the voice of the Church, which condemns his apparent act of lust outside

55

been n
Doran
was su
her sid
exterio
sealset
can hm
Polly,

away a
hepefu‘

home;

mails-r
man-S

L

milk“!- i]

of marriage; ”the sin was there" we are told, but we never learn if he and Polly
actually had sex (D 67). More paralyzing is the voice of Mrs. Mooney, who has
been manipulative enough to use her daughter to create a scandal that will force
Doran to marry Polly or force the Church to condemn Bob Doran: '[Mrs. Mooney]
was sure she would win. To begin with she had all the weight of social opinion on
her side” (D 64). The subjectivity and agency of the characters weaken as other
exterior voices demand positions of authority, at the expense of those already
weakened, whether or not these exterior voices are speaking the truth. Bob Doran
can hardly ﬂee from the power of the Church, society, Mrs. Mooney, or the pathetic
Polly, '0, Bob! Bob! What am I to do?” (D 66). There is little chance of breaking
away as the stories progress in maturation; gone is the earlier vindication and
hopefulness from "An Encounter" that ”real adventures do not happen to people at
home; they must be sought abroad” (D 21). Chandler, as I discussed above, in "A
Little Cloud" has a momentary and compassionless spark as he goes to meet Gallaher,
”if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin” (D
73). The story concludes, however, with Chandler trying to soothe his baby, and
realizing that ”[i]t was useless, useless! He was a prisoner for life;" when faced with
his wife’s condemning voice at the end, he cannot defend himself --- he cannot even
ﬁnish a sentence. These characters are immobilized, stuck in their circumstances.

As the progress continues, the situations of the Dubliners worsen, and the
narrative loses much of its humanity when describing the lot. ”Counterparts" details
a man’s descent into a valueless existence, represented as the deterioration of the

power inherent in voice. Because Farrington couldn’t refrain from making a mockery

56

of his
In the
thoug
this
until l
please
Encou

with h

"'Tati
all 3):.

can do
Unable
Sal dOV
limpet
lime? .
The ,1
«Lion?

..5‘

of his boss, Mr. Alleyne, they are on bad terms, and eventually Farrington gets ﬁred.
In the pub, his retelling of his humorous rebuttal to Mr. Alleyne, when asked if he
thought Mr. Alleyne ”an utter fool,” to which he responds, "I don’t think, sir that
that’s a fair question to put to me," gains him temporary admiration from friends,
until Higgins mimics Farrington’s voice: "And here was my nabs, as cool as you
please" and likewise retells Farrington’s story (D 94). Like the boys in ”An
Encounter” Farrington disguises himself through verbal mimicry, as well as his trick
with his cap, which he uses to go out during to day for a drink; however, his tricks
do not work as well. Farrington cannot sustain the game, not only because he’s
drunk, but because he’s meant to be an adult and therefore responsible. He has lost
his ability to speak for himself after losing his position, literally and ﬁguratively.
When he returns home, his wife is at chapel, there is no dinner for him, and the ﬁre
has gone out (and it’s February).

Farrington is represented as violent and lazy; as his character is developed, the
narrative, which initially told us Farrington’s feelings and frustrations, moves further
away. Without pride, without a job, Farrington has lost all agency, and the most he
can do is beat his innocent and nearly indistinguishable son, while the narrative seems
unable to name him any longer: "’Who are you? Charlie?’ ’No, pa. Tom’ The man
sat down heavily on one of the chairs while the little boy lit the lamp The man
jumped up furiously and pointed to the ﬁre ’Now you’ll let the ﬁre out the next
time!’ said the man, striking at him viciously with a stick” (D 97, 98 italics mine).
The narrative voice condemns Farrington, and so removes from him his name and his
authority as father and as provider. The focalization of the narrative no longer seems
to belong to Farrington, while simultaneously it allows for a harsher and ﬁner

57

scrutin
descruc
eliminz
family?
hours l

violent

authori
by the
Londor
accent"

ahove.

scrutinous critique. The story concludes with his violence and his ranting; his self-
destructive tendencies, as represented through voice, have reduced and all but
eliminated any semblances of his identity and position within society and with his
family: he is impotent as far as commanding respect and the humorous mimicry of
hours before eventually gives way to heightened animosity and then to physical
violence (D 97).

The way voices sound and their ability to transmit qualiﬁers of difference and
authority grow more pronounced as Dubliners continues. Farrington has been ignored
by the woman in the pub who "brushed against his chair and said ’0, pardon!’ in a
London accent,” and upon his return home, ”[h]e began to mimic his son’s ﬂat
accent" (D 95, 97 italics his). We are also told that, prior to the episode quoted
above, Farrington and his boss have not gotten along since ”Mr. Alleyne had
overheard him mimicking his North of Ireland accent” (D 92). Bob Doran, while
thinking of his affair with Polly and what it will cost him, ponders on her speech too:
"She was a little vulgar; sometimes she said I seen and If I had ’ve known. But what
would grammar matter if he really loved her” (D 66, italics his).

In "Clay," although we don’t get a description of the washer woman’s accent,
Maria’s mistake in singing the ﬁrst verse twice of "I Dreamt That I Dwelt" is
certainly a type of verbal qualiﬁer about her relative position within the family and in
society. We did not overhear voices this way in the stories of youth, but in these
stories of maturity, the way the words are pronounced connotes difference. Earlier,
the narrative voice did not show accentual differences but instead told us that the

characters were poor or lower born or that they refused to account for cultural and

58

social
pis'ota

domin

interac
differe
both e:
anothe
mimic

appear

from his

it s

k

social distinctions. Vocal qualities, especially mimicked vocal qualities, take a more
pivotal role in this chapter of the moral history of Dublin, because voice is the
dominant metonymic structure for identity and authority.

The revelation of social differences and cultural biases becomes obvious in the
interaction between self and other, and voice is the transmitter and receiver of that
difference. It is mimicry that occupies a strange double-edged position relative to
both entities. The mimic, as the word implies, imitates the vocal mannerism of
another in an act of ridicule to remove from another his/her position of power; the
mimic mocks social and national qualities, as well as personal. To make another
appear ludicrous by imitating his/her voice is to strip that other of authority.
According to Bhabha, it is also an act of camouﬂage, where the disruptive
repercussions of one voice attempt to hide within the verbal resonances of another, a
power play that confuses speaker from speech and intent. Simultaneously, mimicry
illustrates Bakhtin’s "mutual cause-and-effect and interillumination [of language]"
which reveals both the ”inter-subjective" as well as the "inter-individual" inherent in
identity. “3 Joyce’s use of mimicry allows for one character’s discourse to interact
intensely with another’s, contaminating each other, but ultimately calling attention to
relative characteristics of both discourses.

"Ivy Day in the Committee Room," "A Mother,” ”Grace,” and ”The Dead,"
move the perspective into public life, from middle age to the shadows of death, and
presents within the narrative, numerous layers of mimicry. Because of the stuffy,
hermetically-sealed world of Mr. Duffy, with his odd self-narrating habits and exile
from his own person, I would also include in this analysis ”A Painful Case.” In this
group, mimicry becomes an even greater means of (mis)representing voices:

59

characters mimic each other, the narrative voice mimics characters, again sounding so
much like the character that it is impossible to determine the speaker. The
melodrama of Mr. Duffy’s tiny, platonic existence, before and after the death of Mrs.
Sinico, is reﬂected in the way that the pseudo-objective narrative describes him: ”He
had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed. He lived his spiritual life
without any communion with others, visiting his relatives at Christmas and escorting
them to the cemetery when they died” (D 109). The border between the narrative
voice and the spoken and unspoken voice(s) of the characters continues to grow more
ambiguous, and the narrative voice changes its style of intrusions and imitations. In
this sense, Joyce’s prosaics illustrates a construction and representation of a style of
dislocutory intrusions.

A prime example of this heightened deceptive quality of the narrative is in
"Grace,” where if the narrator knows anything initially, little more is revealed than
what a bystander could report. The narrative voice’s odd exteriority and oscillation
postulates that the teller of these stories is changing its methods of telling. Initially
represented as standofﬁsh and reticent, the narrative voice comes to reveal an
opinionated and deceptive personality, whose intentions are unclear. Initially, the
narrative voice ”sounds” factual and objective with a tone of a newspaper report,
complete with journalistic expressions of dialogue and exposition: ”Two gentlemen
who were in the lavatory at the time tried to lift him up: but he was quite helpless
No one knew who he was but one of the curates said he had served the gentleman
with a small rum” (D 150). The narrative is very similar in tone --- its ﬂat, newslike
quality -—- to the voice of the obituary notice Mr. Duffy reads ”not aloud, but moving
his lips as the priest does when he reads the prayers Secreto," regarding the death of

60

hhs S
nodd;
menar
snneho
mnnuu
Kernan
inunct

ﬁnches

dean
mhlabl

brlievei

bunny,
Opposip
561th
JOFCe,;

Pitit‘isio

Mrs. Sinico, but without any indication that any of the characters respond to the
world in such an odd manner (D 113). Suddenly and without any prior indication,
the narrative alters upon the entry of Mr. Power; the narrative reveals a great
storehouse of knowledge, including the name of the man who has fallen and
intimacies regarding his life and world view. We are told that in the fall, Tom
Kernan had bitten his tongue, and consequently has a speech impediment, as he
inarticulately states, ”’y ’ongue is hurt” (D 153). When the narrative is focusing
solely on Kernan, it too has an impediment.

Mr. Power, who knows Tom Kernan, affects the narrative’s knowledge and
alters the perspective. The narrative can continue, because it can now mimic a new
and abled voice: "Mr. Kernan was a commercial traveler of the old school which
believed in the dignity of its calling" (D 153).

The hybrid nature of mimicry, because it cannot abide singularity, destroys
binary constructions, which would afﬁrm the unique existence of two separate,
opposing entities. The uncertainty principle, as explored by Phillip Herring, does not
set up the possibility of never-knowing but the inability to be certain of knowledge.
Joyce, according to Robert Adams, was more interested in ”the machinery of
precision” than he was with intellectual precision.19 This imprecision, in turn,
makes the reader more responsible for the text, because, as Herring expresses, it
”makes [us] think harder question what is missing, and with absence in mind
interpret what is present. "20 For Dubliners, these dislocutions allow for the voices of
the narratives and characters to elide in ambiguous ways, in some cases presenting the
narrative voice more as a character within the story than as an entity telling it. The
relative subject positions grow increasingly displaced, confusing details and

61

per 5P
alters

direCt

voices
as the

critica
other I
unders
sound

With it
OOHStru

become

from w

perspectives. Relative discourses merge and divide, and often the textual focalization
alters whenever the narrative encounters a new voice, even when that voice is not
directly present.

Dubliners is all about voices speaking, but little can be said about what the
voices say. The narrative voice, by the stories of public life, seems to be as narrow
as the characters’ relative voices, and so too, the mimicry becomes more and less of a
critical statement, often being quite harsh in its focus on the characters’ faults and at
other times sounding like a mindless parroting of overheard words, spoken without
understanding. The boy in ”The Sisters” repeats those three words primarily for their
sound value, and in ”Eveline” we encounter her mother’s voice repeating, ”constantly
with foolish insistence: Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun (D 40)! As the
constructions of these stories continue, the potential for an authoritative voice
becomes impossible, afﬁrming the concepts of multiplicity and uncertainty especially
from within the position of the narrative voice. All representations of the monologic
are displaced, and this displacement, according to Bhabha, ”afﬂicts the discourse of
power, [and] estranges that familiar symbol of [authority] Hybridity is the name
of this displacement of value from symbol to sign that causes the dominant discourse
to split.21

Eveline’s mother’s statement has never been satisfactorily explained.22 It
may be nonsense, representing the mother’s delusional state, or Joyce may have
botched his Irish or some other language. However, Joyce may have had other
speciﬁc reasons in mind with the confusing phrase. In terms of voice and authority,
the voice of the mother, who, from her deathbed, exclaims something that Eveline
interprets some how, again foregrounds this negotiative principle that surrounds the

62

repres
decom
alterit]

oscilla

das‘dre
voices
tale to
theorie
the SIG!
Eveline
Read/z,
What th
mOIher'
iQVe W

910nm"

representations of voice. We can approach a reading to the phrase and attempt to
deconstruct the mother’s intent, but the reading is asymptotic. The authority and
alterity of voice, as represented spoken and written in this example, are ﬂuid,
oscillating and uncertain.

In one sense, the mysterious expression, which Eveline believes to mean
”Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her” (D 40), interrupts her
daydreaming, as Bernard Benstock states in Narrative Con/Texts in 2214mm: ”other
voices intrude even in the privacy of her thoughts [these words have] a separate
tale to tell that impinges on and interrupts Eveline’s ’operettic’ version."23 Critical
theories continue to emerge about what "Derevaun Seraun! " could or should mean for
the story; regardless of these multiple interpretative voices, it seems likely that
Eveline does not know what they mean decisively either. Garry M. Leonard, in
Reading 2mm Again: A Lacanian Perspective, conveys that ”Eveline cannot know
what these words mean, but her mind and body instinctively interpret the tone of her
mother’s last pronouncement as conveying a clear (even if nonsemantic) warning to
leave while she still can. ”2‘ Therefore, the negotiative principle behind the
pronouncement and reception of this "crazy" voice is contradictory, creating an
impasse for the reader, as well as for the character, and recall that in the end, Eveline
cannot leave with Frank.

Such an impasse in reading, as this scene presents to the reader is, as Bhabha
explains, ”[t]he displacement from symbol to sign [which] creates a crisis for any
concept of authority based on a system of recognition. '25 The voice and identity of
the mother, indeed of many of the Dubliners are split; they exist as linguistic and
ideological hybrids along a matrix of signiﬁcation that resists ﬁxed deﬁnition.

63

in Joye
Ireland
husines
Mr. M
lhey‘r
16-1).

perceis
accept;
discour
doctrin

anthori

The co
Church
initiate
of Chile
mignar
'0 @1056
Withers.
930.10”
mimic!“

Genera]

t:

The Church creates an interesting presence and possesses a problematic voice
in Joyce’s stories. The Church not only imposed speciﬁc religious sanctions in
Ireland, it ironically allowed for a certain amount of relative mobility, as the
businessmen in ”Grace" explain about the Jesuits, ”There’s no mistake about it, said
Mr. M’Coy, if you want a thing well done and no ﬂies about it you go to a Jesuit.
They’re the boyos have inﬂuence The Jesuits cater for the upper classes" (D 163,
164). The Church is culpable for much of the paralysis as portrayed, because as a
perceived voice of authority, the Church insists upon stasis: unchanging values,
acceptance, and submission from its followers. Ironically, too, it allows for regulated
discourse, as long as the speaking subject keeps within the conﬁnes of religious
doctrine. More often then not, heresy remained a voiced challenge to the speciﬁc,
authoritative, monologic language of Church law.

In the context of Dubliners, rarely is a story without some religious context.
The collection’s beginning, with the situation of the priest, the language of the
Church, and the potential vocation of the young boy, presents the Church as an
initiator of difference, among a people and a family. The Church is also a sustainer
of difference, along intellectual and economic lines, as "The Sisters” and ”Grace” so
poignantly reveal. The boy in "The Sisters” is already beginning to stand in contrast
to those around him, just as the priest did himself, by virtue of his pronunciating
powers. We are told that the priest ”taught me a great deal he had taught me to
pronounce Latin properly” (D 13). Eliza’s mistake of ”general” for "journal",
mimicked by the narrative which tells us that a notice was placed in the Freeman’s

General, shows that the boy has already developed his own overly scrupulous

meanne

learns tl
simply l
-- we r
brother
resists h
the role
voice. i:
in 'lhe
has no p

hf Chtti

meanness.

The priest, in ”The Sisters,” who has died, was special in the family and one
learns that the sisters spent an inordinate amount of time caring for their brother
simply because he was a priest: ”God knows we done all we could, as poor as we are
--- we wouldn’t see him want anything while he was in it” (D 15-16). What gave the
brother his authority was the blind acceptance of a religious authority. The Church
resists hybrid authorities, because hybridity destroys hierarchical structures; to suggest
the voice of the Church as a relative authority, to insert or construct it as a hybrid
voice, is to play the mimic and, in a sense, reduce its power and presence. The boy,
in ”The Sisters” mouths ”simony,” potentially from the Catechism; even if the word
has no precise meaning for him, his articulation of it ostensibly relatives the voice of
the Church, which insists upon its own singularity. Bhabha explains that this:

acceptance of authority excludes an evaluation of the content of an utterance,

and if its source, which must be acknowledged, disavows both conﬂicting

reasons and personal judgement, then can the ’signs’ or ’marks’ of authority

be anything more than ’empty’ presences of strategic devices.26
Thus, the blind acceptance of the singular authority of the Church, an authority ﬁrst
based on the utterance, on voice, is problematized by the possibility of alterity: the
crisis created via hybridity. Bakhtin’s understanding is that dialogism does not pose
one voice as more authoritative than another, but the Church attempts to underscore
its monologic presence --- it poses that it is the holder of Truth, as given by God and
spoken into existence: the Word made Flesh. Novelistic discourse, itself a type of
translation in process, cannot abide by the monologic voice; Joyce’s stories show that
the monologic cannot exist, cannot propose that it is "pure" because, for Bakhtin and

65

Joyce.
me‘)’
reins'ig

dialogt

translai
that oft
ts‘herea
linguist
undersn
the dial»
Dubline
*he ssrit

“Titlen,

Joyce, purity is always empty potential, ”as the dictionary meanings of words are
empty, unless a commitment is made in a speciﬁc context."27 Translation
reinvigorates language, because it destroys precision by forcing (again) an intense
dialogue.

Translation, in other words, creates hybridity, because the most precise
translation always creates a wedge between it and the original; Fritz Senn points out
that often the translator presupposes that the content is not part of the linguistic form,
whereas for Joyce, the two are indivisible.28 Whenever context is translated across a
linguistic barrier, aspects of form must likewise shift to approximate meaning and
understanding. As an extreme case, Finnegans Wake illustrates Joyce’s concern with
the dialogization of meanings, as well as the appearance of the words on the page.
Dubliners, although written, is presented as a speaking book, and so the authority of
the written word joins the discursive nature of the jostle for position. Spoken or
written, voice possesses unique negotiative resonances that construct and
simultaneously deconstruct authority and identity, as Patrick O’Donnell states in Echo
Chambers, ”voice [is] the last illusory vestige of singularity or alterity."29 Voices
talk over other voices to jostle for position and power; accent reveals social status and
therefore authority; voices mimic voices to reduce or raise position and power; and
voices of the dead are heard to talk through the voices of the living, simply because
they cannot be silenced. Determined, individual voices reveal that their source is less
important than the fact that there are voices speaking, participating in Bakhtin’s
”already bespokenness. ”30 Voice supersedes the identity and individual authority of
the so—called speaker. O’Donnell looks at the situation as one where the speaker
becomes more a transmitter than an originator and that ”the source of speech -- the

66

indiritlua

likewise
when de:
and ther
as critic:

underscr

talling t
Speciﬁc;
medium
maths
how. 35

qualities

individual speaker -- becomes merely a mouthpiece. ”3‘

Mimicry, which has been so important in my discussion with hybridity is
likewise integral to a discussion of translation. Translation is also a form of mimicry
when dealing with issues of voice. Dubliners is a written text about speaking voices,
and therefore is a text about the translation of form -- spoken to written. Translation
as critical mimicry, played out in Dubliners, through the representation of voice,
underscores the exploration into how voices sound and how they look.

"Ivy Day" illustrates this type of critical mimicry in writing, self-consciously
calling the reader’s attention to voice transposed from the spoken medium to written,
speciﬁcally with the use of italics. Stylistically Joyce removes mimicry from the
medium of speech but retains the centrality of its hybridity. The elisions between
narrative and character complicate simplistic determinations of who is speaking and
how, as use of free indirect discourse often gives the narrative voice the verbal
qualities of the character under scrutiny. This type of near seamless ventriloquism is
present in ”Eveline” as well as "Ivy Day," and creates, as Michael Gillespie states in
Reading the Book of Himself, an image of the "most sophisticated form [of mimicry
where] neither the lips of the ventriloquist nor those of his dummy move."32 The
reader, who is both outside the text, as well as outside the committee room, must
make an additional negotiative step in order to comprehend the relevance of the
mimicry, as well as the recognition of the voice mimicked. It is up to the reader
again to propose actively the value of the subversive verbal resonance(s) within the
interstitial and relative authorities that occupy the space. As beings outside the text
and Joyce’s experiences, this type of parody is impossible to resolve, because we do
not know what the original ”sounded” like; therefore, we can never deﬁnitively

67

separate tl

'li
negotiatio
politics, a
voice as,
ldelconsn
self is as
as arbiter
are as un
best resul

Si
also used
“Blend 0'
bsoothes
the disloc
The “Err;
"ablated

“Ting” a!

bu

We

separate the "original voice” from the mimicked voice.

”Ivy Day in the Committee Room” is an interesting pastiche of voices and
negotiations of relative authorities, both because it is a story about petty bourgeois
politics, and because it operates in a sophisticated web of signiﬁcation presenting
voice as, not only a malleable metonymic entity, but the self-conscious means of
(de)constructing identity and community. One ﬁnds that personal understanding of
self is as arbitrary and ﬂuid as political afﬁliation. The characters of "Ivy Day” pose
as arbiters and as whips bold in speech but nothing else. Their political afﬁliations
are as unﬁxed as their public voices, moving toward that which will reward them the
best results, usually a drink.

Similar to Farrington’s mimicry of his son in "Counterparts," where italics are
also used, and to Mrs. Kearney’s mockery of Mr. Holohan in "A Mother,” where
instead of italics, her imitation is prefaced with ”she assumed a haughty voice," voice
becomes the means of repositioning authority from within the guise of the Other, in
the dislocutory position between exterior reception of voice and interior articulation.
The narrative continually and ironically calls one’s attention to the presence of this
translated voice, always illustrating that mimicry in Dubliners is always already
written and therefore translated:

-- It’s no go, said Mr. Henchy, shaking his head. I asked the little shoeboy,

but he said: 0, now, Mr. Henchy, when I see the work going on property I

won’t forget you, i you may be sure. Mean little tinker! ’Usha, how could he

be anything else? Blast his soul! Couldn’t he pay up like a man instead of:

0, now, Mr. Henchy, I must speak to Mr. Fanning... I’ve spent a lot of

money ...” (D 123)

68

lhe diffs
his and l
ridicules
reesrablis
does verj
any. end
represent

that ident

SllSpCCI, '

The difference in the written representation of Tierney’s "shoeboy" voice highlights
his and Henchy’s positions among the committee men. Mr. Henchy compulsively
ridicules Tierney by imitating his voice and language ("Usha' is Gaelic) in order to
reestablish his own oppositional position; yet Henchy’s position remains relative: he
does very little, has little political clout, and his own political beliefs have little, if
any, endurance. Once again Joyce’s narrative blurs supposed oppositions through the
representation of voice. What this means in terms of the progress of these stories is
that identity and authority not only stiﬂe movement, but are themselves increasingly
suspect, unﬁxed and unreliable.

Mimicry establishes an ostensible slipperiness in Dubliners: as one voice is
represented in a distorted fashion, the voice imitating is dialogized as well; mimicry
dialogizes both voices in this scenario, despite the attempt of one to gain a dominant
position over the other. These problems belong to ”the border" as Derrida states,
and, so too, difﬁculties in establishing presence in the ﬁrst place make themselves
known from within those same spaces. Can Henchy’s ridicule of Tierney
simultaneously be an accurate retelling the events as they happened? The reader’s
own relative position creates hybridity, because we are ”speaking” the words in our
own discourse as we enter into the coterminous process of storytelling. Henchy’s
authority and identity become suspect, because, as he continues to play with others’
voices, his own voice, his own authority and agency, become entwined and muddled
with his ridicule. One realizes that Henchy has little to say outside of his mimicry,
and his voice too becomes reduced and ironically the object of mockery. As Bakhtin
states, what becomes readily apparent is that language is always already hybrid, even
before one begins to use it. Voice calls attention to this existent hybridity and

69

simultan

lack of;

l.

insisting

and simt
voices.

monolog

he no pt

Con/Terr

read as \l

14

fal

un

Ch;

Vat

tur

ldéllllties i

heeptm E

SignliiCatic

mgaliOn! l.

Alibi,“ It

"all;

mﬂhing l

l . _
3450 Ialis [O

U l
simultaneously serves to extend and create ever expanding hybrids, by virtue of its
lack of precision and presence.

Henchy, in establishing his own authority by the reduction of another, is
insisting upon his own hybridization, because he relativizes himself as a mock-Tierney
and simultaneously poses as an authoritative ”monologic” critic of others’ deeds and
voices. Bakhtin states that novelistic discourse cannot abide by the unquestionable
monologic position, and therefore Henchy’s discourse cannot be monologic, because it
has no position above any other in the room. Bernard Benstock, in Narrative
Con/Texts, cites the dialogization as an actual "loss of personal identity,” which is
read as widespread among all the characters in these stories:

Loss of personal identity is unavoidable for any of those who manufacture a

false identity for themselves, attempting to satisfy pathetic needs by sailing

under false colours. A boy who sees himself as a knight errant bearing a

chalice in a Dublin market place is destined to realize himself derided by

vanity, and a young woman who fancies herself a lass loved by a sailor will

turn to stone when she anticipates the moment of ascension into ﬂight.33
Identities are established by voice and representations of voice, which from their
inception are already unstable, deconstructing entities in an unﬁxed ﬁeld of
signiﬁcation. Translation is necessarily hybrid, but implied in a translation is its own
negation, the paradoxical nature of Hegelian Being. False identity or not, the boy in
"Araby,” like Chandler in "A Little Cloud," or Gabriel Conroy in "The Dead,"
cannot translate their romantic, intellectual dreams into reality without creating
something unstable and in motion; and yet, the absence of the possibility of negation
also fails to ﬁx identity, and in fact assures its mitigation.

7O

Pe
alternating
between i
are told vs
lrish lang
Holohan‘:
Theatre; I
net get p:
"hear“ WI
ladylike .
class Occi
Would ha
from sayi
italics inc
hl'bridize

Fi
transpires
imilatiOn
0“ quaint.

Sh

Set

the

hit; Keﬁri

Performativity is an active representation of the alternative and possibly
alternating identity. An initial power play for Kathleen’s stage performance occurs
between Mrs. Kearney and Mr. Holohan in ”A Mother.” Mrs. Kearney, whom we
are told was a "supporter of the language movement," the movement to revive the
Irish language and customs, has plans to have her daughter, Kathleen, sing for Mr.
Holohan’s Society in Dublin’s Antient Concert Rooms, the early site for the National
Theatre; however, because of problems, her daughter may not get to sing and may
not get paid her eight guineas (D 138). As Mrs. Kearney grows more agitated, we
”hear” words that she wants to say but holds back, because to say them ”would not be
ladylike so she was silent" (D 141). Our ﬁrst possibly direct indication of her
class occurs when she pronounces the word ”committee” when she is told that it
would have to take up the issue of Kathleen’s payment. What she restrains herself
from saying, indicated in italics, is ”And who is the Cometty, pray” (D 141). The
italics indicate not only her pronunciation, represented as parodic, but an attempt to
hybridize the voices of the organizers who would dismiss her.

Finally, frustration and anger build and she mimics Mr. Holohan, but what
transpires, or what is translated, is the opposite of what Mrs. Kearney intended. Her
imitation of Mr. Holohan reveals, instead, the class differences between them, based
on qualities of voice, enforced as strictures of behavior and morality:

She tossed her head and assumed a haughty voice: ”You must speak to the

secretary. It’s not my business. I’m a great fellow fol-the-diddle-I—do." "I

thought you were a lady,” said Mr. Holohan, walking away from her abruptly.

After that Mrs. Kearney’s conduct was condemned on all hands. (D 149)
Mrs. Kearney stakes far too much on the illusion of her and Kathleen’s singular

71

important:

via an act

the voices

the organi
acceptano
social stas
because 0
Kearney r
potentially

ln

voice, bet
him: he bl
authority 1
Mil? ant
compatrio'

Howiﬂer,

importance, insisting upon order and precision; ironically she combats the injustice
via an act of mimicry —- vocal hybridization. By inserting her voice and hybridizing
the voices of her perceived social superiors, Mrs. Kearney loses the match, because
the organizers refuse the relativization of their authority. Poignantly absent is the
acceptance of that spirit of unruliness, because the organizers insist upon verbal and
social stasis, as represented when Mrs. Kearney is no longer taken to be a lady
because of her mockery. They insist on the singularity of voice, and when Mrs.
Kearney mimics -— when she inserts her voice -- she loses support; her alterity
potentially rivals Mr. Holohan’s authority, and she is condemned.

In a striking difference to Mrs. Kearney, Mr. Duffy seems to retain his own
voice, because he does not attempt any insertion among the disparate voices around
him: he became a member of a political group, but as "Ivy Day” showed, identity and
authority mean very little in the political climate of Ireland. Mr. Duffy does not
imitate and he does not challenge authority, because he feels himself the better of his
compatriots; he want to resist the existence of heteroglossia and dialogization.
However, Mr. Duffy’s identity is nonetheless negligible: Mr. Duffy’s identity and
subjectivity are neither afﬁrmed nor denied, because he has almost no personal
contact with other human beings; the voice he listens mostoften to is his own. If, as
Patrick O’Donnell states, identity is "a construct -- a network of voices,"34 Mr.
Duffy lacks identity in refusing to be part of the living network of verbal resonances,
recalling Hegel’s "thesis of the inseparability of Being and Nothing."” Ironically,
the absence of the negating principle denies "Becoming” a self, because both must be
present within the movement. The absence of the Other marks Mr. Duffy absent
even to himself; he initially even fails to recognize his own voice, as we learn, "he

72

heard a str
refuses cor
person and
Duffy, by
He
dor
cor
in
Mr. Duff}
all!" perso:
seem parc

Ell, whit

Delllda S

ESSan

hlhiimzt

heard a strange impersonal voice which he recognized as his own" (D 111). He
refuses communication with most people, and the narrative voice, entirely in the third
person and seemingly distant and objective, ironically seems to come from Mr.
Duffy, by the description offered of him:

He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with

doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to

compose from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject

in the third person and a predicate in the past tense. (D 108)

Mr. Duffy views himself seemingly externally, with a pseudo-objectivity and without
any personal connection. His movements, performed with "doubtful side glances”
seem parodic of human movements, and call our attention to the construction of the
text, which is always, itself, an imitation of speaking voices.

Since Mr. Duffy is described as listening to himself, it is important to note
that Derrida discusses this marked border between self and other, in terms of
speaking. The ear, as an organ of reception, connects one to the exterior world,
because it receives and transmits language, and writing continues this link:

[T]he teacher dictates to you the very thing that passes through your ear

and travels the length of the cord all the way down to your stenography. This

writing links you, like a leash in the form of an umbilical cord, to the paternal
belly of the state.“
Derrida suggests that the ear transmits and translates one being’s words to another,
necessarily causing a loss of personal agency, because selﬂaood must likewise become
hybridized for communication, imprecise as it is, to occur.
The connection to writing is also signiﬁcant in this story, because, prior to

73

Mrs. S;
inlluent
objectis
other, I
Duffy‘s
third pe
structure
from an;

autonom

Mrs. Sinico’s contact, Mr. Duffy’s world seems to consist of only one exterior
inﬂuence: the newspaper. From this one source, Mr. Duffy believes he has an
objective hold on reality, and as his only link to a living world, through his ear of the
other, Mr. Duffy conceptualizes his own self in similar terms: in other words, Mr.
Duffy’s habit of composing "short sentences about himself containing a subject in the
third person and a predicate in the past tense, " reveals not only a thematic and
structural movement away from personal contact with others, but a movement away
from any self awareness as well. Mr. Duffy’s voice remains unchallenged but not
autonomous, because he refuses engagement with other active living voices.

Regardless of Mr. Duffy’s pose of singularity, the newspaper speaks through
him in a type of voice-over; he believes that he imitates the newspaper’s style of
prose and seeming objectivity, but it becomes another layering of the ventriloquism
and inter-subjectivism that are so apparent in these stories. Once again, as these
stories progress, it is the assumed solidity of agency and identity that are the false
friends of these duped characters. Mr. Duffy’s voice is no more his own than the
boys’ voices in ”An Encounter” where they too perform a type of masquerade based
on their reading material. Mr. Duffy does not realize that he is as mitigated as those
he judges around him. The narrative reveals that he narrates himself in the third
person and exists almost solely within himself (and even then "at a little distance from
his body") which simultaneously undermines his authority and identity.

Mr. Duffy’s identity is negotiated via a narrative voice, which seems to mimic
him and reveals that he exists as a medium, of sorts, which transcribes the voice of
the newspaper, posed as objective and authoritative. "Grace, " too, began as a
newspaper column complete with the vague references to the identity of Tom Kernan

74

prior to
dialogiz
sedimer

individt

authoritl
paradox
This nar
Stories a
narrator
stories 0
rePorter
mmmnn
VOlCCS, 1
mm dear

Morin:
Ctemmt i:

We lEast.

0! Who]

'\

“tiered b

prior to the revelation of his identity. However, where that story deconstructs and
dialogizes the monologic voice of the Church, "A Painful Case" reveals the de-
sedimentation of a secular authority which likewise tries to assert its control over
individual authority and voice.

The seemingly objective pose of a newspaper report initially grants a type of
authority. However, a narrative that mimics a newspaper report possesses a
paradoxical doubled position that allows both intimacy as well as objective distance.
This narrative position, in ”Grace” and "A Painful Case," initially gives to these
stories a oscillative simultaneity --- it is intimate and distant at the same time and the
narrator once again has an odd, duplicitous, then and now quality, as it did in the
stories of youth. The narrator’s position is doubled and negated, serving as both
reporter and witness to the events. S/He occupies a problematic interstice, both
containing the story, as well as contained by it. The newspaper, itself created by
voices, remains a pseudo-objective transmission of living and multiplying discourses
into dead words, and after all, the newspaper is the medium whereby he reads Mrs.
Sinico’s obituary.

"The Dead” with its heightened sense of relativized and meaningless personal
authority, underscores the suspended conclusion of these stories that renders the
Dublin Irish paralyzed; as well it reasserts that the readers have been a performative -
element in the entire process, and are themselves voices within the heteroglossia:
none leave without being tainted by the condemnation of the living and the dead.

By the time one turns to ”The Dead" one is unable to perceive any of the signs
or symbols accurately. The reader’s ability to draw conclusions remains severely
hindered because the narrative voice continues to be distracted by the ignorance and

75

anoga
iuualc
muran:
ambigt

daught

Thena
Characr

problei

arrogance of the characters in the story, making it nearly impossible to restate the
usual differences between narrator and character. Hugh Kenner has remarked that the
narrator’s use of the word "literally” represents a profound blurring, a profound vocal
ambiguity between the voice of the narrator and the voice of Lily, the caretaker’s
daughter, within the ﬁrst line of the story:
Whatever Lily was literally (Lily?) she was not literally run off her feet. She
was (surely) ﬁguratively run off her feet, but according to a banal ﬁgure. And
the ﬁgure was hers, the idiom: ”literally" reﬂects not what the narrator would
say (who is he?) but what Lily would say: "I am literally run off my feet."37
The narrative’s word choice reveals that the hybridization of the narrative and
character voices remains prominent, but the nature of that hybridity continues to be
problematic, because the focalization could hardly be static. Once again, the
narrative voice could be thought of as a mimic, but it has either grown bored with
straightforward imitation and parody, or it is too close to the perceptions of the
character for the reader to distinguish any particular traits of the previous narrative
voice. Its control seems to have strengthened among the sea of character voices, by
virtue of its ability to sample simultaneously from the formulaic storehouse of
character vocabularies. Its ”function" is more like a critic or novelist, who references
other writers, oftentimes using speciﬁc phrases and word choices that are self-
consciously typical of another. In Dubliners, the effect ultimately shows that the
characters are little more than substitutable types speaking substitutable discourses. It
may also reveal, on another level, that the narrative voice has become contaminated
with the traits of the characters it chose to scrutinize and mimic -- paralyzed and
trapped in the same sort of world view --- another voice caught in the dialogization of

76

the al

of the
to die
himse
own i.
ubiqui
dissolt
increa
night]:
unceru
has ah:

the roo

the already existent heteroglossia.

”The Dead" presents scenes of greater ambiguity via the intercourse of voices
of the guests at the party, as well as between the souls of the dead and those waiting
to die. Gabriel’s languages and erudition are not so signiﬁcant as the place he feels
himself travelling toward, ”that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. " His
own identity is becoming indistinct from every other, somehow blurred along with the
ubiquitous weather, "fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world was
dissolving and dwindling” (D 223). Throughout the evening, voices have become
increasingly less distinct and jumbled with ”muttered apologlies]," ”mumbled good-
night[s]," ”indistinct undertones," and even Mr. D’Arcy, the Irish singer ”seemed
uncertain of both his words and of his voice” (D 216, 201, 210). The narrative voice
has altered too in this story, at times independent of Gabriel or any single body within
the room, often able to offer simultaneous perspectives from multiple rooms.

The narrative also reveals Gabriel’s habit of narrating himself in the third
person, to the point that it seems Joyce could already be at play with the possibility of
Gabriel ﬁghting for control of ”his" story with the narrator. Voice and commentaries
regarding voice are everywhere in this last story, complete with intimate
understanding of vocal qualities and deceitfulness, as well as objective and distant
observation. This story continues the oscillation of perspective and the ﬂuidity of
identity that began with ”The Sisters," and death, the annihilation of all sense of self,
is the only unifying principle among the gathering. The result is a narrative that
concludes with a lack of closure, a free falling and complete disintegration of identity
and subjectivity. These same voices will continue to intermingle, despite the event or
the day, caught in the unbearable, eternal return, with no end, and with only ”lame

77

and r
lrelar
ﬂoats
dead.

W8)?!

cleare
realize
voices

Specifi

and useless [words]" offered for consolation (D 222). The snow ”general all over
Ireland” falls indiscriminately on all, Gretta falls asleep in mid-sentence, Gabriel
ﬂoats out observing the city and then to that ”region where dwell the vast hosts of the
dead," and ﬁnally the narrative voice too is absorbed into the mutinous Shannon
waves, compulsively seeking this annihilation of the self.

Already present here, Dubliners shows that the voices of the dead are often
clearer and more signiﬁcant than those of the living. In Ulysses, Bloom has this
realization, but here too the voice of Michael Fury, as well as the potential—dead
voices of the Morkans, dwarf the presence and authority of Gabriel’s voice, or any
speciﬁc living voice.

"The Dead" represents voice in various ways, and alters those representations
within the story, offering alternating views of the various verbal resonances that exist
in the story. We are told how voices sound in this story with a similar focus as the
one used previously to tell that a character had a ﬂat accent or a London one: Lily
gives Gabriel’s name three syllables; Mr. Browne "assumed a very low Dublin
accent;" Bartel! D’Arcy has a lovely tenor voice; Freddy and Mrs. Malins have a
catch in their voices, while she also has a stutter, and many of the guests’ voices are
indistinct, noticeable only as mumbles and murmurs. The sound of Mr. D’Arcy’s
voice, "made plaintive by distance and by the singer’s hoarseness” calls attention to
the song’s cadence and sadness, but the voice itself, supposedly a ﬁne tenor, is
largely ignored. The sounds of shoes and pianos are more pronounced and possess a
greater presence than many of the Morkans’ friends (D 177,183,184,185,190). Voice
remains the means of establishing and disrupting authority; however, the narrative
voice is not offering sufﬁcient transitions. It is mimicking everyone, including

78

Gabri

simul

'Distz
rewor
Gabri
forma
name’
to a It
It is I'd
listehe
relatic
lingo;
rethjn]
he had
”latic'
lie'ttua
living .

mam!“

Gabriel, who also mimics himself, revealing the worst of those who are present, and
simultaneously offering us ﬂawed representations.

When Gabriel looks up at Gretta on the stairs and thinks about painting her,
”Distant music he would call the picture if he were a painter,” he is attempting to
rework his wife in an image he considers beautiful (D 211). As his fantasy continues,
Gabriel rewrites and recalls his life with Gretta, even re-hearing his own words
formally addressed to her: "Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your
name" (D 214, Joyce’s italics)? The italics serve again to call the reader’s attention
to a type of mimicry, in this case Gabriel mimicking himself and his former words.
It is re-hearing, because Gabriel is self-conscious enough about his own voice to have
listened to himself intently the ﬁrst time he said these words to Gretta; Gabriel’s
relationship with language and voice has been self-conscious throughout, as if spoken
language were something visual and tangible. Earlier in the story, while he is
rethinking his speech, Gabriel quotes himself again: ”He repeated to himself a phrase
he had written in his review: One feels that one is listening to a thought-tormented
music” (D 192, Joyce’s italics). In both cases, Gabriel’s relationship with his
language is at odds with his sense of selfhood --- his own words exist as text, not
living discourse. He attempts to reduce the audience, with his eventual speech, to
inactive listeners, passively absorbing his monologic and meaningless phrases.

”The Dead" represents that voice and language, always already hybrid and
hybridizing, create anxiety in characters who believe that, if they can control both of
them, they might control their own representations, as well. As Gabriel learns,

Gretta is more than what he constructs, because she has her own inner narrative, in

79

dials
thou
can .
that

Bioo
with
mart
'vint
22- .
Thos.

Empp

hold .

Who I
CEtnno
Those

ePiphe

Voice 1'
{Emu
Shady t

shill] ice 3

dialogue with images and discourses dead or gone from her immediate experience,
though not lacking in power and presence; and through her voice, Gabriel says that he
can see ”the form of a young man under a dripping tree" (D 223). He had believed
that he occupied a singular position in Gretta’s life, and, although he is not faced with
Bloom’s realization that he is one in a series of potential rivals, Gabriel cannot cope
with his relativized position, and in turn constructs a new narrative for her and his
martyred rival. He thinks he can see Michael Fury, and her story attacks him, like a
”vindictive being” --- words taking on physical qualities as they had for the boy in
"The Sisters” whose words come back to him as a ”maleﬁcent and sinful being” (D
220, 9).

”The Dead” represents humanity’s inability to stop voices from speaking.
Those who try, like Gabriel, produce useless words, monologic discourses that are
empty of context and meaning. With the anxiety of an age passing, the attempt to
hold onto ”tradition" in the face of modernity, Gabriel is revealed as an overblown
and self-involved fool, who does not recognize his wife, literally and ﬁguratively, and
who uses money to reassert his dominant position over the hired help when his voice
cannot do so. For Gabriel, the relativization of presence and voice, liberating for
those who lack a prominent place, like Freddy Malins, presents him with the
epiphany of his own minuscule contribution to the dialogues taking place.

The representation of voice and the speciﬁc commentary and reference to
voice in "The Dead" completes the moral history of a country that Joyce felt was the
center of paralysis. Throughout the collection, voice is, above all else, the primary
study that Joyce is conducting, as he blurs, confuses, and leaves unﬁxed the narrative
voice and various voices of the characters. Voice, spoken and written, reveals how

80

ident
contr
colle
the c
and '
these
diStOI
Balthr
deterr
move
from t
iOI [hg
Chaos,
agency

and .v

identity is constructed and deconstructed, negotiated among a net of opposing and
contrapuntal verbal resonances, none of which possess authority. Voice within the
collection represents a type of ”chronotope of the threshold,” in Bakhtin’s terms, for
the characters and narrators, and for Joyce as well.38 They call attention to "crises"
and ”breaks" in human lives, however negligible those outcomes may be; for Joyce,
these stories metaphorically represent his life, "the mirror as book" reﬂecting and
distorting real people from his actual experiences; the break or the crisis, or in
Bakhtinian terms, "the resurrections, the renewals, epiphanies, decisions that
determine the whole life" are there within the constructions of voice.39 Joyce’s
move of revenge was not to allow any of the characters their own chances to break
from their experiences; they are silenced and stuck within the time and place created
for them. Dubliners, which represents these characters’ failures to impose order over
chaos, complicates the always already slippery concepts of identity, subjectivity, and
agency by afﬁrming and denying movement over that simultaneous threshold of Being
and Nothing.

Notes:

1. Joyce, Stanislaus. The Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce. Ed. George Harris
Healey. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1962: 19, 23.

2. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994: 50.

3. Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990: 314.

4. Mikhail Bakhtin, 317.
5. Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation.

Ed. Christie V. McDonald. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. NY: Schocken Books, 1985: 13,
italics his.

81

Horn
1905
“Est
Daet
in IT
(Con
com;
1914
(Wit
1915
1905
story
July

("Corr
late 1
in Tr

T. Mi

9. F3
Essen

6. Dubliners, published 1914: ”The Sisters” (13 August 1904, originally in The Irish
Homestead, signed Stephen Daedalus); "An Encounter” (composed in September
1905 , the ninth to be written); ”Araby” (October 1905, the eleventh composition);
"Eveline" (10 September 1904, originally in The Irish Homestead, signed Stephen
Daedalus; it was the second story Joyce wrote); ”After the Race” (17 December 1904
in The Irish Homestead; it was the third story in composition); ”Two Gallants”
(Composed over the winter of 1905-06; it is the thirteenth story in order of
composition); "The Boarding House” (Completed 1 July 1905 and ﬁrst published in
1914 in Dubliners; it was the ﬁfth in order of composition); "A Little Cloud"
(Written in 1906; it was the fourteenth story in composition; also published in May
1915 in Smart Sel, edited by H.L. Mencken); ”Counterparts" (Completed on 12 July
1905; sixth story in composition); "Clay" (Composed early 1905 ; it was the fourth
story composed and originally titled ”Hallow Eve"); "A Painful Case" (Composed in
July 1905, seventh in composition, originally titled ”A Painful Incident”); "Ivy Day
..." (Completed late summer 1905, the eighth story in composition); "A Mother"
(Completed late September 1905; the tenth story in composition); ”Grace" (Finished
late 1905 , twelfth in order of composition); "The Dead” (Completed in Spring 1907,
in Trieste).

7. Mikhail Bakhtin, 336.

8. Thornton, Weldon. The Antimodemism of Joyce’s WWW
Man. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1994: 40, 51.

9. Fargnoli, A. Nicholas and Michael Patrick Gillespie. James Joyce A to Z: The
Essential Reference to the Life and Work. NY: Facts on File, 1995: 90.

10. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky ’s Poetics. Ed./Trans. Caryl Emerson.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1984: 198.

11. O’Donnell, Patrick. Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative. Iowa
City: University of Iowa P, 1992: 121.

12. Echo Chambers 122.

13. Deﬁned by Hayman in his essay "Cyclops" as "a nameless and whimsical-
seeming authorial projection whose presence is ﬁrst strongly felt in ’Aeolus’, where
he starts usurping the prerogatives of the objective narrator by interjecting the
frequently intrusive mock—headlines. " (James Joyce ’s gasses 266)

14. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1976: 50. The Ear of the Other, 61.

15. The Location of Culture 50.
16. Mikhail Bakhtin, 338.

82

17. l
Cathi

353d
18. T

19. A
NY:

20. E
303.

21. T

‘97]

‘8.

Eire~i

17. Much of Dubliners can be read as represented confession, in both the literary and
Catholic senses. An interesting analysis of confessional style is in Gerald Doherty’s
”The Art of Confessing: Silence and Secrecy in James Joyce’s ’The Sisters.” JJQ
35/36 (1998): 657-64.

18. The Dialogic Imagination 12, 249.

19. Adams, Robert M. Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce ’s Ulysses.
NY: Oxford UP, 1967: 182.

20. Herring, Phillip F. Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987:
203.

21. The Location ofCulture 113.

22. For example: Coilin Owens, ”’Entends sa voix’: Eveline’s Irish Swan Song."
Eire-Ireland. 28 (1993): 44; Wim Tigges, "Derevaun Seraunl’: Resolution or
Escape?” JJQ. 32 (1994): 102; Hedberg Johannes, ”Derevaun Seraun -- A Joycean
Puzzle.” Moderna Sprak. 60 (1966): 109-10; and most recently Jim LeBlanc, ”More
on ’Derevaun Seraun!” JJQ. 35/36 (1998): 849-51.

23. Benstock, Bernard. Narrative Con/Texts in Dubliners. Chicago: University of
Illinois P, 1994: 20.

24. Leonard, Garry M. Reading DMJiners Again: A Lacanian Perspective.
Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1993: 98.

25. The Location of Culture 114.
26. The Location of Culture 113.
27. Mikhail Bakhtin, 228.

28. Senn, Fritz. Joyce’s Dislocations: Essays on Reading as Translation. Ed. John Paul
Riquelme. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1984: 5.

29. Echo Chambers 174.
30. Mikhail Bakhtin, 338.
31. Echo Chambers 157.

32. Gillespie, Michael Patrick. Reading the Book of Himself: Narrative Strategies in the
Works of James Joyce. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1989: 12.

33. Narrative Con/Texts, 166.
34. Echo Chambers 73.

83

35.
C011

36.
37.
38.

39. L
Trar.

35. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. NY:
Columbia UP, 1984: 112.

36. The Ear of the Other 36.
37. Kenner, Hugh. Joyce’s Voices. Berkeley: University of California P, 1978: 15.
38. The Dialogic Imagination 248.

39. Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist.
Trans. Caryl Emerson and David Holquist. Austin: University of Texas P, 1981: 248.

84

Ada

Baki

Bakh

Balm

Bakhl

References:

Adams, Robert M. Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce ’s ngsses.
NY: Oxford UP, 1967.

Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist.
Trans. Caryl Emerson and David Holquist. Austin: University of Texas P,
1981.

Bakhtin, M.M. Creation of a Prosaics. Ed. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.

Bakhtin, M.M. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael
Holquist. Trans. Vadim Laipunov. Austin: University of Texas P, 1993.

Bakhtin, M.M. Problems of Dostoevsky ’s Poetics. Ed./Trans. Caryl Emerson.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1984.

Bakhtin, M.M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas P,
1986.

Bakhtin, M.M. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin.
Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Trans. Vadim Liapunov.
Austin: University of Texas P, 1990.

Benstock, Bernard. Narrative Con/Texts in Dubliners. Chicago: University of
Illinois P, 1994.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation.
Ed. Christie V. McDonald. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Schocken
Books, 1985.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1976

Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena: and Other Essays of Husserl ’s Theory of
Signs. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973.

Doherty, Gerald. "The Art of Confessing: Silence and Secrecy in James Joyce’s ’The
Sisters.” JJQ 35/36 (1998): 657-64.

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce: New and Revised Edition. New York: Oxford UP,
1982.

85

F31
Gil

H61

H01
lser
Jan

by

1ch
1ch
Joye
Jolt:

Kenn,

Kersh
Krisre
Lama]

Mac-Ca

uan‘r‘

Fargnoli, A. Nicholas and Michael Patrick Gillespie. James Joyce A to Z: The
Essential Reference to the Life and Work. NY: Facts On File, Inc, 1995.

Gillespie, Michael Patrick. Reading the Book of Himself: Narrative Strategies in the
Works of James Joyce. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1989.

Herring, Phillip F. Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987.

Hofstadter, Douglas R. Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York:
Vintage, 1979.

lser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.

James Joyce’s MM! Critical Essays. Ed. Clive Hart and David Hayman.
Berkeley: University of California P, 1974.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Penguin Books, 1976.

Joyce, James. The Letters of James Joyce. Vol. 1 Edited by Stuart Gilbert, 1965.
Vols. 2 and 3 Edited by Richard Ellmann. NY: Viking Press, 1966.

Joyce, James. The Selected Letters. Ed. Richard Ellmann. London: Faber and
Faber, 1975.

Joyce, Stanislaus. My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years. Ed. Richard
Ellmann. NY: The Viking Press, 1958.

Joyce, Stanislaus. The Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce. Ed. George Harris
Healey. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1962.

Kenner, Hugh. Joyce ’s Voices. Berkely: University of California P, 1978.

Kershner, R.B. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder.
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina P, 1989.

Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. NY:
Columbia UP, 1984.

Leonard, Garry M. Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian Perspective. Syracuse:
Syracuse UP, 1993.

MacCabe, Colin. James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word. London: The
MacMillan P, 1978.

86

Mm

O’D

Pow

Riqu

Riqu

Riqu

A.“ .
I

Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics.
Stanford: Standford UP, 1990.

O’Donnell, Patrick. Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative. Iowa
City: University of Iowa P, 1992.

Power, Arthur. Conversations with James Joyce. Ed. Clive Hart. New York:
Harper and Row, 1974.

Riquelme, John Paul. ”Joyce’s ’The Dead’: The Dissolution of the Self and the
Police.” Style 25 (1991): 488-503.

Riquelme, John Paul. Teller and Tale in Joyce’s Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins UP, 1983.

Riquelme, John Paul. ”For Whom the Snow Taps: Style and Repetition in ’The
Dead. ’ " "The Dead": Complete Authoritative Text with Biographical and
Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary
Critical Perspectives. Ed. Daniel R. Schwarz. Boston: St. Martin’s P, 1994:
219-33.

Senn, Fritz. Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation. Ed. John Paul
Riquelme. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1984

Thornton, Weldon. The Antimodemism of Joyce’s Widow
Man. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1994.

87

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of v0
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Stories

“PS Us

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.

A Portrait of Stephen (Hero) D(a)edalus:
Identity, Authorship and Subjectivity

A transition from Dubliners to Joyce’s semi-autobiographical novels, Stephen
Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man continues to complicate the issues
of voice and identity. Stephen Hero, the novel that Stanislaus called ”a lying
autobiography and a raking satire"1 preceded A Portrait, a similar lying
autobiography, in composition, and because both novels are relegated to the
development of Stephen, they hybridize each other; reading them side by side serves
to create a heteroglossic, dialogic relationship similar to the way that Joyce’s
manuscripts of his later novels highlight the processes of creation for the artist. This
transition also reveals the alterations that Joyce made in the construction of voice. In
his previous writings, Joyce did not need to create a consistent narrative voice from
one story to the next; in a sense, similar but different narrators tell the different short
stories and it is the presence of the author, presented to us through the letters, that
tips us off to the consistent agenda, namely the creation of that polished looking glass.

Constructing these two novels, however, whose narrative framework encircles
the development of Stephen’s consciousness meant that the transitions, presented
largely through voice, had to either be seamless or self-consciously disjointed.
Through the use of free indirect discourse, as well as a continued emphasis upon
heteroglossia and intense dialogization, Joyce attempted to create both, a paradoxical
seamless disjointed representation of voice. The narrative voice of Stephen Hero is
closely aligned with the voice of Stephen: they share common ideas and views of
language; they are also both cold. Each voice remains, like Mr. Duffy, a certain

distance from the action that is taking place and from any kind of human compassion;

88

Staph,

narrat

we ha

of Ste
ill)“
before
Memo
CV’Cll V
formei
side b3
Which

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Second

Stephen and the narrator are truly ”poet[s] with malice aforethought' (SH 26). The
narrative voice of A Portrait, however, is no longer fully aligned with Stephen, and
we have slippage between what Stephen thinks and feels and what the narrator thinks
of Stephen. In addition to this slippage, both texts present the notion of memory as a
type of invention; memory is the storehouse of things past, a bridge to what has come
before, as well as the recognition of the division between what was and what is.
Memory therefore calls attention to textual and thematic hybridity in Joyce’s novels,
even when the character seems to remain static. It serves as a mirror, reﬂecting
former and present selves backward and forward, allowing, at points, both to exist
side by side. Thus, the construction of voice is represented as a factor of memory,
which in turn suggests that voice can represent that which is recalled: memory
constructs voice, and voice represents that which is remembered in an ongoing cycle.
The movement between the two texts presents a developing ability to
manipulate constructions of voice; the narrator of A Portrait has already moved into a
secondary type of narration; it is not representing Stephen as Stephen would like to be
constructed. It is mimicking his thoughts and feelings, both internal and external,
presenting a type of fun-house mirror where portions of his representations are
exaggerated while others seemingly remain largely untouched. The earlier
construction of Stephen, where we learn that "he built a house of silence for himself”
is not the representation we receive in the later version, where Stephen thinks much
the same, but there is an entity between that does not offer direct translation from the
character to the reader (SH 30). Bakhtin illustrates that this entity is the
acknowledgement of all the voices that would construct reader, author and character,
and Stephen’s voice, as well as the narrator’s and reader’s voices, are in a continuous

89

 

dialog
voice
mono
of A i
his pe
COHSII
voice,

andra

dialogic relationship, whereas the earlier novel attempted to make primary Stephen’s
voice alone. Stephen Daedalus of Stephen Hero is the controller of his Socratic
monologue, playing all the parts, including perhaps the narrator’s. Stephen Dedalus
of A Portrait would like to do the same, but his interlocutors are talking back without
his permission, creating a much more realistic exchange and illustrating that the
construction of Stephen’s identity and subjectivity is grounded on the existence of
voice, spoken and written, that served to create his own unique but dispersed ethnic
and racial consciousness.

Joyce began writing Stephen Hero on his twenty-second birthday in 1904 and
abandoned it to begin transforming it into A Portrait in September of 1907; these
dates correspond closely to dates of composition for many of the stories from
Dubliners.2 Obviously, since Joyce was writing Dubliners simultaneously with much
of Stephen Hero and had begun A Portrait while trying to get Dubliners published,
they would share many of the same verbal shifts between narrative voice and
character voice, as well as positions of subjectivity and identity. However, as a mark
of stylistic difference, Stephen Hero and A Portrait deal primarily with the
development of a single consciousness and so the representations of voice are more
complex, developing simultaneously in various directions, as they are narrowed and
expanded. Integral to the discussion is still Joyce’s attempt to represent voice and
identity as ﬂuid and therefore indeﬁnite in terms of difference, which is a hallmark of
much, if not all, of his ﬁction. However, with the advent of Stephen Dedalus -- as a
nom-du-plume and as a character3 -- Joyce’s attempt to circumvent the negotiative

principles of reading places a greater emphasis on the position of the reader from

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within the text, with regard to distinguishing those verbal resonances that would
identify such qualities as narrator, author, and character. Thanks to Ellmann’s
biography, as well as Stanislaus’ Dublin Diary and My Brother’s Keeper, we know
that a great deal of the material in Stephen Hero and A Portrait is autobiographical;
however, that term is always insufﬁcient, because Joyce, like all authors, transforms
scenes self-consciously to ﬁt his purposes.

As with Dubliners, free indirect discourse insists that the reader directly
participates in the development of the story; h/she, as Michael Gillespie states in
Reading the Book of Himself, is moved "to the foreground of the work, overtly
[engaged] with the creation of meaning. ”4 In other words, Joyce constructs into
his ﬁction the reader’s difﬁculty in distinguishing the relative differences among the
multiple perspectives, despite the fact that either novel deals almost exclusively from
the perspective of Stephen. The apparent impossibility of determining the speciﬁc or
general spaces that demarcate the voice of the author, the voice of Stephen, and the
narrative voice (where does one begin and the other end?) ostensibly becomes part
and parcel of Joyce’s aesthetics of mimesis and memory as creation: ”[We] may have
our irremovable doubts as to the whole sense of the lot we must vaunt no idle
dubiosity as to its genuine authorship and holusbolus authoritativeness" (FW
1.117.35ff). Rather than attempting to draw distinctive conclusions about whether
Joyce sympathized with the issues and ideals put forth by Stephen, a new profound set
of (un)rules governs the writing and idealogy of Joyce’s aesthetic: an aesthetic that
will eventually push him to create the inter-intratextual Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

Opening the covers of these two novels, A Portrait and Stephen Hero, places

91

 

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one already in the textual labrynth that most critics conceive as a product of the more
mature Joyce. Moreover, the dialogical quality that exists between these two texts,
illustrates the growing circularity that is integral to anyone’s experience with reading
James Joyce.

The dialogical relationship that exists between Stephen Hero and Portrait is
essential in any discussion of Joyce’s relative constructions of voice. They speak to
each other and therefore require each other as companion pieces to a story about the
development of a boy into an artist with the creation of an artistic theory and
temperament. In addition, the interstices that exist between these two novels are
important in one’s attempt to comprehend the development of Joyce’s aesthetic
principles; as well, they provide a space for deeper inspection of the hybridity of
voice(s) that exist in Joyce’s ﬁction. They exist together in transformational relation,
as Michel Beaujour, in Poetics of the Literary Self Portrait, reads the relationship
between the Old and New Testaments: one can endlessly comment on the allegorical
links between the two novels or discuss one as a perversion or reduction of the other.
Either of these readings, among other possibilities, always already illustrates their
necessarily dialogic nature to each other. Identity and authority are paradoxically
founded on contradictions and are the constructs of juxtaposed and counterposed
misalliances. Furthermore, Joyce presents all these juxtapositions and
counterpositions through representations of voice as perceived and represented by
Stephen. What is achieved is likewise a conﬁrmation that representation itself is
voiced and internally dialogical: Stephen mimics and mocks voices he hears, he
voices placards he reads, and he articulates and conceptualizes existence as a
linguistic construct, speciﬁcally dialogue. Creation itself exists, even for the

92

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religiously ambivalent Stephen, as the voiced command of God —-- not an especially
new notion, but it helps to conceptualize how Stephen and Joyce understand their own
positions as creators.

The borders between, where presencing begins, where that insigniﬁcant
difference exists, are the places where Joyce constructs and deconstructs, weaves and
unweaves his ﬁctions. At the borders one can begin to conceptualize the signiﬁcance
of the movement from one entity to another, because Joyce is primarily playing with
notions of authority and identity through voice, usually at the traditional
representations of difference between relative characters and voices. Furthermore, it
is at these ambiguous distinctions that Joyce also complicates representations of the
”oral” and the "written,” i.e. the passages where what Stephen thinks and what
Stephen says are both represented with the dash.

--- I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is

Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in

the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and

Victoria. Names. (P 92)

Joyce considered quotation marks an eyesore, but the dash also augments the
ambiguity between spoken and unspoken discourse in the novels. The above passage
is prefaced as something Stephen is saying to himself, but it does not say what it
clearly is, namely Stephen thinking, and not necessarily aloud. He is creating, in a
sense, a division within himself and articulating a type of internal dialogue, where he
examines rhetorically the notion of place and the interdependent conceptual izations
that are names. We see differences initially at the boundaries between entities and
Stephen is marking off his person as distinct from others in his family, speciﬁcally his

93

father:

Simon

where '
conscic
interrog
via his

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and pro
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father: "I am Stephen Dedalus” -vs- ”I am walking beside my father whose name is
Simon Dedalus. "

It is at the borders where voice begins to tear at the fabric of the text and
where voice itself ruptures notions of literary and textual authority. Stephen is
consciously presenting himself as a subject, but he is also in the process of
interrogating himself -—- projecting his subjectivity outward, remaking self into other
via his textual meditations which serve as a type of projecting mirror. Voices blur in
the myriad of spoken and unspoken discourses that are A Portrait and Stephen Hero,
and provide a context for the carnivalization of experience and representation. Right
after this passage, he thinks (this time without the dash), "The memory of his
childhood grew dim. He tried to call forth some of its vivid moments but could not.
He recalled only names" (P 92). The latter part of the scene is carnivalesque, in that
what seems apparent is that the vivid moments he is paradoxically unable to recall are
growing indistinct, "I have a recollection, deﬁnite enough though vague in detail" as
Stanislaus regards his own recollections in My Brother’s Keeper’; these deﬁnite,
vague memories become interchangeable with creations of his imagination, which will
rework those memories into new experiences, some of which will be more real than
they actually were. Voice through memory provides the context for the grotesque,
supplying the liminal space where bodies collide, consume, and are destroyed.

Voice creates ﬁssure within the texts of A Portrait and Stephen Hero, within
and between, primarily because the constitution of Stephen’s psyche, according to
R.B. Kershner in Joyce, Bakhtin and Popular Culture, is founded upon speech and

because Stephen’s language itself is hybrid. Such ruptures reveal the tensions that

94

exist t
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for Jo;
becaus
multitt
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are say

from S

exist within the texts between the written and the spoken as the means of representing
authority and identity: ﬁnally there is a confounding oscillation between text and voice
for Joyce’s creations, making their/our speciﬁc distinctions ambiguous at best,
because, according to Kershner, "each generic identiﬁcation carries with it a
multitude of intertexts of greater or lesser resonance. ”6 In other words, an inﬂux of
sense and of meanings complicates one’s ability to read and interpret what the voices
are saying and to whom the voices belong, even when they seem to be emanating
from Stephen.

Joyce’s ﬁctional writings are a distinct web, weaving and unweaving,
proposing, from the ﬁrst, issues of negotiating the problematic interdependent
relationship among the voices of the author, narrator, and character. One’s attempt to
distinguish whether or not Stephen and Joyce are in fact the same person creates one
of the earliest controversies surrounding Joyce’s writing. If one denies their kinship
or attempts to reduce their obvious dependence upon one another, then one is
obviously erroneously overlooking or ignoring volumes of biographical evidence to
the contrary. Joyce’s ﬁctions insist that we know a considerable amount about the
author’s personal life. However, if one insists that these two entities, the author and
his creation, share extensive commonalities, at least up to the writing of the novel,
then the role of the artist may be severely debilitated. The artist must be free, by
Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetic principles, to create. To model one’s artistic creation
only on what already exists is to destroy artistic freedom, by systematically reducing
imagination to a minor role in the creative process. Joyce conﬂates the two, pure
creation juxtaposed with creation based on biography, in order to confound. The text
is never static nor is one’s interpretation of a situation, because the authority of the

95

 

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narrati
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voice telling the story is already suspect: nonﬁction blurs with ﬁction in Joyce’s
narrative, vertiginously disallowing certitude with regard to a scene’s or a character’s
validity -- alluding that such a question is not valid itself. Thus the most elementary
attempt to read Joyce is already an attempt to deconstruct Joyce.

The issue of religion and Joyce’s adherence to Roman Catholicism is one such
obstacle that many critics have attempted to comprehend. Do Stephen’s thoughts on
the Church represent Joyce’s? J. Mitchel Morse attempts to answer this question and
in so doing creates an even greater problem of negotiating the interstitial relationship
between the author and the voice(s) he created, as well as the even more problematic
discrepancy between voice and authority:

In this [rebellion against intellectual meekness and the Jesuit life of obedience]

Stephen’s life parallels that of Joyce; and with whatever detachment the author

viewed his hero, there is reason to believe that on religion and on art their

views were identical.7

Much like a spider’s web, if one pulls on one strand the entire thing unravels; if one
accepts this premise regarding the inherent parallel of art and religion, then an even
greater blurring coincides. The point of this peristasis is to illuminate the signiﬁcance
of Joyce’s experiments, not to diminish the work of another. The fact that Joyce is
the author of both of these novels is obviously not under suspicion on either side of
this question. The signiﬁcance of this idea is that as the attempts mount to distinguish
the difference among the vocal resonances that exist within the text, something much
more profound is possible, namely the study of the movement between the texts, from
each other and from their teller. Oscillating authorities and voices focus the attention
of the reader to the multiplicity of perspectives possible within the narrative that only

96

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Joyce's
of the c
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seems to be about a single perspective.

This initial complexity of Joyce’s novels is pivotal in one’s understanding of
Joyce’s aesthetic principles. The boundaries that supposedly would separate the voice
of the creator from those of the created, although not absent, are indeed vacillating,
giving rise to an alterity of identities within the web of signiﬁcation that one would
call Stephen Hero or A Portrait. This movement, which implies "proximate self
presences," according to Homi K. Bhabha in Location of Culture, creates liminal
spaces within a single city, within the relative constructions of author and character,
and assuredly within the readers’ minds. These liminal spaces remain:

in between the designations of identity [and] become the process of symbolic

interaction, the connective tissue that constructs the difference the temporal

movement and passage that it allows, prevents identities at either end of it
from settling into primordial polarities. This interstitial passage between ﬁxed
identiﬁcations opens up the possibility of a hybridity that entertains
difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.8
Thus the movement that exists between creator and created in Joyce’s earliest novels
already prevent these "primordial polarities. " The function of the boundary of
difference between author and character already prevents any deﬁnitive answers: the
voice of the author, the voice of the character, and the narrative voice interact on
levels that continually alter and shift. The narrative voice of A Portrait changes as
Stephen changes, yet it seems to retain control over the text while simultaneously
allowing for the representation of a variety of perspectives.

Joyce is always intimately present in his texts, often violating notions of

authority within the work’s context. One sees this type of intimacy most prevalent in

97

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the ”Circe” episode of Ulysses and obviously throughout Finnegans Wake, but such an
intimacy exists in Stephen Hero and A Portrait too. The assumed polarity between
author and character is shown to be far more complex than simple notions of self and
Other. In one sense, Stephen’s story can be read as Joyce’s self-analysis. Stephen
exists as a type of medieval mirror of the self, that allows for a type of reintegration.
In this sense, the novel is autobiographical, because, as such, autobiography is the
diachronic interplay of selves housed in a type of double consciousness.

Stephen also exists as the Other to himself, the juxtaposed counterpart of the
mirror image: in so doing, Joyce becomes the beneﬁciary whereby he remains in a
process of fragmentation and reuniﬁcation. Within the space of enunciation that is the
novel, conceived as a mirror, Joyce produces objects of reference as well as processes
of representation, i.e. national identity, family, and religion. The novels are then the
enunciations of a type of secular meditation where author and character meet in the
act of writing: a type of dialogic soliloquy.

This stance, in Michel Beaujour’s reading9 proposes the "validity of
undertaking to write about the self, with no other purpose than to know the self in the
process of writing, profane meditation sets out once more in quest of a
transcendence.”‘° Joyce, 'steeled in the school of old Aquinas"u and educated by
the Jesuits, would have recognized the inherent historical and religious value of the
meditation -- ”the meditative soliloquy of a divided subject," as Beaujour terms it --
as well as its place in the study of the secular, profane individual attempting to
develop in a context hostile to its inclinations.12

A Portrait and Stephen Hero work on a doubled plane if read as meditations:
they are the meditations of Stephen, pursuing his aesthetic theory and growing as the

98

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meditati
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artist recollecting the path that brought him to the point of writing; they are also the
meditations of James Joyce, who had done much the same thing, but now is the artist
creating another self to represent the paths as well as the memories. Stephen’s words,
in this context might as well be Joyce’s: ”He chronicled with patience what he saw,
detaching himself from it and testing its mortifying ﬂavour in secret" (P 67). The
tone and quality of these meditations are directly indebted to The Spiritual Exercises
of Ignatius of Loyola. This text’s meditative purpose is to instruct on how to be ”in
the world but not of the world. " The Jesuit meditation, in other words, seeks to
divide the subject along a contradictory axis: can a human being, who is worldly,
occupy a space in the world but simultaneously not be of the world? The meditations
that are part of the process of Joyce’s ﬁrst two novels occupy a similar contradiction,
because the character of Stephen is likewise of a paradoxical construction, created
upon the contradictory power inherent in voice to both represent as well as destabilize
representation. In this sense, the narrative voice is a type of medium, an odd
occupying presence who is illustrating the divided subject and in parts commenting
upon him, but who remains independent of the process and the product.

This stance, text as meditation or even text as confession further complicates
and destroys the possibility of the existence of deﬁnite binary constructions such as
self/Other or author/character, because the portrait within A Portrait is likewise a self
portrait of a character creating a self portrait. The circularity can be dizzying, but it
is relevant to a discussion of Joyce’s position within the text, as well as Stephen’s.
Michael Beaujour states:

The self portrait’s ethnology, like its archaeology, deals with the Other only to

say something about the writer himself; that he too is Other, savage, ancient,

99

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and that he feels more at home with what is radically different from his

present, his surroundings, his own culture.13
Thus, the alterity of the self is represented simultaneously with the development of the
self -- Stephen’s ideals as artist, rebel, son, lover, and exile, presented within the
dark mirror of the book, as well as the series of mirrors that reﬂect Dublin, the Irish,
and various political and aesthetic concepts. Beaujour’s idea in Poetics also works to
conceptualize the issue of the exile within, which becomes part of the novel’s ending,
where Stephen is set to ﬂy above his nets; as such, Joyce tells us, rhetorically as well
as physically, that to create the self, one must become the outcast, the Other. We had
seen this ostracism before with Mr. Duffy in ”A Painful Case,” but he simultaneously
lacked a modicum of self knowledge; he lacked interaction with other living voices
and so was not only an exile in his city but in his own mind.

When Cranly asks about Stephen’s former religious convictions, which are so
contrary to Stephen’s artistic devotion, Stephen states "I was someone else then I
was not myself as I am now, as I had to become (P 240).“ Time simultaneously
unites and divides the two states of consciousness, brought together via Stephen’s
memory and voice. Therefore, Stephen’s extended soliloquy, that can be either
novel, further complicates the notions of self and other, or the divided subject. In
this context, self and other are revised as self and former self. Augustine would
divide himself for his soliloquies by abstracting the quality of reason and pitting it
against an interlocutor named Augustine. Stephen may be establishing a purely
academic difference for the sole purpose of evading responsibility, but it begs the
question regarding self consciousness. He is underscoring the idea that time alters
selﬂtood, while simultaneously calling attention to his own recognition of himself then

100

and non

his sens

present

Dedalus
relative

that rev:
a desk,

powerle.
Place hit
words h.
and fadi
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self, as l
‘0 see in
93), Ste

as a diVit

and now, ostensibly moving in two opposite directions.

The representation of Stephen’s alterity juxtaposed with that which produced
his sense of identity, manifests itself, via a collision of real and imagined past and
present discourses, when Stephen and Simon venture to Cork to sell off the remaining
Dedalus property and to visit Simon’s former school. What gets played out is the
relative and seemingly incompatible authorities of written and spoken voice in a scene
that revisits Simon’s past. The word, ”Foetus" carved into the dark stained wood of
a desk, gives to Stephen "a vision of their life, which his father’s words had been
powerless to evoke" (P 89). Words on signboards, which Stephen can barely read,
place him ”beyond the limits of reality” (P 92). It is then that he feels that with
words he can summon the dead, like he summons his past reveries. Pondering death
and fading out like a ﬁlm in the sun, lost and forgotten in the universe, Stephen’s act
of prosopopeia turns inward and re-presents the memory of his former, childhood
self, as well as Stephen’s imaginary re-vision of Simon’s childhood: "It was strange
to see his small body appear again for a moment: a little boy in a grey-belted suit" (P
93). Stephen can represent himself, as Joyce represents the notion of the artistic self,
as a divided subject, alienated from that little boy in the grey suit, objectifying and
transforming the past via the associations of voices and distinct memories. This, in a
sense, is the ﬁrst draft version of what would become Stephen’s theory of
Shakespeare-as—his-own-creator, which gets played out in the "Scylla and Charybdis"
episode of Ulysses. Stephen re-creates his father’s past, and in so doing, revises his
own past in order to alter his present and future --- all via an imaged act of memory.
From written words, voices transcribed, (seemingly ﬁxed in wood and on signposts)
Stephen creates a perspective of a life he has never experienced, memory as

101

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physical

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and um-
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invention; simultaneously he recalls a life terribly distant from the one he is living,
physically as well as emotionally.

Voice reveals this temporal lag between the little boy and Stephen -- the self
and not-self -- or the self that was. Stephen believes that written language holds a
supreme place over spoken discourse, because the wood-word ”Foetus" appears to
have an authority superior to the voice of the father, Simon; however the reality that
it conjures for Stephen is not necessarily true, and furthermore, Stephen’s imagination
and ability to play with voices, rather than a dead word carved in wood, create the
scene: ”[Hle seemed to feel the absent students of the college about him A broad
shouldered student with a moustache was cutting in the letters with a jackknife" (P
89). One written word triggers certain powerful images that allow Stephen to
transcend the moment of his father’s nostalgia; however voice -- the voice of the
written word and of the narrative -- always already presented to us as written text,
poses the paradoxical temporary nature of those ”wooden" images as the narrative
conﬂates the voices of Stephen and Simon, as well as the relative juxtapositions of
real and imagined pasts. Stephen emerges greater than the father, able to recall the
dead with a profound self-consciousness of his unique position among the members of
his family. However, the voices that Stephen conjures may have little similarity to
those that existed in reality.

Stephen believes in the superior power of the written over the spoken, but the
narrative illustrates the presence of voice behind both spoken and written language.
For Stephen, written signs take priority, but what the reader is allowed to witness is
Stephen’s ability to verbally play with the text, forcing it back, at the moment of
imagination, to its previous spoken medium through mimicry and memory, both of

102

whici

out 01

constr
Stepht
author
his mi
Stepht
repres
Stephe
distinc
family

his pre

which are processes of invention. The effect is to throw, once again, time and space
out of joint.

Stephen’s power over voice and language is, however, tempered and
constrained by circumstance: Simon is selling off the last of the family land and
Stephen’s previous life of privilege is forever gone. Stephen’s position in society, his
authority and identity are more insecure than ever. His historical legacy, as well as
his mitigated present, are being sold off piecemeal. Through his father’s impotence,
Stephen’s inheritance and his birthright, as eldest son, are lost. Voice, therefore, also
represents the ﬂuidity of his identity -- he is in ﬂux. The lack of difference between
Stephen’s temporal moment and his father’s schooldays simultaneously reiﬁes other
distinctions, i.e. Stephen’s own self-alienation and his feeling of separation from his
family. Stephen moves from recollections as a "leader afraid of his own authority” to
his present existence of ”[o]ne humiliation after another” (P 91, 93).

A similar process is represented when Stephen wins £33 from the essay
contest; written verbal resonances present an apotheosis as well as the inevitable
tragic fall. This scene is signiﬁcant, because for a brief period, Stephen is the
provider: he usurps his father’s position monetarily as well, through acts of writing
and speaking --- language ”read” thwarts the position of the father.

Memory as invention begins the novel A Portrait itself where a narrative
voice, aligned with Stephen’s, tells ”Once upon a time and a very good time it was
there as a moocow coming down along the road” (P 7). It begins as a third person
narrative, ”His father told him that story He was baby tuckoo;" it is hardly
disruptive, since memory as a literary device often places the subject in such a
position of presence and absence. One can read the novel as Stephen’s perspective

103

regart
mm
or mo
voice

origin
Stephe
narratt
comm:

Conscit

regardless of the missing "I,” a move demonstrated throughout Dubliners where the
narrative is swayed by the presence of a character, Kenner’s Uncle Charles Principle,
or more precisely the narrative technique of free indirect discourse. The narrative
voice and Stephen’s voice intertwine so effectively that it is impossible to discern the
origin of the verbal resonances represented. Most likely, the narrative voice is not
Stephen’s, because, as Michael Gillespie illustrates, free indirect discourse keeps the
narrator detached from the character; the narrative often poses some ironic
commentaries about Stephen, positing a separate but intimately involved
consciousness:

[D]escriptive segments bearing traces of Stephen’s personality do not

simultaneously establish his consciousness as the indisputable source of the

narrative voice use of second- and third-person pronouns blurs direct
association with Stephen’s consciousness, yet the images do not present the
complete conjunction of principal character and narrator.ls
The narrative voice, nonetheless, seems in places to be Stephen’s voice posed as the
narrator, which helps to complicate this novel all the more, because as "A Painful
Case” revealed, a more removed style of prose could suggest a greater proximity
between narrator and character.

Like the ﬁrst three stories in Dubliners, much of A Portrait is presented as
relative constructions of memory, initially from Stephen’s childhood; if extrapolated,
the entire novel is a representation of, as well as a commentary upon, Stephen’s
recollections of his development as an artist, blurred with the perspective of a
narrative voice whose stylistic and syntactic qualities alter and shift as Stephen
matures. Joyce’s use of memory, like his use of the mirror, is medieval in ﬂavor and

104

speci1
memr
Story.
conch
novel
as a It
openit
who n

Where;

to exis
in A P
“Tiling

ll-TitIEn

speciﬁcally Augustinian, who stated that memory was invention. The earliest
memory recorded in A Portrait is the story of the ”moocow," a story that was ”his”
story, namely Stephen’s, told to him by his father who had a hairy face. The
conclusion of the novel is of Stephen writing, which may or may not become the
novel that the reader completes. We get a movement from the spoken to the written
as a representation of Stephen’s development as a writer. It is obvious from the
opening pages of A Portrait that oral stories have a profound impact upon Stephen,
who must struggle with the problematic divisions between written and spoken voice,
whereas the reader must contend with their elision in the text.

As I discussed of Dubliners, memory allows for an odd then-and-now quality
to exist in those stories of youth. A similar discrepancy of time and space is present
in A Portrait, but our realization of the trap does not occur until we "see" Stephen
writing in his journal, until we encounter the overlap between a written text and a
written text about a written text.

Joyce’s use of memory not only helps to skew once again the authorial
identities of author and character, it helps to conceptualize the process of invention
inherent in the structure of the novel and stories themselves. As Phillip Herring
concludes his study of Joyce, "From early to late in Joyce’s work one ﬁnds an
uncertainty principle responsible for obfuscation; its effect is to make readers think
harder, to question what is missing, and with absence in mind to interpret what is
present in the text.16 The representation of memory serves to blur even further the
boundaries between voices and authorities; it helps to problematize the value placed
on authorial intent, as well, since memory can and often does present inaccurate and
even false reclamations of the past. Cognitively one’s identity is closely aligned with

105

one’s
exper

char at

epiph:
evenn
structt
Openh

Vance

one’s memory: we believe we are who we are because we are conscious of our
experiences. Within A Portrait, which uses representations of memory as its central
character matures, ﬁctional narrative and prosopography converge and reorientate.
Within Stephen Hero, one encounters Stephen’s habit of writing down
epiphanies -- those moments that reveal the unexpected realization from various
events -- in a very obvious, deliberate and intense representation. The narrative
structure of Dubliners parallels the observations in these epiphanies, as does the
opening section of A Portrait where Dante, to get Stephen to apologize to Eileen
Vance and her parents, repeats "Pull out his eyes,/Apologise ..." (P 8). Thus all
three books, Joyce ’s Epiphanies, Stephen Hero, and A Portrait share a type of
dialogic convergence, that is articulated explicitly in Stephen Hero:
[Hle would suddenly hear a command to be gone, to be alone, a voice
agitating the very tympanum of his ear He would obey the command
and then he would return home, with a deliberate, unﬂagging step piecing
together meaningless words and phrases with deliberate unﬂagging seriousness.
(SH 31)
This passage reveals this unusual convergence of textual temporalities and
methodologies, a method that reveals a type of recollection of a world of unknown
voices that compel one to create and paratactically arrange meaningless words; in
turn, this process illuminates one of Joyce’s methods of invention, as Stanislaus
conﬁrms Joyce’s own habit of writing down "’epiphanies’ -- manifestations of
revelations always brief sketches, hardly ever more than some dozen lines

always very accurately observed and noted, the matter being so slight. ”‘7

106

Whit:

that l

after

Stepht
novel:
imagit
people
ﬁction
simulc
histori.
Bakhti
of way

15 Wel.

re«idin!
lourna:
35 mat
amwa

Memory, for Joyce, participates in a grand notion of hybridity, much akin to
Whitman’s in ”Song of Myself” where he stands as the pivot, recipient of everything
that has come before and is simultaneously the " good manure” for all that will grow
after him. This hybridity is the result of the dialogic interaction between Joyce and
Stephen, between narrator and character, between past and present. As well, the
novels present various dialogical relationships among a wide range of voices, real or
imagined, because Joyce constructed a type of historical novel: he used historical
people whom he knew to construct characters, to create a prosopography, in his
ﬁctional narrative. All authors do so, but Joyce’s veil is often thin, representing
simultaneously -- as would a palimpsest or Freud’s ”Mystic Writing Pad" -- the
historical with the ﬁctional.18 "The major characters and their worlds," according to
Bakhtin, ”are not deaf to one another; they intersect and are interwoven in a multitude
of ways“; such a theory would equally apply to the interweaving among characters,
as well as the world outside the text, both of which for Joyce continually oscillate.

John Paul Riquelme, in Teller and Tale in Joyce’s Fiction suggests such a
reading of A Portrait, namely that Stephen is both character and narrator, and that the
journal begun at the novel’s conclusion, exists prior to the book itself, since Stephen
as mature artist creates himself as character. Riquelme ﬁnds this narrated monologue
a rewarding interpretation of A Portrait, since it allows Riquelme to read ”Stephen as
character and as narrator . .. both the immature and the mature artist, both Icarus and
Daedalus. "2" Hugh Kenner in gym, contemplating a world where Ulysses had
never been written, postulates that of all the works written by Joyce, only the thirty-

six poems of Chamber Music are ”easy to imagine Stephen writing."" Although

107

rear
as a
mist
app:
'10)
valu.

Godt

inext

ofth

reading Stephen’s theory on Shakespeare in Ulysses could certainly suggest this theory
as a possibility, Joyce’s aesthetic principle involving multiple perspectives, multiple
misunderstandings, and numerous voices often speaking at once, would discount this
apparent singularity. According to Michael Gillespie, through this multiplicity,
"Joyce calls into question the primacy of the single voice."22 One interpretation can
value a single but emerging consciousness, but like Beckett’s leaf in Waiting for
Godot or Joyce’s Man in the Mackintosh, a range of possibilities creates a richer text.
It seems to Riquelme that ﬁnally the voices of narrator and character are
inextricably fused with ”no means for disentangling Stephen’s attitudes from the voice
of the narrator who speaks them. The two voices are linked ....'23 Potential clues
are that we are never without Stephen’s perspective, even when the narrative is
representing the voices and perspectives of other characters, such as the Christmas
dinner scene: although easy to forget, Stephen is never absent from the narrative.
The more substantial clue rests in the novel’s end where Stephen begins to write in
his diary and vows to forge the conscience of his race within the smithy of his soul.
Riquelme reads this conclusion as the seeds of the beginning of the very novel that the
reader has just completed. However, this ending reveals a "failure of integration
[of]" an ”acute disequilibrium [between]" process and style --- of process and
product, as Riquelme explains, because the reader experiences, indirectly, this linkage
and this disturbance via the author’s act, not Stephen’s. This failure "provides
grounds for interpreting A Portrait as preposterous in that word’s etymological sense.
Before and after, pre- and post-, are made to exchange places and to interact

reciprocally. ”2‘ Memory provides the context and the means for this preposterizt'ng

108

of

his

A}

int

witl

emu
son
aPPT
at w
appn
their
Uhss
rema
POrtr.
OISE

[he “

artistic
psFChC

of the narrative that in effect creates the tensions between the story that is being told
and the means of telling that story. This tension, in turn, becomes the very means of
inventing the story, via voice, that is taking place: Joyce’s chaotic/chiasmic aesthetics.
A Portrait is a novel about ”the transforming of a character into an artist in which
style regularly turns character into a teller. "25 Although interesting and thorough in

its focus, Riquelme neglects with this hypothesis that it is Joyce who writes A Portrait
with this simultaneous disparity and proximity between narrator and character.

Along Riquelme’s lines of interpretation, A Portrait is a novel about a
character named Stephen who is developing into an artist, who in turn tells his own
story; however, this portrait cannot be brought to close, because one can never
approach the point at which Stephen actually sits down to write A Portrait -- the point
at which memory becomes written narrative: that suggested point can only be
approached asymptotically. The narratives must remain a sufﬁcient distance from
their subject’s culmination as an artist. Furthermore, Stephen Hero, A Portrait, and
Ulysses too, for that matter, as literary self-portraits of James Joyce must likewise
remain a certain distance behind their actual, living creator. The narrative of A
Portrait, nonetheless, hybridizes the character-teller position for the characterization
of Stephen. This early novel is speciﬁcally about a young artist, how he perceives
the world, and how he integrates and manipulates the voices that surround him within
a narrative presented in the third person. As a creation of memory, the novel is an
artistic study of and by the artist himself, presenting memory as a type of
psychoanalytic mirror whereby the artist becomes, in Lacanian terms, simultaneously

the analyst and the analysand, once again conﬂating, subverting, and inverting the

109

[Elli

moi
ohm
dﬁh
mni
Sum

net—e

degre
eXUa
mom
auho
amob
rem;
rePres
with n
lilo
MiChe
iMMﬁ
memo
that J0:

terms and positions of subjectivity.

Through free indirect discourse, narrative and narration, because of the
problematic representation of voice, fuse in Joyce’s novels, where the narrative voice
often takes on verbal characteristics of a character; both supposed entities lose
deﬁnition. The alignment of character with narrator in A Portrait conﬂates the
distinctions between narrative and narration speciﬁcally when the ”styles characterize
Stephen’s thoughts,"26 according to Riquelme. Just as in ”A Painful Case" we are
never without Mr. Duffy’s perspective, but free indirect discourse accounts for the
narrative shifts and tone of ”A Painful Case. " The same, with obviously a greater
degree of sophistication, can be said for A Portrait. Joyce blurs the diegetic with the
extra—diegetic. The reader’s take on this blurring often creates other numerous
problems when s/he attempts to conﬂate the unique characteristics and positions of
author/text and narrator/character. One cannot obviously turn A Portrait into an
autobiography of Joyce, despite its autobiographical elements; it is also difﬁcult to
read it as the autobiography of Stephen. The proximity of narrative to narration,
represented and obscured by voice, pushes us to assume certain textual tendencies
with no real evidence, i.e. the narrator of the novel is Stephen. To make this move,
i.e. to legitimize the shift in focus to the author himself, can be done, according to
Michel Beaujour, ”only if book, author, life, and work are all one."27 To fuse these
entities, for Joyce, would be impossible, because A Portrait is not ﬁxed as such. To
interrogate these entities is indeed valuable, because one must investigate the process
that Joyce is performing as one’s part in reading the novel. The novel, therefore,

resists closure on this thematic level as well as on a structural level.

110

In performing such an interrogation of the text along the lines of an
autobiographical agenda, the reader needs to ﬁnd out which elements are
autobiographical and which are ﬁctional, but for Joyce, the author creating the text,
who refuses traditional hegemonic positions, those terms are unﬁxed as well. Arthur
Power’s Conversations with James Joyce and also James Joyce: Interviews and
Recollections give insight into Joyce’s blurring of the ﬁctional with the biographical.
Recollections of Power and such others as John Francis Byme (Cranly) reveal a
signiﬁcant reliance on real events and real people: in many instances, Joyce has not
altered anything except for the names, and sometimes not even that. In other places,
Joyce’s reliance upon historical accuracy is diminished. This inconsistency calls
attention, in a sense, to the mutual impossibilities of the existences of biography and
pure ﬁction.

In addition to these unﬁxed categories, the counterpositioning of autobiography
with biography is, in part, what Beaujour studies in Poetics. Beaujour extensively
focuses on a similar complex and unﬁxed text, Robert Laporte’s Fugue. Laporte
chose to elide the differences between biography and that which is perceived as
autobiography. Beaujour states ”This paradox announces an ’anti-auto—biography’
Anyone wishing to comment on Fugue sentence by sentence, sequence by sequence,
would be led to elaborate a theory of the theory, or simply, as is more likely, to
paraphrase Laporte’s text, which is already, and remains, a metalanguage. " Beaujour
calls it an anti-auto—biography, not because Fugue cannot be read as autobiography,
but because to read it as such means to miss "precisely the development of the

game. '28 The text is doing a great deal more than simply telling about the author’s

111

 

life; the language and the narrative participate in a performance that is center stage,
reducing the pivotal position of the autobiographical premise.

In similar fashion, Joyce creates a similar ”antiauto-biography" and we are
urged to attempt a resurrection of the process that Joyce wrote through, to devise a
theory of the theory, which simultaneously strands us en route. These early novels do
more than tell us the life story of a young artist; they perform a speciﬁc aesthetic and
artistic function, they test the reader, and they ask probing questions regarding the
nature of art.

In addition to a study of biography, memory allows both novels to probe the
dialogic relationship of culture, identity, and authority: Stephen listens to and
manipulates the literal and ﬁgurative voices that surround him, making and remaking
them into his own artistic creations. Phillip Herring points out that, in A Portrait, ”it
is through words, language that Stephen Dedalus comes to know the world around
him, his reality being continually shaped by vocabulary acquisition. '29 While
listening to Simon and Uncle Charles speak constantly of ”subjects nearer their
hearts,” Stephen listens avidly and absorbs their speech: ”Words which he did not
understand he said over and over to himself till he had learned them by heart: and
through them he had glimpses of the real world about him” (P 62). Joyce, like
Bakhtin’s analysis of Dostoevsky, was inﬂuenced by this dialogic culture. As Bakhtin
states of Dostoevsky’s ”participants,” Stephen too is a participant ”in the act
stand[ing] on the threshold (on the threshold of life and death, falsehood and truth,
sanity and insanity). And they are presented here as voices, ringing out, speaking out
...."3° Stephen’s movements throughout the novels are continuously punctuated by
the hearing of and listening to voices: big voices, voices without a point of origin,

112

overheard voices, inhuman voices, and accented or authorial voices. Such interests

are more prominent in Joyce’s later works, but this type of development of Stephen

reveals a sophisticated and often obsessive interest in the intermingling of words and
voices, often independent of any bodily source.

One witnesses this interest speciﬁcally in Stephen’s pondering about English as
an acquired language, most obviously in his encounter with the priest over the words
”funnel” and 'tundish.” Stephen does not know the word ”funnel,” and the priest
assumes that Stephen’s word is Irish. The fact that it is English -- ”and good old
blunt English too" -- gives Stephen the further impetus to continue to deconstruct the
verbal resonances that surround him in his linguistic environments. It is precisely at
the level of language that Stephen begins to deﬁne himself against the backdrop of
Irish Catholic life. Speciﬁcally this war is waged through his conception of voice as
a signifying process. The text forces us to read chiastically spoken and written
voices, to call attention to Stephen’s own developing understanding of himself as a
being constructed by the dialogization of verbal languages.

Regarding the discrepancy between the two words, Stephen thinks/speaks:

--- The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How

different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I

cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so

familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not

made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. (P 189)

Joyce has placed Stephen in a unique and powerful position. As Irish, he is a
linguistic-outsider; English is an imposed language. Examined another way, Joseph
Valente considers such passages to reveal ”the fruits of the two-front struggle against

113

 

British capitalism and Irish feudalism,” two sides of the same coin.31 It is
speciﬁcally relevant because, for the Irish, a sense of linguistic autonomy must
emerge paradoxically from the language of the Other. The scene above, where
Stephen ponders on the sounds of words as he speaks them, as opposed to the way the
priest does, continues a younger Stephen’s thoughts regarding God’s comprehension
of human language as a means of identifying the person praying: "when anyone
prayed to God and said Dieu then God knew at once that it was a French person that
was praying” (P 16). Thus, language is identity, as voice is agency and subjectivity,
as speaking and thinking are conﬂated in the text (again Stephen’s thoughts are often
represented exactly as his spoken words). It is voice that will keep the priest’s words
”at bay,” and it is the particularity of language, not its speciﬁcity, that will identify
the pilgrim to his/her God.

The fact that the priest makes a misjudgement regarding Stephen’s word choice
also calls attention to the lack of precision, a human frailty, attributable to the earthly
Church; the priest does not realize that Stephen’s tundish is English, and so the
Church’s presence, as represented by the priest’s linguistic misunderstanding, is again
hybridized and relativized, intimating that what lies between necessarily, as well as
accidentally, contributes to the larger conversation taking place in the guise of
monologic discourse.

Implicit in this childhood reminiscence is, of course, the fact that the Irish
speak an imposed language, and are therefore, in one sense, unidentiﬁable to God as
distinctly Irish. This situation is both the foundation for Stephen’s later rebellion, his
declaration that he will not serve, as well as the revelation, as Bakhtin states, that
language is no longer ”a sacrosanct and solitary embodiment of meaning and truth,

114

[it] becomes merely one of the many possible ways to hypothesize meaning."32 If
the equation is that voice is identity and voice is nationalism, Stephen already feels
disconnected from the Church and with Ireland, precisely at the level of voice, long
before we see him prepared to take ﬂight. As the text also reveals when Stephen sits
thinking of his relationship to his family, it is again the representation of voice that
underscores the gap between them.

As such, Stephen’s has no sense of national ﬁdelity; the loss of linguistic
authority gives Stephen the self-conscious power to reject, refuse, and yet return the
calls of Ireland: ”My ancestors threw off their language and took another . .. They
allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in
my own life and person debts they made? What for" (P 203)? Stephen’s and Joyce’s
sense of national identity have already been relativized, because Ireland had long ago
lost, in Bakhtinian terms, its ”sealed off and self sufﬁcient character;" the country, by
virtue of its colonial status, and moreover its loss of linguistic and political autonomy,
was ”conscious of itself as only one among other cultures and languages” as Bakhtin
states when a linguistic culture ﬁnally loses its sense of possessing a unitary,
canonical language. When this occurs, Bakhtin states, ”only then will language reveal
its essential human character; from behind its words, forms, styles, nationally
characteristic and socially typical faces begin to emerge, the images of speaking
human beings. "33 This relativization and dialogization of languages into speaking
voices implies a simultaneous reduction and expansion of identity, a liberating
position that allows for Stephen’s unique inside/outside perspective.

Stephen’s statement regarding English as always an acquired language is a
multifaceted response to the decay of Ireland’s linguistic and epistemological center,

115

because of this loss of linguistic certainty; A Portrait ﬁnds support in what Bakhtin
calls the ”social heteroglossia of national languages that are actually spoken.” This
idea is all the more prevalent when we turn to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, but it is
no less relevant here --- Stephen Hero and A Portrait represent the oscillating and
interweaving of relative voices tenuously contextualized within a premise of a
development of an artistic mind.

Irish identity is presented to the reader as a ﬁgure outside, excluded from life
by virtue of its loss of agency. Throughout the story, however, Stephen is likewise
posed as an exile on many fronts, not only politically and linguistically: he feels
somehow unrelated to his family, even to Maurice, the brother to whom in Stephen
Hero, he was so close; in A Portrait Maurice disappears altogether, although in
Ulysses he reappears when Stephen thinks of him as his ”Whetstone. " Regarding
Simon and his father’s cronies, Stephen realizes that "[h]is mind seemed older than
theirs: it shone coldly on their strifes and happiness ..." (P 95); he resists the Gaelic
league’s emphasis to learn Irish; and, because of his artistic temperament, he is
marked as Other among his contemporaries.

Throughout both novels, Stephen is continuously placed on the threshold of
becoming, in the intersticial space between potential and actual. Even Riquelme’s
premise of Stephen’s dual position within the text, ”Stephen as teller and Stephen as
character all merge in the book’s oscillating focus," presents Stephen in the act of
becoming from the perspective of the novel; we do not have the ﬁnished artist but
merely the portrait of a young man who may go on to become the artist that may

create the novel. The narrative voice presents us with Stephen’s memories through

116

free indirect discourse, but the difﬁcult distinctions between narrative voice and
Stephen’s voice make the complete conﬂation of the two impossible. However, A
Portrait thematically retains the representation of the isolated artist, which is begun in
Stephen Hero: the narrative voice is oddly exterior to Stephen thoughts and feelings,
despite its intimacy, which we have shared since the moo-cow story. If read as
Stephen’s own narrative, he is likewise an exile, not only in the city, as Umberto Eco
reads Ulysses, but an exile from himself. As a being on the threshold, he has left his
own context for another, but he is still en route -- now no longer what he was but not
yet what he wants to be: artist, rebel, or exile.

Most assuredly, however, Stephen’s interstitial position does more than pose
him in the act of becoming, because Joyce begins to conﬂate the apparent binaries
that would divide Stephen’s consciousness, i.e. past/present, death/life, English/lrish,
or self/Other, within such stylistic conﬂations as speaking and thinking, a merger
technically instrumented by free indirect discourse. The boundaries that Stephen
encounters, once he accepts his position as artist of the eternal imagination, vacillate.
The power of the Church, or perhaps better, the idea of the power of the Church, is
revealed to be corrupt, participative in the sin of simony; however, that revelation is
soon disparaged when the priest himself warns Stephen of his own condemnation
should he choose an insincere religious vocation. Thus, simultaneously, the Church is
both deﬁled institutionally and praised individually, and we are shown that it is an
internal temptation, an attribute of his pride that urges him to join the Jesuits, as the
words ”The Reverend Stephen Dedalus, S.J. leaped into characters before his

eyes” (P 161).

117

 

This division is theologically and philosophically ﬂawed, because the Church,
by its doctrine, cannot be reduced to the individual, and the larger context that offers
liberty for Stephen, hybridizes the authority of the Church, as we saw before in

"Grace. His pride is the source of his assumed vocation, not God. Stephen is posed
on the threshold, the place between, represented as a hybrid character, possessing
contradictory qualities which remain unresolved for the length of both novels. What
gets played out is Stephen’s rhetorical transformation, opposed in many ways to
Augustine’s parallel conversion from The Confessions. Augustine found the Bible,
initially, rhetorically unsatisfying only to be converted by its plain language and
sincerity, whereas Stephen tries to conceptualize the colors of words (one deﬁnition of
rhetoric) and ﬁnally has his ﬁnal metanoia, the profanation of the Beatiﬁc vision of
the Bird Girl. She is represented angelically, but his focus is earthly -- on her thighs
and skin. Thus the process of meditation, which is to bring us closer to heavenly
preoccupations, instead regrounds Stephen in worldly thoughts: pride of status and
women. However, the metanoia is simultaneously hybridized, because Stephen does
re-make the girl into a being of transcendent beauty.

Stephen’s interrogation of words is more than his attempt to codify and label
the rhetorics of language; he is attempting to understand his position between words
and their ability to associate and transcribe meaning. He has a unique relationship to
language; his identity is simultaneously grounded upon vocabulary acquisition, as well
as linguistic etymologies:

Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their

associations of legend and color? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he

was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reﬂection of the glowing

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sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly

storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions

mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?” (P 167)

Stephen’s dismantling of that which constructs him and makes him ponder his own
existence signiﬁes that it is not so much the way words look but their ability to move
and create ideas, as manifestations of voices in and out of relative contexts in
dialogue. As the so-called climax of his mental processes, Stephen becomes aware of
his ability to transcend time and place with language, things become visible to him
”across the timeless air ...” and it concludes with ”A voice from beyond the world”
calling to him (P 168).

The scene in question raises Stephen to a strange level of self-awareness
through the sound of words and the ability to create associations via the distortion of
their sounds: ”Hello, Stephanos Come along, Dedalus! Bous Stephanoumenos!
Bous Stephanemous" (P 168)! His experiences up to this point, which set the stage
for his re-presentation of the Bird Girl and ﬁnal comprehension of his mutual
rejection and acceptance of vocations, present to him his moment of re-transformation
through his re-presentation of his name which suddenly "seemed to him a prophecy. "
The toying with his name, the distortion of its sound value emphasizes the power of
verbal distortions over language. The distortions of ”Stephen” and ”Dedalus”, into
words that sound (more) Greek, give way to their etymological and mythological
resonances, the Greek artiﬁcer, and then to an image of the winged Icarus, the
transformation of ”sluggish matter of the earth [into] a new soaring impalpable
imperishable being" (P 169). Of course, Stephen’s rebirth must remain incomplete,
and ﬁnally an utter failure. The scene is constructed only in the imagination, a

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transitory, incomplete transcendence founded upon ethereal stuff, mythology, whose
message is also one of failure, because Icarus plummets to his death. Stephen is
forever in a process between, in this case, success and failure.

Through Stephen’s perspective, binaries are complements rather than
opposites, represented already in dialogue with each other: good/evil, self/Other,
Christ/Lucifer. These are generally two sides of a single reﬂectant. Mirroring in
these texts, in the absence of ﬁxed identities and subjects, multiplies the voices,
creating a heteroglossic polyvocality, the way an echo reverberates sound making it
seem as though the sound produced has no origin or ﬁxed location. Additional
complications arise, not so much because of these overlaps and vocalizations, but
because Joyce’s intent is purposely obscured, as M. Keith Booker states, ”Joyce
never supplies an authoritative viewpoint from which the multiplicity of social voices
sounding in his texts can be judged.” Joyce is writing the book of himself but
never giving dominant authority to any one voice, not even his own.

A Portrait and Stephen Hero are both serio-comical novels, because they fully
participate in the carnivalization of life and of the novel, as a genre. Both novels, but
A Portrait especially, possess intense parodic episodes wherein they mock themselves,
as well as the actual world outside the text for which the novels provide a mimetic
context of ridicule, condemnation, and potential resurrection. They are examples of
”syncretic pageantry of a ritualistic sort. ”3‘ Joyce constructs the narrative as a
profanation, Bakhtin’s fourth carnivalistic category: "carnivalistic blasphemies, a
whole system of carnivalistic debasings and bringings down to earth, carnivalistic
Obscenities linked with the reproductive power of the earth and the body, carnivalistic
parodies on sacred texts and sayings‘etc. "37 This profanation provides the rationale

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for the instability of identities and authorities across the spectrum of various voices
and characters; it is both the power Stephen has over the authorized voices in the
novel, as well as his greatest frustration: few recognize him as an artistic or aesthetic
authority. By virtue of this position, Stephen rests uncomfortably in that place
between, the individual who has the uncanny ability to deconstruct authority and
identity, and yet who is the victim of that same destabilization. Stephen’s identity is
ﬂuid as the novel progresses: the bildungsroman provides a context of maturation,
ironically, to help stabilize, but the pageantry itself continues; Stephen’s lack of ﬁxity
remains forefront even when he becomes the self-proclaimed artist. A Portrait
illustrates that the artist is simultaneously divided and subdivided along with everyone
else, yet he recognizes that forces are at work pulling him asunder. As Bakhtin states
in Problems of Dostoevsky ’s Poetics, everyone participates in the carnival ization of
life, in the ritualistic syncretic pageantry.

When Stephen stands there at the conclusion of A Portrait prepared to take
ﬂight, he is acknowledging through writing, since he is scribbling in his diary, that
one cannot come to understand his/her context without leaving that context; Stephen’s
topos and his tropos, his position and his turning, must be rejected and shifted in
order for him to return, metaphorically at least, and create that consciousness of his
race. He must remove himself in order to examine where he had been --- in one
sense, this is the basis of the Uncertainty Principle that Phillip Herring explores,
albeit not in this rhetorical sense. Thus at the novel’s close, identity is hinged upon
seemingly antithetical actions: leaving and returning. Stephen must ﬂy above the nets
of family, Church, and state in order to construct some narrative of his and Ireland’s
familial, religious, and nationalistic identities. Joyce recognized that reality could

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only be suitably represented through the construction of unﬁxed, relative, and
paradoxically contradictory points of reference, largely based on voice: that ﬂuid,
metonymic symbolic chain. One can only return by leaving, self exists only by virtue
of its otherness, good is meaningless without evil, and light has no context without
darkness.

Such a conceptualization of identity necessarily provides the context that
Bhabha postulates, namely that community itself, is a dialogic ideological construct,
and therefore unﬁxed, ﬂuid, and moving. This movement, in turn, creates a unique
double-bind, rendering even the smallest articulation regarding life, in general,
suspect. If the carnival brings together opposites, ”uniﬁes, weds, and combines the
sacred with the profane," as Bakhtin states, it does so by revealing an essential lack
of deﬁnite opposition.38 Within the carnival, king becomes peasant, men become
women, sacred becomes profane in a ritual that suspends and reiﬁes difference,
revealing the assumptions authorized by ordered convention. Polarities exist largely
at the level of discourse. Stephen’s narrative reveals the freedom and frustration of
this type of reading of existence. It provides the epistemological foundation for the
continuous oscillation between proximity and distance, which reveals the double bind
of existence itself; if I am insigniﬁcantly different from everyone else, what makes
me ”me” and not somebody else? For Stephen in A Portrait what makes him
different from his family or from his former self is largely based on unﬁxed
discourse. Most of his articulated recognition of his separation from his family is
expressed and represented as unspoken thoughts -- his voice is readily apparent, but
that voice remains silent speaking.

Represented as spoken and unspoken discourse, Stephen’s imaginative

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meanderings lack closure and deﬁnition; he defends himself from the authority of the
Church by using rhetoric taught to him by the Jesuits: the gestalt shift that would free
him from Catholicism’s power is incomplete. There are no simple answers, and any
answers provide a reductive reading of the text. Stephen, in a sense, attempts to
speak from a place outside the ”cultural homogeneity,” by virtue of his position as
Irish artist, an exile within the city. He speaks as a divided subject on multiple
levels, culturally and spiritually, a schizophrenic who is experiencing, according to
Bhabha’s reading of the post-colonial subject:
a profound ascesis in the anonymity of the modern community and its
temporality, the meanwhile that structures its narrative consciousness from
the place of the ’meanwhile,’ where cultural homogeneity and democratic
anonymity articulate the national community, there emerges a more
instantaneous and subaltern voice of the people that speak betwixt and
between times and places.39
Thus, identity, hinged on voice and presencing, for Stephen becomes something self-
contradictory. He feels that he must develop his voice as an artist, and he must ﬂee
from the verbal resonances that sound through his voice, because his voice, his
consciousness of his race and his art, emerge in between, in a context where it is
suspect and negotiated. Stephen, in this case, wants to be the dominant voice,
possessing an unmitigated position of authority. What the narrative presents is that
Stephen can never possess this monologic status. If he ever has his Eureka
experience, it will come only after he gives into the idea that his is a relative and
reduced voice among many, always already hybridized.
Stephen resides in a paradoxical state of ”ﬁssured unity,” according to Joseph

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Valente —-- "a speciﬁc form of nonclosure,” which is the act of ”interpersonal
communication. ”4° In Bakhtinian terms, Stephen’s actions focus on the act of the
speaker who ”strives to get a reading on his own word and his own conceptual system
determining that word within the alien conceptual system of the understanding
perceiver."41 Thus, identity and subjectivity, because they are represented through
voice, are continually re-deﬁned by their simultaneous singularity and alterity.

A Portrait sits in another interstice that marks it as a hybrid text: it resides
within the historical juxtaposition between Romanticism and Modernism. Stephen is
clearly inﬂuenced by the Romantics, especially in his thoughts regarding poetry and in
his response to the Bird Girl, where his poetic muse descends upon him
instantaneously inspiring him ”to live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out
of life” (P 172). Represented as a non-physical climax, this scene has a sense of
delayed composition, indeed a recollection in tranquility. Even his composition of the
villanelle, inspired by and written for Emma or "E.C.", reveals an adherence to the
aesthetics of the Romantics, replete with exaggerated passion, romantic irony and the
anxiety that so typiﬁes those poets: "Are you not weary of ardent ways,/Lure of the
fallen seraphim?/Tell no more of enchanted days And still you hold our longing
gaze/With langorous look and lavish limb" (P 223)!

In Stephen Hero, he articulates his artistic theories and stresses a strong
Romantic aesthetic for experience and completeness, with which he also interprets as
essential in Aquinas: ”Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony, and
radiance. Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension” (SH 212, Joyce’s

italics)? What casts his disciples into thought enchanted silence is still Stephen’s

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‘15-'13; ‘

emphases on balance and on the apprehension of wholeness, the integritas, and the
”whatness" of the thing. For beauty, he quotes Shelley and Galvani to underscore its
otherworldly quality and capacity to enchant the heart.

However, Stephen’s interest in the new drama of Ibsen, reﬂected in both
Stephen Hero and A Portrait, casts a new light on this developing portrait, that
exempliﬁes both his dual nature, as well as the important dialogic relationship that
exists between Stephen and the novels and between the two literary movements.
Stephen states clearly that what has come before is no longer adequate to his vision
and aesthetics: "When we come to the phenomena of artistic conception, artistic
gestation, and artistic reproduction I require a new terminology and a new personal
experience” (P 209). And yet so much of Stephen’s artistic output remains Romantic.
The novel, itself, is Modernist, but Stephen is the subject between two literary
worlds. Representations of his thoughts and abilities show his belonging to one, but
as representor of language and voice, he belongs to another. Neither view, however,
offers a satisfactory rendition of him or his aesthetics.

These connections, as well as Stephen’s understanding of the need for
something beyond what has come before, however, reveal other voices. Joyce’s
novels remain within a network of varying and oscillating vocal characteristics,
showing A Portrait and Stephen Hero to be participative in a ”multiplicity of genres, "
of which the modern novel is always a participant. According to Kershner in Joyce,
Bakhtin and Popular Culture:

[the protagonist’s] mind, language, and sense of structure are in continuous

change. A Portrait participates in a multiplicity of genres --- Bildungsroman,

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Kunstlerroman, heroic romance, Victorian novel incorporating classical mythic

parallels, Victorian/Edwardian novel of the rebellion of Youth, Irish novel of

departure, Catholic novel of apostasy, naturalistic novel of urban poverty, to

name several -—- and each generic identiﬁcation carries with it a multitude of

intertexts of greater or lesser resonance.42
Thus, when one tugs on one end of this dialogic, heteroglossic resonance, more vocal
and literary connections come with it, until the text represents itself as a type of
medium allowing space and time to voices long since passed. The novel is therefore
prosopopeial, because it translates voices through space and time, serving as
chronotopic translator, breathing new life into them, while simultaneously calling
attention to their disjointedness. In other words, by translating voices, the novel calls
attention to its inability to translate voices thoroughly and completely. This
multiplicity, this unﬁnalizability, is indicative of A Portrait ’s resistance to closure, as
it rests tenuously in the interstices between authorities and identities, testifying to
what Bakhtin called "this unﬁnalizability of a man. "‘3

This multiplicity as well as this resistance toward closure is something that
both novels possess. At the end of A Portrait, Stephen is beginning a process of
recollection in order to create: memory as invention. In A Portrait, the ending has
Stephen clearly beginning a writing process that may or may not turn into an
autobiographical work, ostensibly a literary self-portrait. As Michel Beaujour argues
effectively in Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, such self-portraits are dependent on
the rhetoric of invention, and therefore dependent namely on anamnesis: the act of

remembering a memory. Once again it highlights the discrepancy between narrative

126

and narration, and between the voices of narrator and character. Stephen remains the
incomplete artist, caught between land and sea, Ireland and the Continent, Lucifer and
Christ, Icarus and Daedalus. The narrative voice could possibly be what Stephen
could become, but only if Stephen, like his position relative to the little boy in the
grey suit, becomes another ”I, " another subject.

Joyce is insisting that we, the readers, participate in the game whose rules are
imbedded in the text, and in so doing, the text asserts itself. Already by A Portrait,
this continuous ”play, " in Derrida’s sense of the word, is present and operational, and
is part of ”the struggle between writing and the ’counterwriting’, with gaps and
displacements that dislocate, articulate, and give play to the discourse that erases and
uncenters itself as it progresses,“4 according to Beaujour. Therefore the closing act
of Stephen composing and readying himself to take ﬂight with his bold mission, is the
very act that serves to dislocate the space between his own writing and the text which
reveals his writing to us. Like Chaucer’s or Langland’s pose, the narrative is
eavesdropping on Stephen’s internal monologue and then his private writing to create
a paradoxical simultaneity between intimacy and distance, between hope and failure.
In this sense, all of Joyce’s major ﬁctional work is participative in the action of
Mother Dana -- weaving and unweaving, Stephen’s theory of the work of the artist,
which is always an acknowledgement of the mutuality between creation and
destruction. The action of the artist is simultaneously the action of the reader in that
we too must participate in a process of reduction, destruction, death, and resurrection
by way of the interpretations placed upon the text(s) that we, as readers, help to
create.

Even early on in A Portrait and Stephen Hero, Joyce provides these gaps of

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writing and unwriting that produces a continuous work in progress, paradoxically
joining and separating voices in and around the texts; lacunae serve a conjunctive and
disjunctive function simultaneously, as Philip Kuberski suggests in The Persistence of
Memory:

[T]he essential, the irreducible or the fundamental is very like something

which is not there: an opening, a space, a gap which joins [separating

distances are] not evidence of alienation but the sign of an essential bond."5
Stephen’s attention to how voices are represented highlights the inherent movement of
perspective that insists on the conﬂation of identities and subjectivities throughout the
novels. Mimicry and memory of that act play an important part in the novels’
attempts to represent and misrepresent various identities and characterizations:

He [Simon] inclined his head, closed his eyes, and, licking his lips profusely,

began to speak with the voice of the hotel keeper Stephen, seeing and

hearing the hotelkeeper through his father’s face and voice, laughed. (P 29)
There is an interesting slippage between the narrative and Stephen’s attention to what
is happening, which illustrates the movement from distance to intimacy between these
two entities. The narrative states that Simon spoke ”with the voice" whereas Stephen
"sees and hears the hotelkeeper through his father’s face and voice. " Stephen’s
memory reiﬁes the voice imitated, giving it substance, and yet Simon, the imitator,
has little position or authority; like the men in ”Ivy Day” he ridicules from an empty
position.

Although both amount to much the same thing in the end, Stephen’s attention

is more precise and more critical and yet problematic since Stephen attributes so

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much power to the written word, and yet here he recognizes a unique power of the
spoken, a power dramatically on display at the start of the book. The scene of
mimicry (Simon mimics, Stephen mimics his father’s mimicry, and the narrative
mimics Stephen’s mimicry of his father’s mimicry) in turn asserts the movement of
perspective and disallows a certainty or ﬁxity of position of both the narrative voice
as well as the interpretive stance of the reader. What we are getting here in a single
passage is the division of perspectives from a single narrative voice. This dislocution
was jarring in a story like "Grace," where initially the narrator seems to know
nothing about poor Kernan, and then shows plenty once Mr. Power enters the room.
A Portrait is that much more insidious, because we are generally with one character,
and so the narrative reveals its own duplicitous position, as teller and liar. In this
sense, the distance between Stephen and the narrator alludes to a growing sense of
self, as Stephen learns to use voice to articulate and dislodge various authorities,
initially for humor but eventually to sustain his own sense of being and artistic
consciousness. Ironically, memory serves to sustain both his distinctiveness as well
as merge his identity with a myriad of other voices and texts that he encounters and
reconﬁgures. Stephen, as well as the narrator, create a palimpsest, erasing and re-
establishing narratives, voices, and character zones, to use Bakhtin’s term, in acts of
mimicry and parody.

On this level, the narrative/narration remains simultaneously and paradoxically
diegetic and mimetic, and continuously unﬁnished. A Portrait and Stephen Hero are
texts without closure, without ending, the "ever-in-progress-but-never-written-text[s],
the zero degree of writing that never achieves anything beyond an embryonic magma,
potentially containing the All,” as Beaujour writes regarding Le Livre de Mallarmé."6

129

The rhetorical stance of such a "book" illuminates a similar position of Joyce’s books.
They move, oscillate, and reveal a certain kind of life for themselves as such, but
they refuse to give the reader an ending that they, the texts-themselves, promise: a
portrait of the artist --- we see the artist becoming, but we do not see him emerge
fully-formed, complete, and ﬁnished. Such incompleteness, unﬁxity, and circularity
are certainly "responsible for obfuscation;" the novel is participative, after all, in the
uncertainty principle, speciﬁcally by Herring’s deﬁnition: "its effect is to make
readers think harder, to question what is missing, and with absence in mind to
interpret what is present in the text. ”‘7

Read side by side, Stephen Hero and A Portrait possess a complementarity,
reading each other as it were in the creation of Stephen. Individually, they are
simultaneously multiple texts, because of free indirect discourse and because of the
instability of voice: authority is suspect and identiﬁable vocal characteristics oscillate -
- some via Stephen’s maturation, others because of the interaction between narrative
voice and the voice of Stephen. There is a return, of sorts, in A Portrait, but never a
deﬁnitive, singular reading; A Portrait, the more articulate voice in the dialogue, also
reveals the continuing development of the young Joyce’s aesthetic principles and
constructions of voice in narrative and narration, and a movement away from the
more straightforward narratives, the kind in which Stephen Hero participates. Always
with Joyce’s ﬁction, however, we can approach a reading or an interpretation, only to
ﬁnd it shifting, as the voices of the text(s) engage our own, creating multiple and
variant novels.

Notes:

130

1. Joyce, Stanislaus. The Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce. Ed. George Harris
Healey. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1962: 25.

2. See my note in the previous chapter on the composition history for each of the
Dubliners stories.

3. Joyce signed ”The Sisters,” "Eveline,” and "After the Race" with the name
Stephen Daedalus, which all appeared in the Irish Homestead in 1904; he also signed
some of his letters as such. That spelling is consistent with Stephen in Stephen Hero
too; however the name is altered to ”Dedalus” for A Portrait and Ulysses.

4. Gillespie, Michael Patrick. Reading the Book of Himself: Narrative Strategies in
the Works of James Joyce. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1989: 14.

5. Joyce, Stanislaus. My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce ’s Early Years. NY: Viking
Press, 1958: 3.

6. Kershner, R.B. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Culture: Chronicles of Disorder.
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina P, 1989: 152.

7. Morse, J. Mitchell. The Sympathetic Alien: James Joyce and Catholicism.
Washington Square: New York University Press, 1959: 73.

8. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994: 4.

9. Michel Beaujour’s Poetics of the Literary Self Portrait presents a great many
examples of portraiture; however, I would like to point out that Joyce’s work is not
mentioned in his study.

10. Beaujour, Michel. Poetics of the Literary Self—Portrait. Trans. Yara Milos.
New York: New York UP, 1991: 58.

11. See ”The Holy Ofﬁce.” Joyce is judging as deﬁcient those who ”made [him] the
sewer of their clique” and in turn anticipates the envy from "those souls that hate the
strength that mine has/Steeled in the school of old Aquinas." Relevant to my paper is
that this poem expresses that part of his strength lies in his ability and desire to see
corollaries among opposites: ”To enter heaven, travel hell,/Be piteous or terrible/One
positively needs the ease/Of plenary indulgences. (TPJJ 657-9)

12. Poetics of the Literary Self Portrait, 221.
13. Poetics of the Literary Self Portrait, 214.

14. Stephen, in Ulysses, debases this concept that allowed for his artistic expression
and freedom; it becomes instead a principle by which to avoid payment of a debt:
"Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got pound”
(UG.9.205-6).

15. Reading the Book of Himself, 86.

131

16. Herring, Phillip. Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987:
203.

17. My Brother ’s Keeper, 124-5.

18. See James Joyce: Interviews and Recollections for examples of the historical
people talking about their ﬁctional counterparts in Joyce’s writing.

19. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky ’s Poetics. Ed./Trans. Caryl Emerson.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1984: 72.

20. Riquelme, John Paul. Teller and Tale in Joyce’s Fiction: Oscillating
Perspectives. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1983: 63, 67.

21. Kenner, Hugh. ﬂames: Revised Edition. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP,
1987: 12.

22. Reading the Book of Himself, 91.

23. Teller and Tale in Joyce’s Fiction, 60.

24. Teller and Tale in Joyce ’s Fiction, 60.

25 . Teller and T ale in Joyce’s Fiction, 60.

26. Teller and Tale in Joyce ’s Fiction, 59.

27. Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, 218.

28. Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, 218.

29. Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle, 151.

30. Problems of Dostoevsky ’s Poetics, 147, Bakhtin’s italics.

31. Valente, Joseph. "The Politics of Joyce’s Polyphone. " New Alliances in Joyce
Studies. Ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Newark: University of Delaware P, 1988: 63.

32. Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist.
Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas P, 1981:
370.

33. The Dialogic Imagination, 370.

34. The Dialogic Imagination, 370.

35. Booker, M. Keith. Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition: Toward a
Comparative Cultural Poetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan P, 1995: 107.

132

36. Problems of Dostoevsky ’s Poetics, 122.
37 . Problems of Dostoevsky ’s Poetics, 123.
38. Problems of Dostoevsky ’s Poetics, 123.

39. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994: 158,
Bhabha’s italics.

40. ”The Politics of Joyce’s Polyphone", 57.
41. The Dialogic Imagination, 282.

42. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Culture, 153.
43. Problems of Dostoevsky ’s Poetics, 117.
44. Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, 219.

45. Kuberski, Philip. The Persistence of Memory: Organism, Myth, Text. Berkeley:
University of California P, 1992: 69, 76.

46. Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, 269.

47. Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle, 203.

133

I l

 

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Joyce, Stanislaus. The Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce. Ed. George Harris Healy.
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135

Ulysses: "Everything Speaks is its own way” (UG.7.177)

Opening Ulysses, one ﬁnds that the book is already in transit, like its epic
predecessors, and it is even more contingent upon the reader to try to catch up.
Voice in Ulysses remains what it had been in Dubliners and A Portrait, but its power
to represent, as well as destabilize representations of authority and subjectivity, has
grown to an extreme. Voice, ﬁnally, has taken center-stage and has become the only
characterization that matters. Like light, voice shows that it is composed of
antithetical elements which serve to call into question, not only our ability to
perceive, but the nature of story-telling and the relative differences that exist between
reality and mimetic representation.

One of the lessons of Ulysses, as Hugh Kenner reminds, is a lesson in how to
read Ulysses. The conditions surrounding the representations of voice are much more
complex than anything prior to its inception and, because of its encompassing power,
everything prior to its inception is forever altered, as Fritz Senn articulates in Joyce’s
Dislocations.

Moreover, the reader’s participation is also increasingly convoluted, since the
interpretation of much of the novel is even more contingent upon the active
participation of the reader. It becomes imperative that we enter into a conversation
with the book --- Ulysses becomes interactive, and "a reciprocity develops,” according
to Michael Gillespie:

We ﬁnd our perceptions of the nature of the narrative voice directed by our

impressions of aspects of the character . .. and vice versa. At the same time,

the varying emphases that one can assign to their distinct voices endow the

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I l

 

discourse with a mutability that conditions and reconditions the meaning(s) we

give to subsequent encounters with the work.‘
Therefore, there is again an oscillation between proximity and distance in the
representation of voice, as well as a movement between reader and narrative; one’s
ability to settle on any single, deﬁnitive interpretation is obstructed, because the
conditions affecting the narrative, the efforts of the reader, and those delineating the
relationship between the reader and the author, are not strict nor concretized,
rendering the book much more complex and ambiguous, as well as more rewarding.

M. Keith Booker, in Joyce, Bakhtin and the Literary Tradition, points out that
in contrast to a writer like Dante, who brought in opposing voices in order to defeat
them, Joyce never provides a topos to condemn or reify: ”Joyce never supplies an
authoritative viewpoint from which the multiplicity of social voices sounding in his
texts can be judged. Instead, he allows opposing voices to sound on their own
terms."2 Like the Man in the Mackintosh where there is no single answer to his
identity, Ulysses itself stands reticent to any deﬁnitive answers to any of the questions
it may pose about language, discourse, and voice. Such reticence does not destroy
the text, but offers other possibilities of looking at the problems posed in any text that
attempts to represent language and signiﬁcation: ”the antithesis of certitude is
provisionality. "3

largely through the representation of voice speciﬁcally, as spoken and written,
Joyce constructs and deconstructs his tales with Ulysses, according to Patrick
O’Donnell, standing ”near the beginning of [the] history of voice.“ In as much as
Joyce plays with the varying and traditional concepts of voice, he likewise
complicates and conﬂates the issues of voice, subjectivity, and authority as he weaves

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and unweaves the identities of the characters, the narrators, and the readers, ﬁnally
ambiguously presenting an alterity of subjectivities and languages relative to the
position of the artist in and out of the novel. Joyce has Stephen comment in such a
vein when he recognizes, in part, the role of the artist as a type of penelopian weaver
who re-constructs himself in his very creation: ”As we, or Mother Dana, weave and
unweave our bodies from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does
the artist weave and unweave his image" (UG.9.376). Subjectivity, as represented
through voice is, like creativity, a process that moves, and neither ﬁctional nor "real”
identity can remain a passive, static element. O’Donnell continues that ”identity is a
conﬂation of multifarious and multiform subject positions formed in and by
contradictions.” In this sense, identity as a construction of voice, is a hodge-podge
of odd and potentially counterposed elements.

In Ulysses, experience is represented, through voice, as fragmented, distorted,
and negotiated; these verbal disruptions of the narrative structure illustrate an
enunciation of difference which, to paraphrase Homi K. Bhabha in The Location of
Culture, is the ability to articulate distinctions between ideas and things, even those
that are based, in part or in whole, upon ideological systems. This enunciation of
difference, because it is based on voice and ideology, in turn creates
alternative/alternating subject positions that reveal a culture’s lack of certainty, ﬁxity,
and deﬁnitive unity.6 Far from a ﬁxed notion of self and other, Joyce allows for a
ﬂuidity of voice and identity in such episodes as "Circe" and in "Sirens”: a ﬂuidity
and an alterity of experience. Voice, as negotiated and explored from the boundaries

of spoken and unspoken discourse, is that which begins to reveal the invisible or the

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barely visible. Ulysses is a performance of this ”in-betweenness" of existence; it
explores a ﬂuid space, which in turn helps to re-examine and re—deﬁne difference,
ﬁnally proposing a new negotiative principle of identity, through hybridity, which, as
Bakhtin points out, implies the impossibility of pure being. Pure being is the
antithesis of dialogism, words in the dictionary for instance -- an impossibility for
living, moving voices. According to Bhabha, "the boundary becomes the place from
which something begins its presencing in a movement not dissimilar to the ambulant,
ambivalent articulation of the beyond. "7 Textual movement, from proximity to
distance or the interstices that exist between supposed binaries: self/other,
past/present, private/public, paradoxically also create interstitial intimacy, which
Bhabha deﬁnes as "an intimacy that questions binary divisions through which such
spheres of social experience are often spatially opposed. "3 Therefore, voice creates
an immediate duality for the reader -- voice simultaneously represents both the point
of departure, as well as intimate proximity.

The hybrid, which is integral to this discussion of the interstitial relationship
between supposed binaries, is deﬁned as neither one thing nor an-Other, but the
tenuous construction of two or more that does not necessarily conﬁrm any of its
constituents. Based on this deﬁnition, ”being” is the tenuous construct which is less
than that which contributed to the whole -- a construct that serves to destabilize,
underscoring the paradoxical impossibility of essentialism and fundamentalism.
Heteroglossia is also imperative within novelistic discourse, according to Bakhtin,
because the position of ”another’s speech in another’s language“ serves to destabilize
deﬁnitive representation.9 The hybrid and heteroglossia, through dialogization, call
cultural and artistic authority into question and illustrate, through the use of voice, a

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conﬂation and confusion regarding the enunciation of difference: the narrative,
through representations of voice, inverts male/female, interior/exterior, and self/other.
The multiple layerings of voice in the Telemachiad, the ﬁrst three episodes of
the book, already position the reader at a certain distance from the action of the
scene, yet simultaneously one is intimately involved with the characters’ thoughts and
potential intentions. The ﬁrst two words that open the novel, ”Stately, plump” both
closely deﬁne Buck Mulligan and reveal their separateness from his characterization,
representing, as Katie Wales discusses in The Language of James Joyce, "a narratorial
voice in poise indicating a fastidiousness of tone and linguistic manner.” Wales
continues, "with the juxtaposing of Stately with the apparently incongruous plump and
the use of assonance (plump Buck Mulligan) the voice suggests playful distance, even

irony. " 1°

Therefore, from the very ﬁrst line in the very ﬁrst episode, the authority
of the narrative voice is already called into question at the same time it presents to us
a pivotal and signiﬁcant character. "Stately" and "plump" are not necessarily
opposites, but they are unlike each other enough to allow for a great deal of
uncertainty regarding Mulligan’s description and position in the narrative.

Mulligan’s identity as constructed by the narrative voice is a pastiche of
words, phrases, and allusions to Oliver St. John Gogarty, Roman Catholicism, Oscar
Wilde, and Joyce’s previous writing, speciﬁcally A Portrait. Mulligan is similar to
Stephen’s childhood friend, Cranly, only with a distinctively better sense of humor:
"Slow music please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about
those white corpuscles. Silence, all” (UG.1.22). Like Cranly before him, Buck
Mulligan represents a temptation to relinquish the isolationism of the artist through

voice --- Cranly wanted Stephen to give in and perform his Easter Duty, and Buck

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cannot understand why Stephen couldn’t kneel down and pray as his dying mother
asked. When the reader ﬁnally encounters Stephen, recently returned from Paris,
”displeased and sleepy,” one is also displaced by his seemingly secondary nature in a
novel that is positioned as a type of sequel to A Portrait. It becomes quickly apparent
that, whereas A Portrait was Stephen’s song, this book falls somewhere already
beyond the scope of Stephen’s perspective and identity, as presented by voice.
Contrarily, the narrative voice is operating already at a much more ambiguous level
with free indirect discourse, because at points it does seem to share Stephen’s
expressions and thoughts. Stephen with his Jesuit education is perhaps the voice that
interrupts the description of Mulligan to add ”Chrysostomos" and ”The plump
shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, a patron of arts in the middle
ages” (UG.1.32). Such expressions sound very much like the Stephen one has
encountered before and will encounter more of in this novel, but of course there is
nothing absolute in the book to conﬁrm that. As readers, we are overbearing many
of these voices and trying to assign identities to them.

More to the point, the ﬁrst page of Ulysses already has the narrative voice
mimicking Stephen’s language and voice, to the extent that Stephen’s character
emerges as a condition of the voice already in motion. Recall that in A Portrait,
Stephen could sense the materiality of the person that Simon imitated; in Ulysses, the
imitation precedes and then conjures the very ﬁgure of Stephen: voice possesses as
well as constructs character. Furthermore, voice has the power to join as well as
divide, because the narrative voice of this ﬁrst episode, despite Stephen’s and

Bloom’s relative differences in space, connects the two characters, as well as all other

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‘ﬁ

Dubliners who cared enough to look into the sky to see ”A cloud [which] began to
cover the sun slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in deeper green" (UG.1.248).
"Calypso," the fourth episode of the novel, restarts the story back to the time of
"Telemachos," and we learn that Stephen and Bloom both look into the sky at roughly
the same time to see that same cloud, "A cloud began to cover the sun slowly,
wholly. Grey. Far" (UG.4.218). It is not so much the cloud itself that serves as a
connector of these two men who are soon to meet, but the voice telling about them
and directing our attention, and perhaps theirs, to the thing in the sky.

Joyce allowed for a breakdown to take place in the representations of voice to
enrich the already ﬂuid representations of voice, ﬁnally to present in Ulysses, an
alterity of voices, identities, and subjectivities, where opposites can swap and join.
These opposites, when brought together, help to create movement and interpretation
within the text, as two magnets will create movement and energy when their contrary
poles are brought into proximity with one another. Moreover, Vicky Mahaffey states
in Reauthorizing Joyce, that Joyce’s perception of truth was less of a concept of
coming from within; it comes from the exploration of contradictions: "enlightenment
can only be produced through the juxtaposition of opposites. '"

By the ﬁrst page of Ulysses, one is already hardpressed to ﬁgure out who is
speaking or whose voice the narrative is imitating. Joyce’s works prior to Ulysses
also regarded language as provisional and ﬂuid; however in this novel, language at
last becomes the subject of the entire text. As Kenner remarks in Ulysses,

by the third episode, it is commonplace to remark, the chief actor has

become the language in reenactment of the primal narrative act whereby

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Event becomes Word. For events in a book, and notably in this book, are

events perceived and worded as if by someone present, and perceiver gradually

engulfs perceived as words replace visible acts.12
The work itself is about language, ”worded as if by someone present, " or put another
way, the words are presented as if someone were speaking them -- like the epic poet
retelling and translating the events for his/her audience. As Kenner points out in
Joyce’s Voices, "All is words, we are being reminded, and all words are now."13
We are in the presence of the story-teller, so to speak, through the construction of the
novel, only the novel displaces us. It is a text meant to be read as if spoken, only it
requires the written element too. Ulysses anticipates hypertext, forcing us to see and
hear voices simultaneously. Language is no longer the means of transmitting
information; it has become the means of disrupting and confusing information. As
Samuel Beckett pointed out, Ulysses is not about something, it is that something
already; however, that "something” is never deﬁned singularly. Even the voice of
history loses its authority, for example, as Haines dodges Stephen’s condemnation of
English imperialism. History is to blame, now that it too has become a negotiative
and hybrid principle.

Moreover, Ulysses is already forcing the reader to negotiate among a sea of
voices in dialogue; their dialogic relationship to each other, furthermore, is imprecise,
as an examination of Gifford’s Annotations reveals, and as one would conceptualize
with any passage that represents so many mutable allusions: the text is alive and
moving with languages and speech patterns that may or may not belong to the

characters or narrator(s) represented on the very ﬁrst page. This narrative is playing

143

directly with, what Bakhtin explored in The Dialogic Imagination, "traits of human
identity. Even basic motifs -- meeting/separation, search/ﬁnd narrative
expression[s] reﬂecting [a] concern for individual human identity. "“ Joyce’s
conception of identity is constructed through the representations of spoken and
unspoken voice in a written format where multiple allusions to multiple voices
continuously confound one’s ability to validate a single reading. Despite its suitability
to Bakhtin’s deﬁnition of ”the novel of ordeal,” Ulysses does not necessarily endorse
the concept of individual identity as independent of communal and mobile verbal
registers -- we are all ﬁrst-person-plural-singulars.

In a description of the gold bits in Mulligan’s teeth and his equine face, one
already has to negotiate among the voices that may belong to the joking Mulligan, the
mercurial and sleepy Stephen, and a suspicious narrator. Joyce is presenting,
excessively, intentional stylistic hybrids of the narrative levels of representation that
involve the dialogism of ﬂuid and mobile verbal registers. As Bakhtin states:

This means that the languages that are crossed in [the hybrid] relate to each

other as do rejoinders in a dialogue; there is an argument between languages,

an argument between styles of language it is a dialogue between points of

view.”
Furthermore speech, in Ulysses, as well as in ordinary conversation, is always an
entropic enterprise, and Hugh Kenner points out that communication in this novel is
negotiated indirectly, ”occur[ing] chieﬂy and under the words [the characters]
speak“: The Irish milkwoman in ”Telemachos" does not speak Irish, a condition
created because of the English occupation, and thinks that the Irish that Haines, the
Englishman, speaks to her is French -- an irony not lost on Stephen who thinks, ”She

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bows her head to a voice that speaks to her loudly” (UG.1.418). Haines’ interest in
the Gaelic revival, as well as his condescending reorientation of English-Irish
tensions, "We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems
history is to blame,” are problematic interpolations of his historically dominant voice
into the discourse of hybrids (UG.1.648).

Oddly enough, Haines is trying to reduce the historically problematic situations
in Ireland, speciﬁcally Ireland’s loss of linguistic autonomy, by relativizing all voices,
and it is Stephen who refuses to allow it. Elsewhere we see Stephen hybridizing
voice; for example, Stephen coopts Buck’s voice to make it sound as though Stephen,
in fact, is the rightful possessor of the Martello Tower, when in fact, he has little to
no money to pay for it: ”He wants that key. It is mine. I paid the rent" (UG.1.631).
However, against Haines, he remains rigid and jesuitical, losing his chances at
making some money. These examples represent, like a Chinese whisper, the thematic
signiﬁcance of misunderstanding and misrepresenting voice.

Joyce had originally planned to include Ulysses as a story in Dubliners and the
novel is a return to the heteroglossic polyvocality of the multiple narrative positions of
Dubliners. Ulysses is also in a hybrid relationship with the structure and language of
the novel in general and speciﬁcally with A Portrait. Ulysses is a continuation of the
narrative structure of A Portrait, and it is in this second book that we get the scene of
failure that the ﬁve chapters of A Portrait lead us to expect. However, since the
close of A Portrait, Stephen’s voice has not remained static. Stephen is able to look
at himself parodically, with those Bakhtinian "sidewards glances": ”You were going

to do wonders, what? Missionary to Europe after ﬁery Columbanus . .. Pretending to

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speak broken English as you dragged your valise" (UG.3. 192-94); Stephen also calls
attention to his odd appearance: "A side eye at my Hamlet hat. If I were suddenly
naked here as I sit” (UG.3.390)? Moreover, Stephen has learned to play with his
own voice and the arbitrary distinctions we make with reference to voice.

In "Proteus” Stephen translates and mutates with the language and sounds to
indicate a unique understanding of identity as an element and function of voices.
However, his understanding of his position in school in A Portrait was primarily an
acknowledgement of himself on a scale with linear points moving from speciﬁc to
general: ”Stephen Dedalus/Class of Elements/Clongowes Wood
College/Sallins/County Kildare/Ireland/Europe/The World/The Universe --- That was
in his writing" (P 16, italics mine). The speciﬁcity that the logical progression was
”in his writing” also distinguishes the list from the mocking poem Fleming had
written on the opposite page: "Stephen Dedalus is my name/Ireland is my
nation./Clongowes is my dwellingplace/And heaven my expectation.” Stephen muses
over the writing, recognizing that it is no longer poetry if read backwards, but then
reads his own list backwards until he comes to his own name again, "That was he:
and he read down the page again. What was after the universe? Nothing. But was
there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place
began" (P 16)? Fleming’s poem and Stephen’s expanding self-deﬁnition from local to
universal together reveal Stephen’s growing logical understanding between meaning
and the arrangement of words; however, although Fleming’s poem can be read in two
directions, it loses its poetic meter if read backwards, whereas Stephen’s prose retains

its integrity despite the alteration in intent. Based on this textual juxtaposition (which

146

are posed as literal and ﬁgurative opposites) Stephen’s comprehension of his identity
as a factor of writing in prose and in verse moves Stephen into deeper meditations on
the nature of existence and those seemingly essential boundaries, including linguistic
and verbal differences, that divide elements.

This logical relationship between writing and identity remains a consistently
strong notion for Stephen in this novel too, but Stephen is moving outside certain
prescribed boundaries in Ulysses. His dialogic relationship to existence is not
necessarily logical nor linear. He states to himself, "These heavy sands are language
tide and wind have silted here," referencing the dual nature of writing and the
movement of voice (UG.3.288). His imagination is, above all else, that which fuels
his creative spirit, and his imagination, like his voice, always looks back to an
undeﬁned and relative past looking forward to an uncertain future: "I moved among
them on the frozen Liffey, that I, a Changeling, among the sputtering resin ﬁres. I
spoke to no-one: none spoke to me" (UG.3.307-9). His relationship to speech is
always presented as problematic and unclear; he toys with sounds and then turns to
writing: "Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched:
ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring,
wayawayawayawayaway. Paper (UG.3.402-3). When Stephen ﬁnally begins to write
something down, the reader sees the words that Stephen imagines and speaks as he
continues his soliloquy. He may hear his own voice but we read it: ”Who watches
me here? Who ever anywhere will read these written words” (UG.3.414)?

In Ulysses Stephen, in a sense, continues his thoughts from A Portrait about

the relationship of meter and arrangement to meaning; he also includes the idea that

147

words must be translated for meaning and this speciﬁc translation rests between two
senses, hearing and seeing: "Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter
of iambs marching. No agallop: deline the more (UG.3.23, Joyce’s italics). This
phrase also represents just how critical voice is to Ulysses. Normal reproduction of a
portion of dialogue would give the entirety of the line "Madeline the mare,” but here,
Ulysses-the text only "hears" the last four syllables of Stephen’s interior monologue.
It is both less than a full explanation and sufﬁcient to explain the point regarding the
meter of the poetic line, as if the text verbally underscored the last four beats.

The speciﬁc, individual representations of written texts, speech, and
character’s thoughts and other ”unspeeched" language, grow continuously blurry as
the novel progresses. Deasy’s letter about foot-and-mouth disease in ”Nestor” or in
”Proteus,” Simon’s ”blue French telegram" regarding May Dedalus’ death, are two
particular examples, because Stephen is reading them and voicing them, in a sense,
and we are reading Stephen’s reading coupled with his interior monologue; we get
"oral” transmissions of the text, translated for the reader, back into writing.

After a rather tense conversation with Mr. Deasy, Stephen quickly reads Mr.
Deasy’s letter, and we read the letter with the gaps in the sentences that Stephen
creates: ”Dictates of common sense. Allimportant question. In every sense of the
word take the bull by the horns. Thanking you for the hospitality of your columns”
(UG.2.335-37). We are also given evidence that Deasy’s voice is neither
authoritative nor reliable; his antisemitism and belief that ”England is in the hands of
the jews" mark him as problematic, especially since he admirably quotes

Shakespeare’s Iago when he tells Stephen to "Put but money in thy purse” (UG.2.346,

148

239, Joyce’s italics). His understanding of history is also skewed; Deasy states that
”A faithless wife ﬁrst brought the strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough’s wife
and her leman, O’Rourke, prince of Breffni" (UG.2.393), when MacMurrough eloped
with Devorgilla, the wife of O’Rourke in 1152.” The mistake is caused by Deasy’s
reading of "leman" as paramour, when archaically it simply meant husband; thus we
are allowed to read his mistakes, which deconstruct the status of his voice, as well as
Stephen’s own unvoiced opinions of the man, which affect the narrative as well.

In "Proteus” Stephen recalls the telegram about his mother’s death that brought
him back to Ireland from Paris. ”Nother dying come home father” is the way that the
telegram read and we read it through Stephen’s memory complete with error intact.
"Nother" is obviously ”mother”, but it also means "a-nother" for both Stephen and
the Dedalus family; their rapid descent into poverty marked the numerous children as
easy targets for disease. Both words, ”mother" and 'a—nother" sound simultaneously,
because of their phonetic similarities in English, as well as their relevance to Stephen.

Bakhtin points out that the style of the novel is to be found in the combination
of styles, and the language of the novel is ”the system of its languages."18 The
languages of Ulysses are not only languages that are other than English, but mutations
of English as well -- illustrated here as the displacement and reorientation between the
textual representation of oral and written speech. The narrative voice, through
Stephen’s voice, is mimicking and translating errors and conceptualizing them into the
literary landscape.

A pun or a parody functions the same way and must always work in multiple
ways, and mimicry, which is voiced parody, is the means whereby voices coalesce.

In A Portrait, we saw that Simon is a good mimic by the young Stephen’s admiring

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estimation; however, in Ulysses Stephen can master Simon’s mimicry. Stephen is
able to perform multiple parodies while preserving some semblance of the voices
involved. That said, the narrative voice, which is often closely aligned with
Stephen’s voice and opinions, takes on more independent qualities, allowing for little
certainty regarding the identity of those who are supposedly speaking. Identity is still
closely tied with representations associated with voice, but voice and consequently
identity are becoming increasingly difﬁcult to substantiate as parody and mimicry
create greater problems of reading.

Fritz Senn points out that Joyce creates "doubt" in the reader’s mind by
placing errors purposely into the text. Parody and mimicry certainly help to produce
those errors, since these concepts intensify the slippage in meaning. The word
”doubt” comes from the same root as duo: "a going in two directions."19 Joyce
offers doubt by offering indeterminate identities, by not allowing a secure relationship
between one identity and one voice: the voice of the narrative ﬂows into the voices of
characters, and, as Stephen illustrates, the voice of a character can merge with other
voices to compound the effect of indeterminacy. The concept of difference between
one entity and another grows more ambiguous at the point of contact between them.
This idea is intensely abstract if space exists between the two: no physical contact,
save voice. Voice, in terms of the relative characterizations and subjectivities,
provides an indeterminate point of contact, especially with a narrative that allows
verbal qualities to contaminate multiple characterizations. Voice becomes a
paradoxical means of representation, because it suggests materiality, but within a
novel, that materiality must always remain a suggestion, a sustained element of the
imagination. Therefore, voice as that point of contact appears as it disappears, absent

150

U

even when present; and so, because of the simultaneous elisions and distinctions
among the personae in Ulysses, particular identities can only ever be approached but
never fully realized.

In terms of these ambiguous distinctions among the characters in the novel, it
is important to recall again Stephen’s interrogation of existence in A Portrait: ”What
was after the universe? Nothing, " he also asks about the border that marks off the
universe from the incertitude of the void: ”was there anything round the universe to
show where it stopped before the nothing place began” (P 16)? In other words, he is
interrogating the idea of a the existence of a deﬁnite separation between things in
empirical reality; he then moves another half-step to question the relevance of the
border itself, that point of contact between the material and the void: if there is
contact, what is the relationship between the material and the nothingness? If the
boundary does not exist, how does the material exist as distinct from the void? In
Ulysses such a deﬁnitive and exact ”thin line about everything and everywhere” that
positions identities as distinct from one another remains impossible, because
differences are always already relative and arbitrary.

Stephen, as with his questioning of the universe and the void, cannot resolve
what joins father and son, as well as what makes them distinct. Notions of paternity,
as a concept of unity and lineage, continuously plague Stephen. The relationship
between father and son is a relationship that has a signiﬁcant and obvious effect on
identity. One connection between Simon and Stephen is based on the value inherent
in voice; both Simon and Stephen have tenor voices and this verbal similarity links
them familially. However, Stephen realizes that paternity can be nothing more than a
legal ﬁction, and so a paternal relationship with Leopold Bloom is just as important as

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U
with the one who may have gotten May Dedalus pregnant. In terms of identity for
Stephen, voice constructs the person, but voice lacks actual material substance, and
yet it can suggest presence and unity, i.e. Simon is Stephen’s father. Long before
DNA or blood tests, voice transmits and qualiﬁes paternity. Stephen does recognize a
vocal lineage with Simon: "Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten.
By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her
breath" (UG.3.45, italics mine). Father and son share similar tenor voices and the
ability to mimic.

This quotation, however, also offers a movement away from that link between
father and son and inverts it. Simon has Stephen’s voice, from Stephen’s perspective,
not the other way around; Simon is no longer the progenitor, and Simon’s voice,
through Stephen’s mimicry, gets distorted as he has distorted and parodied other
voices. In "Proteus,” Stephen is manipulating voice and identity simultaneously to
offer a new identity for himself, independent of the father, with himself in the role as
author. In ”Proteus, " Stephen attempts to take control of Simon’s verbal power by
coopting Simon’s vocal mimicry; one gets an imagined/experienced reason for his
shaky theory on Shakespeare that we will read in ”Scylla and Charybdis” regarding
the nature of the relationship between father and son:

Am I going to aunt Sara’s or not? My consubstantial father’s voice. Did you

see anything of your artist brother Stephen lately ? No ? Sure he ’s not down in

Strasburg terrace with his aunt Sally ? Couldn ’t he ﬂy a bit higher than that,

eh? And and and and tell us Stephen, how is uncle Si? O, weeping God, the

things I married into! De boys up in de hayloﬂ‘. (UG.3.61-66, italics mine)
This internal mimicry, Stephen of Simon and of Simon’s mimicry, as well as

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5
Stephen’s theory of Shakespeare, which will get played out later in the National
Library represent Stephen’s desire, as artist, to invert the father-son tie to make the
son the creator and independent of the power and voice of the father.

Stephen’s sense of his identity is continuously represented as dialogic and
heteroglossic. Stephen enjoys manipulating voices and sounds, often ignoring any
intellectual difference between ”sound” and "voice": ”Listen: a fourworded
wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes,
rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: ﬂop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels.
And spent, its speech ceases” (UG.3.456ff). Stephen is constructing the things he
hears speciﬁcally as voiced, forcing them to participate in a type of dialogue with his
imagination that can likewise (re)construct human narratives. He has moved a certain
distance from his early fascination with the sounds of words, like "suck,” and also
beyond his youthful method of acquiring speech as a means of establishing identity.
Not only words, but the interactions of words in dialogue, have become Stephen’s
means of constructing himself. With inanimate objects and in his own meditations,
Stephen’s voice is eloquent, articulate, and sustained. Despite his lack of a separate
human interlocutor, Stephen’s sense of being is hinged on dialogism --- his voice in
motion with other voices. His sense of himself as artist, likewise, depends upon the
voiced interactions of words: tundish/funnel, Irish/English, servant/master --- all are
represented as factors in dialogue with one another which serve to create a
representation of Stephen.

In terms of the interactions between languages, Stephen’s linguistic
juxtapositions force the reader who lacks Stephen’s and Joyce’s education either to
"read over” those words not understood or to look them up. As with potentially

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B
obscure poetry or terms from Eastern mysticism, the readers (in and of the text) must
pretend they are not there or contextualize the lines and potentially get them wrong,
such as Bloom and Molly both do.

In "Calypso” Molly’s mispronunciation of "metempsychosis" as ”met him pike
hoses" reveals not only that she has read it incorrectly because she does not know
what it is, but she has sounded it out wrong and made the word more familiar to her,
at least phonetically -- she will meet Boylan and assuredly her pantyhose will be
involved. It is also interesting that the narrative in ”Calypso" does not let us "hear”
Molly’s mispronunciation; we get Bloom’s response: ”Met him what? he asked”
(UG.4.336), but we do not get a narrative representation of what Molly has said.

Seventeen hours later and very near the end of "Circe” when Bloom is trying
to help a drunken Stephen up, Stephen says ”... shadows the woods white
breast dim sea" (UG.15 .4940). Bloom thinks Stephen is talking about a girl, "The
deep white breast. Ferguson, I think I caught" when Stephen in fact is quoting from
Yeats’ poem ”Who Goes with Fergus" (UG.15.4950). The mistake, like Molly’s, is
caused by a lack of knowledge, but the error allows for illuminations as well. In both
of these instances, there is a dialogue between the actual words’ meanings and those
that are erroneously sound-constructed: with both "met him pike hoses" and
”Ferguson” , it is the sounds of the words that create an alternate interpretation.

Errors are always signiﬁcant in Joyce’s ﬁction and Ulysses’s narrative builds
on them; any words missed are often reasserted by the narrative voice later:
"metempsychosis" returns as Bloom thinks about Molly throughout the day, just as
the horse race and the winner ”Throw away" haunts Bloom. Stephen’s conception of,
and the novel’s presentation of reality and meaning are based upon the juxtaposition

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U
of voiced and unvoiced words and whether or not meaning can be transmitted by
allowing those words juxtaposed to ”speak in [their] own way" (UG.7.177). The
sound of a word, imagined or spoken aloud, is often as integral to the story as its
meaning and relationship to other words on the page or in the air.

The soliloquy, for Stephen and Bloom, is therefore one of the most important
means of constructing and representing identity through voice. The idea has a rich
historical matrix of its own, from Augustine onwards. Stephen’s concept of self
comes directly from his ability to manipulate words and from setting those words into
motion through dialogue, even when that dialogue is solitary.

I was young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to

applause earnestly, striking face Books you were going to write with letters

for titles. Have you read his F? 0 yes, but I prefer Q. When one reads

these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who

once (UG.3.136ff)
In this scene, Stephen reveals his intense ability to be self-critical and self-parodic.
He assumes the two parts of the conversation. Included are various reviews of books
he has never written, and he is mocking himself for his past and present aspirations.
His self-irony and self-parody places him at a distinct level of maturation and artistic
ability, and simultaneously reduces him to the clown, the fool, Polonius by his own
admission ”Ay, very like a whale. "

The tearing asunder of reviewer and reviewed in Stephen’s conversation places
at the center the divided subject, Stephen himself, who remains one voice among
many in dialogue. The soliloquy blurs the speciﬁc differences between interlocutors,
because in the traditional sense of the word, both parts are played by abstracted

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elements of a single but divided subject. Authority is not substantiated, but
continually called into question in such an act. Stephen’s soliloquies and meditations
do not present the ready-made artist in control of his powers; we again receive a type
of portrait of development of this self-same artist who has grown more doubtful of his
position and his abilities to create art. Stephen recognizes the punishment and reward
of Babel: meaning, identity, and authority fall somewhere in between the words we
speak (or write) and what the bearer hears/reader reads.

Misunderstandings and mishearings are two of the most intense and important
means of continuing the story, as it moves from Stephen to Bloom. In ”Lotus
Eaters, " Bloom walks into a Catholic Church. Although he was Baptized Catholic to
marry Molly, he possesses little knowledge or belief in the ceremony that he
observes. In this episode that occurs around 10:00 am, Bloom is already immersed
between misrepresentation and misunderstanding: ”letters on his back: I.N.R.I? No:
I.H.S. Molly told me one time I asked her. I have sinned: or no: I have suffered, it
is. And the other one? Iron nails ran in" (UG.5.372-74). It is through these errors
that the reader is able to co-create with Joyce a novel about a single day in which
very little happens, and yet simultaneously much of human history is alluded to.
Phillip Herring considers errors as those "portals of discovery” since meaning and
truth are oftentimes discovered with those errors in the space between displacement
and illumination.” Stephen Dedalus comments that Shakespeare made no mistakes
but committed plenty of errors, because ”His errors are volitional and are the portals
of discovery” (UG.9:228-29). ”Error” has a particularly ﬁtting existence in Joyce’s
texts, as Fritz Senn points out, because ”to err means to wander an oddly
ﬁtting Odyssean touch."21 Errors are imprecise ”portals" with no clear or single

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reason behind their existence. Therefore, Joyce’s errors in Ulysses, both as a subject

within the novel, as well as the errors he committed while writing, become additional

examples of the text’s mutability and unﬁxedness; they are examples of the oscillation
from proximity to distance that are represented and distorted through the discrepancies
associated with voice.

As already touched on, ”Calypso" begins the novel again at 8:00 am, only this
time a new hero emerges as central to the story: Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly
at #7 Eccles Street; however, the same little cloud from ”Telemachos" hovers outside:

Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He

liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried

with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton
kidneys which gave to his palate a ﬁne tang of faintly scented urine.

(UG.4. 1ft)

The narrative voice has left Stephen altogether, and Ulysses ﬁrmly identiﬁes itself as
not the sequel to A Portrait. This character is represented as distinctly different in
values and education from Stephen in the ﬁrst three episodes, and the narrative voice
has altered too -- it allows us into some very private moments for Bloom: Bloom
lacks Stephen’s education but he also lacks Stephen’s self centeredness. Bloom
attempts inquiries into the scientiﬁc rather than the aesthetic, and he is a sensualist,
readily describing to himself the feeling of defecation, after the previous day’s
constipation: ”Hope it’s not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah!
Costive. One tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be so" (UG.4.509—511). The

narrative of ”Calypso, " however, retains its simultaneous intrusive and detached

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quality.

Voice and representations of identity through voice become more problematic
in this second section. Bloom is as observant as Stephen is of the quality and sound
of various voices about him; however, Bloom possesses a quick empathy with their
emanators, as his discussion with the cat reveals. "--- Milk for the pussens, he said,"
to which the cat replies, "--- Mrkgnao!” A few lines later, Bloom still talking to the
cat says, ”... Afraid of the chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the
pussens,” and this time the cat replies, "Mrkrgnao" (UG.4.24-32). One can infer, as
Fritz Senn has illustrated in Joyce’s Dislocations, that Bloom hears a difference
between the two representations of cat-speech by the addition of the second "r. " "The
feline phonetics also allow us to deduce that Bloom is a good listener, attentive to
subtle changes. ”22 This scene also sets up a situation similar to Stephen’s soliloquy
and his hearing of the wave-speech, because Bloom is conducting a conversation with
an entity that lacks human speech; we are therefore even further away from the
subject speaking, i.e. the cat. Simultaneously, however, we are closer to the subject

under scrutiny -- we "see” what Bloom notices, perhaps unconsciously: the second

r . Bloom hears, interprets, and translates his feline interlocutor’s contribution and
the narrative allows us to read what Bloom has done. As with Lily in "The Dead"
whose idiom affects the narrative’s word choice, the narrative displays Bloom’s
unique listening precision.

Bloom’s multiple-ness begins at 8:00 am at home with his ﬁrst conversation
with his cat and soon afterward with Molly. In this second section, one reads that
Bloom is resourceful, quickminded, and as ”allround[ed]" as Homer’s Odysseus,

which makes him a character that resists a totalizing representation. His voice grows

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9
more complicated, and so too the narrative, because the narrative allows one to read
how Bloom is metamorphosed with the various situations presented. It also forces the
reader to be more a part of the process of writing. If Bloom reads the inner label of
his "high grade ha," we are not only privy to his internal observations of a worn off
letter, but to his adaptability with what is missing. The lack of a ”t" does not alter
his hat, but it does allow Bloom the means of playing with language and transforming
a simple thing into a richer and more complicated representation. This observation
also gives the reader another aspect of Bloom’s polytropic character, for it is inside
the "ha" that one ﬁrst "sees“ the "White slip of paper. Quite safe," which is his
alternative identity’s name and box number for his correspondence with Martha
Clifford (UG.4.70).

Bloom’s identity is always hybrid and unﬁxed. His name is ﬂuidic throughout
the text, both in terms of its sound value and its translatability. His family name has
been changed from Virag, which means "ﬂower" in Hungarian, to Bloom, a
translation that is not altogether accurate; with his epistolary affaire with Martha
Clifford, he changes it again to Henry Flower, a nom-du-plume that is simultaneously
closer to Virag. Affectionately, Molly refers to him as Poldy, and later he is
transformed into "Don Poldo de la Flora" and "Professor Luitpold Blumenduft" in
"Circe.” In ”Cyclops," Bloom’s ethnic language is also represented in ﬂuidic and
distorted fashion. One reads odd distortions of Hungarian as Bloom is ﬂeeing from
the hands of the Citizen and his mob. The language, although Hungarian, has little
meaning to the scene or to common discourse. "Szazharminczbrojugulyas-Dugulas"
is reported by the text to mean ”Meadow of Murmuring Waters," but it actually
means ”130-calf-shepherd" or ”soup" and "constipation" or ”stopping up, sticking

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into" (UG.12.1818).23 In this book, one cannot trust anything at face value,
especially representations of voice. Bloom is a Jew who has ostensively converted to
Christianity and then speciﬁcally to Catholicism, in order to marry Molly; however
he eats pork and has little understanding or belief in the mass or Christian precepts.
Despite this discrepancy, Bloom performs all the Christian acts of mercy. He also
recognizes his fatherhood to Milly, and yet simultaneously can see in her aspects that
remind him of a younger Molly, placing him in a rather uncomfortable position as
father and lover: ”Milly’s tubbing night. American soap I bought: elderﬂower. Cozy
smell of her bathwater. Funny she looked soaped all over. Shapely too" (UG.8.171-
73). Milly has also been introduced to Boylan and is working away from home as a
photographer’s assistant, both of which make Bloom even more uncomfortable as he
obsesses about Boylan and Molly. He can acknowledge his potency in Milly since he
is her father, yet Rudy died, illustrating to him, his paternal weakness. Bloom is
mutable and self-contradicting, and alternating throughout in his character and
identity.

Since Bloom is an ad canvasser, his ability to articulate multiple meanings is
important to his profession. The logic behind the Keyes ad reveals his dubious
authority over language, since the symbol comes from the Manx Parliament (the two
crossed keys) ”Innuendo of home rule. Tourists, you know, from the Isle of Man.
Catches the eye, you see" (UG.7.150). Bloom’s idea possesses a dual nature in that
it will hopefully represent an ad for Mr. Keyes and it will continue to allude to
notions of Ireland’s homerule. The symbol of the key, however, has yet another
meaning for Bloom, which he recalls as "He walked southward along Westland row
I forgot that latchkey too” (UG.5.466). Also, in his hallucinations in ”Circe,"

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Bloom will peer through a keyhole to watch Boylan and Molly having sex. Despite
Bloom’s dexterity, he cannot fully control the slippery identiﬁcations represented in
language; he, himself is a storyteller, but his voice, identity, and his language retain
signiﬁcances independent of their possessor.

As in "Circe," Bloom’s authority over that which he should possess and
control becomes elusive; his unique and simultaneously indistinct subjectivity reside
within the problematic and distorting representations of voice. Bloom tries and fails
to assert his power over words, both spoken and unspoken. In ”Aeolus, " Professor
MacHugh warns that "We mustn’t be led away by words, by sounds of words”
(UG.7.485). But Bloom is often altered, moved, or led away by the sounds of
words -- ”throw away" for example, gets him into a lot of trouble, or his deﬁnition of
a nation, which I will discuss later. Bloom’s self image, like his voice, are never
fully under his control. Identiﬁcations are linguistic, allowing for a mutability and a
movement, so that Bloom’s voice and identity remain works in progress.

The speciﬁc polarity between Truth and Falseth is obviously conﬂated in a
novel such as Ulysses; one’s understanding is contingent upon a set of continuously
moving variables. Augustine stated that ”falsity [can] be found to be anything else
than what it is not as it seems [but falsity] has some resemblance to the truth a
man seen in a dream is not a true man but a false one, just because there is
resemblance to the truth. '2‘ In other words, the difference between truth and
falsehood, for Augustine, is likened to the difference between actual existence and
verisimilitude, between being and seeming. Ulysses complicates this division ﬁrst by
calling attention to itself as a novel: it is ﬁction. Second, it is a ﬁctional novel with
an accurate historical matrix: characters, objects, and places in the novel existed

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independently of the text (i.e. Bloom the dentist, not the character; Maginni the
dance-instructor, or Leopold Bloom’s unreturned library book).” And thirdly, the
ﬁctional and nonﬁctional elements interact on an intersecting plane of language and
discourse, speciﬁcally through the representations of voice. We "read” the novel and
interpret it as possessing speaking voices, but the novel itself reminds us that it is a
written construct, activated by reading. Joyce complicates Augustine’s distinction
between truth and falsity by making even those elements represented as "true" to be
resemblances in the context of the book. No one knows who Mackintosh really is or
what he’s doing in the book, Bob Doran thinks he has seen Paddy Dignam hours after
the burial, and Stephen is haunted by his dead mother. Bloom, himself, more often
seems to be that which he is not, and he is perhaps one of the truest characters in the
book. The particularities of "true” and "false” are less—than determined in Ulysses,
and Bloom exempliﬁes this relativistic perspective, by his presence within his Irish
culture, his Jewish ethnicity, and his commercial occupation.

'Nausikaa” and the style of that episode reﬂect a unique proximity to Gerty
and to Bloom, and also complicate the issue of seeming and being, played out through
the narrative’s representation of Gerty’s girlish desires. The triteness of the narrative
is composed with Gerty’s probable discourse, and thus the ﬁrst part of the narrative
”sounds like” an undereducated Dublin girl. The episode, however, is also a kind of
meditative soliloquy. ”Nausikaa" begins:

The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace.

Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too ﬂeeting

day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud promontory of dear old

Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on the weedgrown rocks along

162

Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on the quiet church whence there
streamed forth at times upon the stillness the voice of prayer to her who is in
her pure radiance a beacon ever to the storm tossed heart of man, Mary, star
of the sea. (UG.13.1ff)
Rhetorically, it is a composition of place, but it is distinctly from Gerty’s perspective;
Gerty’s beginning is a conﬂation of the telling-who with the telling-where. The
narrative is so cliche that one can hardly take it seriously, but as it progresses, the
meditative soliloquy reveals a seriously difﬁcult life: her father may beat her, the
family is poor, and she’s just been thrown over by her boyfriend.

When Bloom looks upon the scene of the girls playing, both he and Gerty
MacDowell transform one another. To her, Bloom becomes the sad, dark stranger,
the answer to all her girlish dreams. Her desire comes not from reality, but, judging
by the style of the prose in this episode, from her reading of romance novels and
young girl’s magazines:

It was Madame Vera Verity, directress of the Woman Beautiful page of the

Princess Novelette, who had ﬁrst advised her to try eyebrowleine which gave

the haunting expression to the eyes, so becoming in leaders of fashion, and she

had never regretted it. (UG.13.110)
Her desire, her longing to be something else comes from fantasy, and any oppositions
to her dreams also remain nearly completely within her own imagination, except for
her class and status. Gerty’s reality is that she is a poor Catholic girl with few
options in life. Gerty MacDowell wants the status of those she reads about---the
status and position of people who have no reality, no real identity. Margot Norris
states, ”this narration therefore represents Gerty not as she is, nor even as she is not,

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ii
but as she would like people to think about her, and indeed, write about her. "26 The
entire episode is one that is grounded in an impossible model of desire, "it is as
though ’Nausicaa, ’ both text and woman, are haunted by a textual ideal they do not
know but whose prestige they covet. ”27 The language of ”Nausikaa" illustrates an
extreme elision of narrative with character, a thematic taste of what we will get in

"Penelope. As Norris points out, it is not just that the narrative talks like Gerty, her
idiom has affected the very world view of the prose, until Bloom is named.

The quotations above are part of an awkward self-portrait of Gerty herself, the
divided subject soliloquizing about her appearance and her prospects while Bloom
looks on. Gerty knows Bloom is looking but doesn’t let him see she is looking back.
Meanwhile, the narrative loses its power to perceive Bloom as a named character, as
if Gerty’s game has blinded it momentarily. Free indirect discourse allows the reader
a distinct advantage, a listening device, to ”hear" what Gerty is thinking and feeling
as the narrative imitates the vocal characteristics of a character narrating herself. As
Michel Beaujour comments on the literary self-portrait, such a scene is contingent
upon the paradoxical positioning of nothing, of an emptiness, as ”was ﬁrst signiﬁed to
the holy women by the sight of the empty sepulcher."28 Gerty is a young girl
fantasizing about young love, and the church, The Star of the Sea, is just a short
distance away, dedicated to the Virgin Mother. She is fantasizing about sex and yet
she has no knowledge or experience with it; as "seducer" she is an empty signiﬁer.
Although Gerty and Bloom reach a sexual climax in this episode, there is no contact,
no coitus, and, despite the orgasm, nothing happens. Gerty’s soliloquy divides and
subdivides, focusing our attention to her whiteness, to her skin’s texture, and to her

knickers, but never to the entire person sitting on the rock, because she remains,

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through her own perspective, fragmented and incomplete: she is young (she confesses
her ﬁrst menstrual cycle, believing it to be sinful, UG.13.463), poor, and uneducated
and will most likely remain that way. Only at the end, as she limps away, does
Bloom become aware of a rather totalizing handicap, which is precisely when the
narrative becomes capable of representing a named-Bloom again. The representation
of voice, through this soliloquy, constructs and deconstructs the character, suggesting
again an oscillation as the narrative moves in closely and then keeps the reader at a
certain distance, until it is ready to reveal its next tidbit of information.

Apparent contradictions are brought together in a type of tenuous unity in
"Nausikaa, " that strain at the foundations of the discourse used. Within that ﬁrst
passage quoted above, the image of the Roman Catholic Church is poignantly present
in a church dedicated to Mary, the Virgin Mother. The paradox of The Virgin Mary
is miraculous and mysterious in terms of Catholic doctrinal law, but a uniﬁed
contradiction nonetheless: virgin and mother. Furthermore, Gerty, a virgin, is
represented as the seducer of Bloom, who stands there watching her intently. Bloom
transfers his guilt upon Gerty almost immediately by assuming that she was
conscious, in some way, of what she was doing and that it was she who lured him in:
”Hot little devil all the same. I wouldn’t mind. Curiosity like a nun or a negress or
a girl with glasses” (UG.13.776). later in "Circe," Bloom’s imagination as well as
Mary’s religious and cultural contradictions impose upon Gerty another mode of life
as a prostitute who both loves and hates Bloom for masturbating in front of her. In
this single characterization, one has the tripartite representations of urban Catholic
women in Ireland: virgin, mother, and whore. Only voice allows for such
contradictions to exist simultaneously within a single persona, because voice can

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register opposition and irony simultaneously. Here in this rather mundane chapter,
representations of voice illuminate and scrutinize many of the foundations of western
thought regarding women.

The articulated as well as the written (and often disembodied) voice can be
understood as both immediate, close, and intimate and simultaneously as distant and
removed, as the narrative voice of ”Nausikaa" revealed. In "Wandering Rocks" a
similar oscillation takes place as Father John Conmee, S.J. walks to the tram. Not
only is the episode a smattering a various Dublin voices and disparate perspectives, in
order to give the impression of the simultaneity of life, but Conmee’s own droughts
are repeatedly represented as oscillating between indirect and direct discourse:

”Father Conmee was wonderfully well indeed. He would go to Buxton

probably for the waters. " (UG. 10.19)

Approximately ten lines later, we ﬁnally ”hear” Conmce’s ﬁrst words. However, the
narrative voice presented a more three-dimensional character than the direct
representation of Fr. Conmee’s voice:

---Good afternoon Mrs Sheehy (UG.10.29).

As with so many representations of the various voices in this book, it remains
ambiguous whether the narrative, through free indirect discourse, is giving interior
monologue or whether the narrative representations allow for a split in the character’s
own consciousness of his/her internal narrative that creates as well as elides the
relative differences between the character and what the reader perceives as the
narrator. The direct discourse oscillates with the indirect throughout this episode,
exchanging personal and impersonal perspectives. The characters, the narrators, and
the readers experience a cyclic movement of proximity to distance continuously. The

166

various voices bring us near only to remind us that we are not in the text except by
invitation; they also continue to remind us that even the voices perceived as spoken
are actually experienced, by the reader, as written. ”Wandering Rocks” possesses
this tension within its representations of direct and indirect voice, speciﬁcally, which
then synecdochically extends itself as a means of (mis)representing voice and identity
throughout the entire novel.

In Ulysses, the English language and its ability to tell a story appear strange,
because Joyce’s experiment involves the defamiliarization of what most consider
natural and normal, one’s own "mother tongue,” as Fritz Senn explores in Joyce ’5
Dislocutions. Ulysses is a study of languages written in English but posed as an entity
whose creator’s ﬁrst language may not be English. Fritz Senn argues that the novel
is an exploration of perspectives within relative linguistic positions. The foreign
reader, as opposed to the native-English reader, has a distinct advantage, because s/he
anticipates, in advance, that Ulysses will present linguistic plights; the native-English
reader, in a sense, must learn "the hard way what Bloom has always known, that we
are in certain constellations aliens and fumbling outsiders. '29 From the perspective
of all readers who must pick out what they know from the intense and seeming
detritic verbiage, Ulysses shows itself to be ”the ﬁrst consistently intratransferential
ﬁctional work. ”3°

Joyce’s word-world contributes to the displacement and disjunction of
experience and perception by calling authority into question: ”If you imagine it’s there
you can almost see it," is what Bloom says when he is contemplating the poetic mind,

but he quickly gives up, ”Can’t see it;" he remains an empiricist, as least for the

167

duration of "Lestrygonians" (UG.8.562-3). However, later on in the day, in a
seemingly simple conversation between Bloom and some other men in the ”Cyclops”
episode, the problematics of deﬁning nation-hood emerge:

--- A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same

place.

--- By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living

in the same place for the past ﬁve years.

--- Of also living in different places.

--- That covers my case, says Joe

--- What is your nation if I may ask, says the citizen.

--- Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.

as”

--- And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted. Also

now. This very moment. This very instant. (UG.12.1430/1470)
It is not merely Bloom’s position and authority that are under attack. The attempts to
deﬁne nationalism are continuously negotiated, but far from negated; like subjectivity,
its deﬁnition is unﬁxed and in process --- its meaning begins to presence at the
interstices of conﬂict and dialogue, between self and Other. The difference between
these two concepts, negotiation and negation, is, as Bhabha explains:

[negotiation] convey[s] a temporality that makes it possible to conceive of the

articulation of antagonistic or contradictory elements: a dialectic without the

emergence of a teleological or transcendent History negotiation open[s] up

hybrid sites and objectives of struggle, and destroy[s] those negative polarities

between knowledge and its objects, and between theory and practical-political

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It:

reason.31
Bloom’s deﬁance and insistence to deﬁne nationhood are futile: the deﬁnition of a
nation has never been deﬁned by an-Other, an outcast, a colonized subject, or, more
precisely for Bloom, a linguistic and cultural hybrid; as the narrative implies in
"Cyclops,” nation-hood is deﬁned against Bloom and at his expense, and contingent
upon his presence as outcast. Bloom, himself, is negotiated, but he cannot be
negated. The multiple, contradictory narrative voices which become so apparent in
”Cyclops" are, in some sense, the product of a narrative without a dominant
perspective, a negotiated, hybridized narrative which seeks to disrupt the progress of
the story and the process of presencing.

This provisional ity is participative within the conﬂation of represented
dialogue, with narrative and narration. Most often this elision is further complicated
with the use of the dash as opposed to the inverted commas which Joyce disliked, and
narrated thoughts, interior monologues, stream of consciousness, and soliloquy. The
differences among all of the these concepts become blurred and/or paradoxically
remain distinct depending upon Joyce’s intent. Joyce questions anyone’s potential for
representing and consequently sharing any experience, because of the instability of the
representation of point of view; conﬂations often mask elements of one entity or
another -- elisions cause overlaps that lose distinctiveness, at the point of contact, i.e.
the border.

The border is the point of differentiation, as well as contamination. Joyce
allowed for entities to blend at the border: fact/ﬁction, literal/ﬁgurative, and
true/false. According to Bakhtin, there is no aspect of language that cannot be used
in a ﬁgurative sense, because ”the point of view contained within the word is subject

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to reinterpretation, as is the modality of language and the very relationship of
language to the object and to the speaker. ”32 Thus all language is already ﬁgurative,
because no word can possess pure signiﬁcation by virtue of perspective and voice.
Thus, Ulysses, as well as any novel that attempts to represent reality, is both ﬁctional
and factual, paradoxically simultaneous. Such is why Joyce’s representation of
language, a representation that is an element of voice, ”[keeps] close to fact. " One
must recall that Joyce himself stated that his writing was meant to invoke experience
and ﬁrmly intended to represent reality: it is realism--it is ”factual. ” Arthur Power in
Conversations with James Joyce, quotes Joyce as saying:

[In] realism you are down to facts on which the world is based: that sudden

reality which smashes romanticism into a pulp .. . Nature is quite unromantic

In Ulysses I tried to keep close to fact.33
Despite Modernism’s tyrannical attempt to totalize experience within the narrative,
Joyce’s representations, although intended to invoke experience, remain paradoxically
postmodern; they are fragmented, distorted, and negotiated.34 Facts, furthermore,
are constructs, and not necessarily accurate. Facts remain creations of a society or an
author that are determined to exist often by circumstantial evidence, as much as by
any other kind of perception that would prove that they are true. Ulysses, of course,
possesses representations that existed (people, events, and dates) largely dependent
upon voice, by virtue of the evidence contained in the book, as well as other
historical texts.

This fragmenting and negotiating are once again akin to the enunciation of

difference. In terms of the narrative, this multi—dimensional boundary is always

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constructed and simultaneously deconstructed through voice. The representation of a
culture, therefore, could be said to be more true to life by its lack of ﬁxity,
paradoxically making it more factual. Far from a ﬁxed notion of self and other,
Joyce allows for a ﬂuidity of voice and identity, a ﬂuidity of experience, by creating
alternative/alternating positions.

Bhabha’s interstices also provide an epistemological position 'unrepresentable
in itself that ensure[s] that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial
unity or ﬁxity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated,
rehistoricized, and read anew.” Conﬁrming this idea is that meaning and symbols
in Ulysses have no stability. As the novel progresses, the reader is faced with a
reordering and continual retransformation/retranslation of events and persons already
introduced: the little cloud36 circa 8 am, Dignam’s funeral, The Man in the
Mackintosh. Even characters from Dubliners resurface: Bob Doran, Kathleen
Mooney, and Gabriel Conroy (suggested by Fr. Conroy, although apparently no
relation, presiding at the Star of the Sea Church in 'Nausikaa") -- all slightly different
from when we last saw them. Nothing is static and consequently, because of the
Mobius strip quality of the narrative, rarely is anything the same or consistent on
subsequent readings. Because of the encompassing power of Ulysses, all the events
and persons introduced earlier in the narrative, as well as previous texts like
Dubliners and A Portrait, are subsequently altered too: the Stephen Daedalus from
Stephen Hero could hardly have known about the Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses, but that
earlier Stephen’s voice remains in dialogue with his later-counterpart, just as the

narrator and the boy speak to each other and contaminate each other in ”The Sisters. "

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w t

In "Circe,” in terms of the third space residing between articulated voice and
experience, Bloom’s fantasies textually conﬂate with his and our ability to detect what
is meant to be ”real.” When Bloom ﬁrst meets the prostitute Zoe, for instance, in his
search for Stephen in Nighttown, she asks, "Are you looking for someone. He’s
inside with his friend” (UG. 15.1282). Almost seven hundred lines, but only a few
seconds later, Zoe remarks, "Talk away till you’re black in the face" (UG. 15.1959).
An unspeciﬁc quantity of the text that one reads between lines 1282 and 1959 is
played out ”in between” the space of dialogue and possible or imagined experience.
Voice in "Circe” is the exempliﬁcation of Bhabha’s analysis of the ”disrupted
dialectic. "37

During this exchange between Zoe and Bloom, any odd reference or comment
seems immediately to gain, for Bloom, an imagined material presence. For example,
when Zoe asks if Bloom will ”know [her] next time,” Bloom responds, "I never loved
a dear gazelle but it was sure to ...." The line breaks off because the exchange is
disrupted, as the ”stage directions” tell, by Gazelles "... leaping and feeding on
mountains” (UG.15.1323—4). Shortly thereafter, Zoe’s appearance has altered a bit
and her lips are covered with pork fat, and she quotes Song of Solomon to Bloom,
”Schorach ani wenowach, benouth Hierushaloim, " which is Hebrew for "I am black,
but comely, 0 ye daughters of Jerusalem” (UG.15.1333-34). The episode is
interrupted early on by Zoe herself, who seems to come from the exterior of Bloom’s
fantasia, to say ”Go on. Make a stump speech of it,” but it serves to drive Bloom in
another direction. He becomes an Alderman, ”the world’s greatest reformer, "

Leopold the First, and a type of executioner/Pope. However, his fantasies also

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condemn him: he’s called a stage-Irishman, and a plagiarist; Alexander J. Dowie,
founder of the Zionist movement and also condemned, says that Bloom is "from the
roots of hell.” Bloom is declared to be the new-womanly-man, pregnant to boot, a
fool like Bottom from Midsummer’s Night ’s Dream, complete with Ass’ ears, and
ﬁnally:

A choir of six hundred voices, conducted by Vincent O’Brien, sings in the

chorus from Handel’s Messiah Alleluia for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth,

accompanied on the organ by Joseph Glynn. Bloom becomes mute, shrunken,
carbonized. (UG.15.1953-56)
The relative positions of interlocutors remain in motion, disrupting dialogue and
communication, but not allowing any point of actual contact or transmittal of deﬁnite
knowledge.

As ”Circe” proceeds, seemingly simple binaries -- male/female, good/bad, and
self/other -- become conﬂated, confused, and redeﬁned. These seemingly opposed
binaries are often negotiated and hybridized, again interpolating that alternative third
space. For example, when Bloom walks into Bella’s brothel and shortly thereafter
”performs” femininity, from his hallucinatory perspective, his identity and perspective
are hybrid, just as Bella’s transformation into Bello, ”a castrating, phallic woman," as
Martha Fodaski Black calls her, likewise reveals the already hybrid nature of
gender.38 Bloom and Bella transform in gender, and confuse reality with
represented experience, rendering from within the conﬁnes of what appears to be an
hallucination, a story in movement, taking place, not in dialogue, but in the
imagination--in the interstitial spaces among voice, the representation of dialogue, and
the articulation/creation of ﬁctional characters. The scene is more than Bloom in

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drag or a representation of the grotesque, deﬁned as the excessive exaggeration,
which may involve humiliation and usurpation of position, as well as gender
switching. Bloom’s "ungendering" is a simultaneous ”linguistic regendering,”
according to Patrick O’Donnell, which is participative in Kristeva’s concept of
juissance.39 Sexual difference(s) and/or the boundaries between identities and
genders are reinscribed as they are negotiated, as they are hybridized. And according
to Black, Bloom become both a "parody of the male voice,” as well as a ”parody of
the androgyne ...function[ing] as a mediatrix and intercessor."‘° Bloom articulates
and then consequently is transformed/translated, revealing the power of voice as a
signiﬁer and creator of difference --- for Bloom, voice has the power to change him,
as it did to Tiresias, be merely speaking:

My wife, I am the daughter of a most distinguished commander

[Dr Dixon]: Professor Bloom is a ﬁnished example of the new womanly man

He is about to have a baby.” (UG.15.777,1798,1810, italics mine)

It is as if, in his attempt to explain Molly and make her present to his listeners, he
has become his act of verbal representation. Cultural as well as artistic authority are
called into question at all points in the novel to the point that ﬁnally the text itself is
recognized as a factor belonging to enunciation.

Bloom obviously represents the hybridity inherent already in gender
constructions, and the hybrid is deﬁned as neither one thing nor an-Other: the
pronouns used for Bloom after his transformation are ”shis" and "hrim'. The hybrid
may be less titan one or double, according to Bhabha. The hybrid destabilizes its
original factors, underscoring the paradoxical fragmentation of essentialism and
fundamentalism. Cultural or historical hybridity, he states ”is taken as the

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paradigmatic place of departure,"41 because the hybrid calls authority into question
by its existence. The narrative often reorients male/female, interior/exterior, and
self/other through its representation of characters as polyphonic, substitutable, and
malleable verbal constructs. The hybrid voice becomes a liminal subject that begins
to presence in various distinct and indistinct subjective positions and shows itself to
participate in "the exploration of the outer boundaries of subject and society. "‘2
Once again, Ulysses is presented as a story created by an entity, not necessarily
Joyce, existing exterior to but simultaneously intimate with the events and situations
represented.

The novel offers a space between the representation of articulated voice and

 

that of experience. Much of ”Circe” is indeed a suspended moment where Bloom is
beyond his experiences of humiliation and defamation, and we as readers are lost in
an hallucinatory period where reality and experience can only be joined provisionally.
Experience is exiled from reality and confused in a place that is also outside decent
Irish Catholic life; ”Circe," one of the longest episodes in the novel, concludes the
second section of Ulysses, and opens, for Bloom, Joyce, and the reader new questions
regarding perception and representation. As well, ”Circe" is in accord with Bhabha’s
theory that literature is never "a smooth passage of transition and transcendence
[it] is a process of displacement and disjunction that does not totalize experience. ”43
In a similar fashion, private voice joins public voice, provisionally in "Circe."
The narrative often reveals things unspoken in the form of public discourse. Bloom’s
hallucinatory trial is a thematic parody of Parnell’s as well as Wilde’s, both of whom
had public hearings that brought intimate matters out, consequently to condemn and
humiliate. For Bloom, the trial not only humiliates him by airing his interest in the

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W

maid, it is the process that begins to regender him; he is declared by Dr. Mulligan,
after the ”pervaginal examination" to be ”Virgo intacta" and simultaneously pregnant:
he is both mother and virgin. Free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness
give us glimpses of the intimate lives of the Blooms and other Dublin citizens,
mingled with thoughts of a very mundane, public world. Public and private remain
indistinct or overlapping at various points in the novel --- one a seeming subset of the
other, rather than two separate conditions. As Bhabha states, ”In that displacement,
the borders between home and world become confused; and uncannily, the private and
the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it
is disorienting. ”‘4

Because of the total confusion of ”Circe," "Eumaeus' provides a type of
reconstitution of particularities; however, the mutual blending of private and public
remains tantamount for Bloom, who is ﬁnally united with his surrogate son. Stephen,
a public individual, is brought into the private life of Bloom, creating a tenuous unity
of the two main characters of the book. Furthermore, Bloom’s encounter with DB.
Murphy brings Bloom’s personal life to the surface again, because Bloom feels
threatened by Murphy’s presence, knowledge, and dubious skills. Ultimately what
Murphy provides for Bloom is a temporary device to regroup after his
emasculinization and near dissolution in "Circe" and the harsh ridicule he had
received in ”Cyclops. " Robert D. Newman discusses the example of the
narrative/verbal scapegoat in Ulysses, in two essays, ”Narrative Transgressions and
Restoration: Hermetic Messengers in Ulysses" and ”’Eumaeus’ as Sacriﬁcial

Narrative. A narrative scapegoat, according to René Girard in The Scapegoat, can
be deﬁned through his/her participation in a reordering ritual grounded on the power

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inherent within voice; the scapegoat must ﬁrst be recognized and then verbally
labelled for the community (or the readers) to register the condemnation. ”The
scapegoat released to us by the text is a scapegoat both in (the clearly visible theme)
and for the text. The scapegoat that we must disengage from the text for ourselves is
the scapegoat of (the hidden structural principle) the text.“5

The scapegoat simultaneously represents a factor of disorder, as well as the
key to resolution, by his/her presence as a rival for possession, a rival for power.
Newman reads D.B. Murphy as a pivotal scapegoat in the novel, because of
Murphy’s ability to construct alternative/alternating narratives. Murphy is known for
his stories and, in coming home from his own odyssey, he is presented as Bloom’s
mirror image. Mirrors are always signiﬁcant in Joyce, because of their
representational function. Furthermore, as Vicky Mahaffey states in Reauthorizing
Joyce, Joyce’s mirrors in Ulysses do not simply ”copy originals unchanged
mirrors produce not copies, but doubles that help the perceiver deﬁne the extremes of
his or her own individuality."“’S

Bloom tells stories, sells ads, and, as the reader overhears from Richie
Goulding, "there’s a touch of the artist in old Bloom.” Murphy, in addition to being
a raconteur, possesses a tatoo that appears to smile and frown when Murphy stretches
his own chest skin, displaying physically, Murphy’s own duplicity and malleability.
”There he is cursing the mate. And there he is now, he added, the same fellow,
pulling the skin with his ﬁngers, some special knack evidently, and he laughing at a
yarn” (UG.16.683-685).

Murphy’s representation is redoubled in a sense too: he doubles not only

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himself, via his contradictory tatoo, he doubles Bloom --- Murphy is returning home,
as well, a bit out of place. Bloom, in fact, appears jealous of Murphy and verbally
challenges Murphy over the story about Gibraltar, to which Murphy ﬁnally concedes
despairingly, "I’m tired of all them rocks in the sea" (UG.16.622). Murphy is of the
utmost importance in this episode, because ”Murphy is imbued with Otherness,”
according to Newman’s ”Narrative Transgression and Restoration. "7 Bloom
intellectually and verbally challenges Murphy, for no other reason than Murphy
represents another type of rival, speciﬁcally one for Bloom’s speaking time. Murphy
is driven out as a surrogate victim to restore peace. ”Point of fact [Molly] could
actually claim Spanish nationality if she wanted, having been born in (technically)
Spain, i.e. Gibraltar" (UG.16.878). As Newman states in "’Eumaeus’ as Sacriﬁcial
Narrative,” ”at the hands of Bloom, Murphy is transformed into Morpheus
(UG.16.1727)‘8, and is put to rest. The liar, the yarn spinner, the usurper is
sacriﬁced, restrained by the reason of Bloom."9 It is ﬁnally a dialogue for Bloom
with an actual other, instead of Bloom’s soliloquy. Murphy is Bloom’s physical
interlocutor, an actual person who is both represented as an interloper and yet he is
simultaneously a mirror image of Bloom. He also provides a salviﬁc function for
Bloom. Murphy gives Bloom a defeatable foe in this episode and allows Bloom to
prove himself worthy in front of his lost surrogate son.

"Eumaeus" concludes with the two leaving the scene, bound for 7 Eccles
Street, and the "Ithaca" episode, Stephen singing ”more boldly, but not loudly, the
end of the ballad” (UG.16.1882). Dialogue dominates the representations of this
episode, and as it concludes the two have talked about Ireland, politics, music,
literature, and poetry, and Bloom continues his paternal care for Stephen by inviting

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him home. The father-son relationship has been re-established anew for both of
them, and some kind of return may be possible, although the door of 7 Eccles Street
is locked and Bloom is keyless.

Since voice for Ulysses is interdependent upon perspective, alienation of
perspective signals a verbal shift as well, which in turn often includes a stylistic shift.
Often the seemingly objective pose of an episode can point to a greater intimacy with
the character, and ”Ithaca,” despite its off—putting catechismal format should alarm the
reader of several movements occurring simultaneously within the narrative. "Ithaca”
presents the reader with an episode most likely from the perspective of Bloom, as
”Nausikaa" reads like a chapter Gerty would like to write for/about herself. Replete
with pseudo-scientiﬁc jargon, hypotheses, and elements of Bloom-like ”on-the-other-
handedness,” as Fritz Senn, in Joyce’s Dislocations, and Vicki Mahaffey, in
Reauthorizing Joyce, both remark of Bloom’s non-committal speech patterns, the
episode reads less like a soliloquy than an interrogation of the ability to distinguish
empirical reality with the senses. It is again a style earlier discussed in connection
with Dubliners: free indirect discourse conﬂates the verbal characteristics of narrator
and character in an act of verbose and cluttered narration, as Kenner remarks of the
beginning of ”The Dead," where already the voice of the narrator is speaking in
Lily’s voice.

”Ithaca" is overly verbose and excessive in its explanations and vocabulary. It
can appear as if Joyce, the author, were suffering from exhaustion, lost in language
and representation, no longer in control of his novel. The episode, however, ﬁlled
with excessive catechismal positions and expositions is much like Bloom’s voice from
”Calypso" when Molly asked about metempsychosis: ”It’s Greek: from the Greek.

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That means the transmigration of souls” (UG.4.340). The episode’s narrator has
certainly lost the ability to evaluate signiﬁcance among details, a loss which presents
an overload of information and potential intellectual detritus. Compare Bloom’s
overly academic deﬁnition of ”metempsychosis" to the explanation of what happens
when Bloom turns on the faucet to "let it ﬂow": ”From Roundwood reservoir in
country Wicklow of a cubic capacity of 2400 million gallons, percolating through a
subterranean aqueduct of ﬁlter mains of single and double pipage" (UG. 17.165). In
either case, the narrative has taught the reader to read in a new way, noticing tone
and voice. The narrative voice is disrupting the heuristic process that would enable
the reader to identify signiﬁcance, with some degree of certainty.

In "Ithaca” the narrative voice may sound like Bloom, but, as in "A Painful
Case" and ”A Little Cloud” the pseudo-objective voice narrating falls some distance
frOm the character and yet is contrarily very close to the character’s thoughts and
idiom; it relates to Bloom and discusses Bloom with an ironic tone that underscores
its independence from the character. Its language and style reﬂect a simultaneous
intimacy with Bloom but its lens possesses a distinct exteriority. It is both/and, in
terms of Bloom’s and the narrative’s perspective. For example, the episode, in
keeping with its Homeric counterpart, refers to Bloom through odd "un—Bloomian"
kennings: "What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier,
returning to the range, admire" (UG.17.183-4)? As the questions and answers
continue, however, the narrative is close enough to imply personal discomfort and
contrary pleasure when Stephen recites an anti-Semitic poem: "How did the son of
Rudolph receive the ﬁrst part? With unmixed feeling. Smiling a jew, he heard with
pleasure and saw the unbroken kitchen window" (UG.17.809-11). Despite this

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h

 

 

U
blurring, the narrative shows Bloom smelling his feet, ”with satisfaction” because the
odor of his feet "corresponded to other odours inhaled of other ungual fragments,
picked and lacerated" (UG.17.1493). Nonetheless, ”Ithaca" insinuates that Bloom is
in the process of narrating himself as the episode is taking place, and so the blending
of narrative voice with Bloom’s becomes impossible to stop and separate. We learn
that he performs an act of ”automatic relation to himself of a narrative concerning
himself before retiring.” Furthermore, when he gets into bed and kisses Molly’s
rump, he is called ”the narrator" when the questioner asks about the modiﬁcations
Bloom makes to the story of his day (UG.17.1756, 2250). "Ithaca" gives the reader
some "ﬁnal," albeit problematic answers concerning Bloom, but in a style that both
conﬂates the two voices to a potential single persona, as well as retains their
problematic distinction. The episode possesses both internal and external expositions
of Bloom that assert that the voice telling the story is so closely aligned with the voice
of the story that both remain mutually inter—dependent.

This episode reasserts a type of soliloquial quality to Ulysses by virtue of the
Catechismal structure of the narrative. Toward the end of "Ithaca" as Bloom looks
about his room to detect the "inverted volumes improperly arranged" and the puzzling
impression of a body, male ”not his” on his side of the bed, one can detect a similar
internal self-analysis whereby the subject fragments his/her ”interior monologue" into
a seeming objectively constructed dialogue; the narrative presents the reader again
with the double-bind of reading and writing, of subjectivity itself. Subjectivity cannot
be represented without deconstructing the inherent idea of both the novel and identity
as mutually intertwined studies of voices in dialogue. Therefore, "Ithaca” as it
represents voice within the potential split of a single consciousness juxtaposed with

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the pseudo-objective tone of the episode, is participative in a unique theory regarding
the authority of voice as a cultural construct by the author, character, or reader. In
other words, as the penultimate episode of Ulysses, ”Ithaca" tells us that voice -- even
a single person’s voice -— always already lacks singularity and resists deﬁnition as an
entity or force, and yet that voice is represented as something uniquely capable of
presenting itself as a constructing and destabilizing element of identity and
subjectivity. Voice exists a priori of the subject, and is therefore that which
constitutes and interrogates all elements that contribute to the individual or
community: language, accent and culture. Voice virtually possesses subjectivity. The
oscillation of perspective within the episode or novel creates hybrid texts that disallow
a ﬁnality of reading, suggesting a circularity or a provisionality to our understanding
of a priori assertions belonging to authority and subjectivity as constructed through
voice.

Identity represented and negotiated in its absence also becomes relevant in this
discussion: in many of Joyce’s works, a persona’s or a voice’s absence makes itself
relevant via suggestion or memory, for example, Bloom’s idea of placing
phonographs near the gravestones to help the mourning recall the dead’s voice, as
photographs recall the image. Joyce often refuses to state something explicitly, but
the event or situation can be read between the lines. The absence of a dominant
narrative perspective or a primary narrative voice or point of view creates, not only a
provisional text, but multiple, provisional conﬂicts of authority, as Marilyn French
explains. "Ulysses is unique in that it possesses a dominant ﬁgure, Leopold Bloom,
but not a dominant point of view [and] if we do not share the narrative disdain,
we, in some sense, invent our own book."50 The absence of this primary point of

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view or dominant voice dispossesses the narrative of any possible, deﬁnitive
resolution, since "any shift in point of view,” says French, "produces contradictions,
data unknown to others, fantasies foreign to others. "5' This textual uncertainty
draws the reader into the creation of the text, into the attempt to create a dominant
voice which only ever possesses provisional authority over the text. This provisional
authority is almost immediately under duress, however, when the text begins to quote
itself, for example, outside any form of narrative, exploring a stance more akin to an
exterior persona, much like David Hayman’s arranger, in possession of the book
called Ulysses: "Pat served, uncovered dishes. Leopold cut liverslices. As said
before he ate with relish ..." (UG.11.519, italics mine). The focal/vocal shift is more
and less than paratextual, because the reader still perceives the words as written rather
than spoken, and repeatedly the reader’s authority is simultaneously conﬁrmed and
negotiated.

”Penelope” turns the reader toward a single consciousness narrating her story.
The obvious difference is that Joyce’s earlier stories retained a narrative distance
between character and narrator, disallowing any deﬁnitive distinction or conﬂation of
the narrative and character voices. "Penelope” is told completely from Molly’s
perspective in her own words, and what is obviously missing is the presence of the
narrator or any other narrative construct that formerly had served to interrupt or
intersect with the character’s perspective. "Penelope" represents a type of narrative
progression: free indirect discourse allows such a great deal of elision between the
voices of characters and narrators that ”Penelope" is the result: character ﬁnally
becomes the unconscious narrator of her story.

The development of the novel has involved a development of a new narrative

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voice -- one independent of character and scene, yet intimate enough to understand
the nuances and positions of the people involved. The ﬁrst-person point-of-view had
obvious limitations that books like Pamela and Oronooko obviously violated, by virtue
of their ﬁrst-person narrators. Ulysses’ narrator violates our expectations too, and yet
simultaneously does not, because it is an undeﬁned vocal entity whose position within
the story remains questionable and relative. We can never be sure of his/her
relationship to the story or to the genre. ”Penelope" has lost the entities of narrator
and arranger that complicated so much of the narrative process prior to this episode.
What is left instead is a rather cinematic presentation of the character, as if the reader
is "watching" and ”listening to" Molly, directly, without calling attention to a narrator
re-telling the events as they transpired. It seems as though Molly is in control of her
own representation and voice. It is another soliloquy, (and "Penelope” is also called
”Molly’s soliloquy") but the term has altered yet again to mean only the character
speaking in an interior monologue, rather than the character represented via a split
consciousness/voice. We are privy to her most intimate thoughts and possible
misconceptions, i.e. Bloom’s egg. We never hear Bloom in ”Ithaca" ask for an egg,
although the narrator allows us to read Bloom’s possible thoughts as he is falling
asleep which includes the line ”roc’s auk’s egg." However, Molly completely
reconstitutes the possible sleepy word as a demand for service: "Yes because he never
did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs
since the City Arms Hotel" (UG.18.1-2).

language itself through the representation of Molly’s voice, resides in the
interstice between character’s articulation and reader’s interpretation. Molly is
speaking herself into existence, but the written representation of that voice does not

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belong to her. This discrepancy complicates one’s ability to "read” Molly; the
episode simultaneously constructs and deconstructs her characterization. This is a
presentation of the psychological problems involved with reading any novel: the
distinct separateness and simultaneous conﬂation between the represented voice of the
character or narrator and the words written on the page that the reader reads.
”Penelope” does not remove the obstacle between reader and character, but
complicates the very idea of reading and writing all the more, namely making
explicit, as Vicki Mahaffey comments:

[T]he imbalance between the employment of a word and the multiple

possibilities for meaning that such employment excludes [because] event

and context, reader and character, story and history repeatedly exchange
positions as a condition of their mutual development. "’2
Just as with watching a movie, ”Penelope” allows us to forget that an—other is telling
us the story. Molly, like all the characters in Ulysses, remains unconscious of the
presence of the reader, and so her soliloquy begs the question, since one assumes the
narrator has cut out for this last episode, of how is it that the character is transmitting
her voice to the page that the reader reads.

"Penelope" is intimately close to ﬁrst-person point-of-view, only Molly
remains unconscious of her retelling of her story to anyone not immediately physically
present to her, or more precisely, not inside her head. In this sense, Molly remains a
divided subject 4- split via the book, the axis between Molly-the character and the
reader. This split makes the book Molly’s immediate Other, a book in which she is a
character. As a soliloquy, Molly’s subjectivity is divided as ”self” and ”other" or
”book," and the book serves as a mirror, reﬂecting Molly back to herself, as well as

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reﬂecting her image out to the reader. The reader participates in this process, making
the reader Molly’s ”human" interlocutor. In this sense, reading ”Penelope” conﬂates
all the voices of reader(s), possible narrator(s), and represented character(s).

Ulysses is the paradoxical post-modern text, that both deﬁnes, as well as erases
itself through representations of voice. It is a book that anticipates our present
anxiety over simulation and simulacrum, since it is a book largely about itself, largely
created through representations of voice, which independent of materiality, should
lack representation. It is Joyce’s recreation of Ireland, perhaps not as it should be,
but as Joyce saw it, ”a country destined by God to be the everlasting caricature of the
serious world” (CW 168). It is a powerful image, as well as a silly one, but like
Joyce himself, the book stands ready to delight in any of its errors, transformations,
and translations in order to titillate and keep us all guessing. Voice, because of its
lack of materiality, as well as its power to conjure the material subject, is the pivot on
which this book rotates and makes us all dizzy.

Notes:

1. Gillespie, Michael Patrick. Reading the Book of Himself: Narrative Strategies in
the Works of James Joyce. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1989: 151.

2. Booker, M. Keith. Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition: Toward a
Comparative Cultural Poetics. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan P, 1995:
107.

3. Reading the Book of Himself, 2.

4. O’Donnell, Patrick. Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative. Iowa
City: University of Iowa P, 1992: 65.

5. Echo Chambers, 5.
6. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994: 37-38.
7. The Location of Culture, 5, italics his.

186

 

 

8. The Location of Culture, 13.

9. Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist.
Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas P, 1994:
324.

10. Wales, Katie. The Language of James Joyce. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1992:
103.

11. Mahaffey, Vicky. Reauthorizing Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988: 114.

12. Kenner, Hugh. M: Revised Edition. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP,
1987: 41.

13. Kenner, Hugh. Joyce’s Voices. Berkeley: University of California P, 1978: 48.
14. The Dialogic Imagination, 106, italics his.

15 . The Dialogic Imagination, 76.

16. Joyce’s Voices, 87.

17. Gifford, Don. Ulysses: Annotated. Berkeley: University of California P, 1989:
39.

18. The Dialogic Imagination, 262.

19. Senn, Fritz. Joyce’s Dislocations. Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins UP, 1984: 96.

20. Herring, Phillip. Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle. Princeton UP, 1987: 93.
21. Joyce ’s Dislocations, 59.

22. Joyce’s Dislocations, 126.

23. Ulysses: Annotated, 379.

24. Augustine. Augustine: Earlier Writings. Ed. J .H.S. Burleigh. Philadelphia: The
Westminster P, 1953: 46.

25. Fritz Senn discusses brieﬂy in Joyce ’5 Dislocations that the book that Bloom
reminds himself to return was, in fact, never returned to the library. Although closed
now, the library reported that the book was checked out in 1904 and remains missing.
We learn in ”Ithaca” that the text is "The Stark-Munro Letters by A. Conan Doyle,
property of the City of Dublin Public Library, 106 Capel Street, lent 21 May
(Whitsun Eve) 1904, due 4 June 1904, 13 days overdue (black cloth binding, bearing
white letternumber ticket)” (UG.17.1375-78).

187

 

26. Norris, Margot. "Modernism, Myth, and Desire in ’Nausicaa."' JJQ. Ed. Robert
Spoo. 26 (1989): 39.

27. ”Modernism, Myth, and Desire in ’Nausicaa,"' 40.

28. Beaujour, Michel. Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait. Trans. Yara Milos.
New York: New York UP, 1991: 223.

29. Joyce’s Dislocations, 53.

30. Joyce’s Dislocations, 52.

31. The Location of Culture, 25.

32. The Dialogic Imagination, 237, italics his.

33. Power, Arthur. Conversations with James Joyce. Ed. Clive Hart. New York:
Harper and Row, 1974: 98.

34. Weldon Thornton in The Antimodemism of Joyce ’s mm
mm suggests, using Morton Levitt’s Modernist Survivors and Ihab Hassan’s
The Postmodern T urn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture, that there is no
need for the term ”postmodern" and prefers to read "even the most recent literature as
an extension of modernism” (17).

35. The Location of Culture, 37.

36. The little cloud makes a ﬁnal appearance hours after when Bloom and Stephen are
talking in ”Ithaca.” Through dialogue they both realize that they both saw the
"reapparition of a matutinal cloud (perceived by both from two different points of
observation, Sandycove and Dublin) at ﬁrst no bigger than a woman’s hand"

(UG. 17.40-42).

37. The Location of Culture, 18.

38. Black, Martha Fodaski. ”S/He-Male Voices in Ulysses: Counterpointing the New
Womanly Man." Gender in Joyce. Ed. Jolanta W. Wawrzycka and Marlena G.
Corcoran. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997: 75.

39. Echo Chambers, 83.
40. ”S/He—Male Voices in Ulysses, 71.
41. The Location of Culture, 21.

42. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution of Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New
York: Columbia UP, 1984: 17.

43. The Location of Culture, 5.

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44. The Location of Culture, 9.

45. Girard, Rene. The Scapegoat. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins UP, 1986: 118-19.

46. Reauthorizing Joyce, 114.

47. Newman, Robert D. ”Narrative Transgression and Restoration: Hermetic
Messengers in Ulysses.” JJQ. Ed. Robert Spoo. 29 (1992): 331.

48. "Anyhow they passed the sentrybox with stones, brazier, etc. where the municipal
supernumerary, ex Gumley, was still to all intents and purposes wrapped in the arms
of Murphy, as the adage has it, dreaming of fresh ﬁelds and pastures new”
(UG.16.1725—28).

49. Newman, Robert D. ”’Eumaeus’ as Sacriﬁcial Narrative.” JJQ. Ed. Robert
Spoo. 30 (1993): 455.

50. French, Marilyn. "Silences: Where Joyce’s Language Stops." The Languages Of
James Joyce. Ed. R.M. Bollettieri, C. Marengo Vaglio, and Christine van
Boheemen. Philadelphia: John Benjamens Publishing Co, 1992: 45.

51. ”Silences: Where Joyce’s Language Stops,” 41.

52. Reauthorizing Joyce, 65.

189

 

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Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical
Tradition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971.

Augustine. Augustine: Earlier Writings. Ed. J.H.S. Burleigh. Philadelphia: The
Westminster P, 1953.

Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist.

Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas P,
1994.

Bakhtin, M.M. Problems of Dostoevsky ’s Poetics. Ed./T’rans. Caryl Emerson.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1994.

Beaujour, Michel. Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait. Trans. Yara Milos. New
York: New York UP, 1991.

Behn, Aphra. Oronooko: Or the Royal Slave. New York: Norton, 1973.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Black, Martha Fodaski. ”S/He—Male Voices in Ulysses: Counterpointing the New
Womanly Man.” Gender in Joyce. Ed. Jolanta W. Wawrzycka and Marlena
G. Corcoran. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997: 62-81.

Booker, M. Keith. Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition: Toward a
Comparative Cultural Poetics. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan P,
1995.

Bowen, Zack. ”All in a Night’s Entertainment: The Codology of Haroun an Raschid,
the Thousand and One Nights, Bloomusalem/Bahgdad, the Uncreated
Conscience of the Irish Race, and Joycean Self-Reﬂexivity.” JJQ. Ed.
Robert Spoo. 35 (1998): 297-307.

Card, James Van Dyck. An Anatomy of Penelope. Rutherford: Associated UP, 1984.

Davison, Neil R. James Joyce, gum and the Construction of Jewish Identity:
Culture, Biography, and "The Jew " is Modernist Europe. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1996.

Dent, R.W. Colloquial Language in Ulysses: A Reference Tool. Newark: University
of Delaware P, 1994.

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Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation.
Ed. Christie V. McDonald. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Schocken
Books, 1985.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.

Ellmann, Richard. The Consciousness of Joyce. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce: New and Revised Edition. New York: Oxford UP,
1982.

Ellmann, Richard. gum on the Ltﬁ’ey. New York: Oxford UP, 1972.

French, Marilyn. "Silences: Where Joyce’s language Stops.” The Languages Of
James Joyce. Ed. R.M. Bollettieri, C. Marengo Vaglio, and Christine van
Boheemen. Philadelphia: John Benjamens Publishing Co, 1992.

Gifford, Don. gum: Annotated. Berkeley: University of California P, 1989.

Gillespie, Michael Patrick. Reading the Book of Himself: Narrative Strategies in the
Works of James Joyce. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1989.

Girard, René. The Scapegoat. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins UP, 1986.

Henke, Suzette A. James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. New York: Routledge,
1990.

Herring, Phillip. Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle. Princeton UP, 1987.

Jackson, Tony E. The Subject of Modernism: Narrative Alterations in the Fiction of
Eliot, Conrad, Woolf and Joyce. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan P,
1998.

James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth - Proceedings of the Ninth International James
Joyce Symposium. Ed. Bernard Benstock. Syracuse UP, 1988.

James Joyce: Interviews and Recollections. Ed. E.H. Mikhail. New York: St.
Martin’s P, 1990.

James Joyce’s Mes: Critical Essays. Ed. Clive Hart and David Hayman.
Berkeley: University of California P, 1974.

Joyce, James. The Critical Writings. Ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann.
New York: The Viking Press, 1973.

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Joyce, James. The Letters of James Joyce. Vol. 1 Edited by Stuart Gilbert, 1965.
Vols. 2 and 3 Edited by Richard Ellmann. NY: Viking Press, 1966.

Joyce, James. Ulysses: The Corrected Text. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. NY: Vintage
Books, 1986.

Kenner, Hugh. Joyce’s Voices. Berkeley: University of California P, 1978.
Kenner, Hugh. Ulysses: Revised Edition. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.

Kershner, R.B. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Culture: Chronicles of Disorder.
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina P, 1989.

Kristeva, Julia. Revolution of Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New
York: Columbia UP, 1984.

Kuberski, Philip. The Persistence of Memory: Organism, Myth, Text. Berkeley:
University of California P, 1992.

Lernout, Geert. The French Joyce. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan P,
1993.

Litz, A. Walton. The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and
W. New York: Oxford UP, 1964.

MacCabe, Colin. James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word. London: The
MacMillan P, 1978.

Mahaffey, Vicki. Reauthorizing Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.

Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.

Murphy, Michael. ”’Proteus’ and Prose: Paternity or Workmanship?” JJQ. Ed.
Robert Spoo. 35 (1997): 71-81.

Newman, Robert D. "’Eumaeus’ as Sacriﬁcial Narrative." JJQ. ed. Robert Spoo.
30 (1993):451-458

Newman, Robert D. ”Narrative Transgression and Restoration: Hermetic Messengers
in Ulysses." JJQ. ed. Robert Spoo. 29 (1992):315-337.

Norris, Margot. Joyce ’s Web: The Social Unraveling of Modernism. Austin:
University of Texas P, 1992.

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Norris, Margot. ”Modernism, Myth, and Desire in ’Nausicaa."' JJQ. ed. Robert
Spoo. 26 (1989):37-50.

O’Donnell, Patrick. Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative. Iowa
City: University of Iowa P, 1992.

Power, Arthur. Conversations with James Joyce. Ed. Clive Hart. New York:
Harper and Row, 1974.

Richard, Samuel. Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded. New York: Norton, 1958.

Rickard, John S. Joyce ’s Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnic of ﬂags. Durham:
Duke UP, 1999.

Riquelme, John Paul. Teller and Tale in Joyce’s Fiction: Oscillating Perspectives.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1983.

Schlossman, Beryl. Joyce’s Catholic Comedy of Language. Madison: The University
of Wisconsin P, 1985.

Senn, Fritz. Inductive Scrutinies: Focus on Joyce. Ed. Christine O’Neill.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.

Senn, Fritz. Joyce’s Dislocations. Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins UP, 1984.

Shloss, Carol Loeb. “Behind the Veil’: James Joyce and the Colonial Harem.” JJQ.
Ed. Robert Spoo. 35 (1998): 333-47.

Slote, Sam. ”Nulled Nought: The Desistance of Ulyssean Narrative in Finnegans
Wake. JJQ. Ed. Robert Spoo. 34 (1997): 531-542.

Steward, Garret. Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext. Berkeley: University
of California P, 1990.

Thornton, Weldon. The Antimodemism of Joyce’s Portrait at the Amst' as a Young
Man. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1994.

Wales, Katie. The Language of James Joyce. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1992.

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Finnegans Wake:
Voices as ”changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns” (FW 188.27)

Throughout Joyce’s artistic career, ambiguity remained a pivotal component of
his aesthetic principle. The interplay and intraplay of verbal characteristics
problematically presents itself as early as Dubliners, where the reader is never certain
what the proximity of the narrative voice is to the various character voices, to the
author, or to the reader. In kind, the reader must become more than a consumer of
the text; as Roland Barthes insists, "the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is
to make the reader a producer of the text. ”1 We become participants in the act of
creation and lend to the text(s) our own voices participating with the voice of the
author and his creations. Joyce is always already playing with the varying and
traditional concepts of voice, but in Finnegans Wake Joyce reveals that he not only
complicates and conﬂates the issues of voice, subjectivity, and authority, but presents
a new paradoxical (dis)union of subjectivities, mythologies, and languages. '

The textual schism in this present duality can be thought of as the ”air/ink
difference" according to Garret Stewart, which creates a tension between the sounds
and the representations of voice. Stewart states ”Such a friction thus reads as a
’dyslocutory’ tension between phonemic and graphemic signiﬁcation."2 Because of
this "air/ink” split, voice, as a representing and reﬂecting construct, is the means of
telling a story, as well as the simultaneous process that will dissemble the very
markers of conventional storytelling: perspective, characterization, authority, identity
and subjectivity. Voice is the only thing left in Finnegans Wake, since the characters
have all become unstable personae and principals. In terms of interpretation and

perspective, Finnegans Wake emphasizes, as Michael Gillespie explains, "the

194

 

subjectivity of all views in a manner that conjoins where possible and accepts with
equanimity what cannot ﬁt into a system for understanding."3

Voice is the point at which self metaphorically meets other; however, voice
problematizes this boundary contact, because voice exists simultaneously in and out of
materiality. It usually suggests a physical being as the producer of the sound we
identify as voice, but in a narrative, voice neither possesses sound value nor a
physical manifestation of the body that produced it. All that exists is the book, a
product of Joyce’s imagination and memory interacting with the imagination and
memory of the reader. Finnegans Wake plays with this only relevantly "true”
statement and proposes that the text is voice. Everything in Finnegans Wake is about
voice and how to read voice in Finnegans Wake.

Voice functions as a type of mirror, where the other becomes self in a
continuously repeatable and reversible act of reﬂection. ”He looks rather thin,
imitating me. I’m very fond of that other of mine” (FW 408.24-25). In Finnegans
Wake, everything already exists as a secondary representation, and Joyce uses voice
for multiple purposes, all which contribute to the increasing complexity of story
telling. Voice presents the story, as well as the scaffolding of the process, forcing the
reader to acknowledge that Finnegans Wake is representation, not reality; it equates
and divides the literal and ﬁgurative, as well as voice and the body.

Furthermore, voice is always already a representation, supposedly a signiﬁer
of the speaking subject. Therefore, Finnegans Wake also calls attention to the
secondary status of existence itself -- always one step removed from the mechanics of

reality. Voice, therefore, serves as a synecdoche for the novel called F innegans

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Wake, as well as a primary link in the metonymic chain whose elements begin with
self and other, as well as a myriad of initially seeming paired opposites, which merge
and separate as we read.

The dialogue between Mutt and Jute is a good example of the dual nature of
voiced conversation. The conversation is intensely dialogic, initially by their names,
Mutt and Jute, which creates a dialectic with Bud Fisher’s comic strip, Matt and Jeff.
The allusion presents the reader with the relative signiﬁcance behind the
representation of pairs, which the novel will repeatedly represent with Shem and
Shaun, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE), Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), Esau
and Jacob, and St. Kevin and the arch-Druid. This situation also creates, as David
Herman argues, "a generic expectation of discourse in which adjacent pairs will play
an important role.“ Mutt and Jeff, the initially posed "originals” were cartoon
versions of Vaudevillian comedians. Thus, early in the text, we already encounter
allusions to layers of other, exterior voices.

Mutt and Jute’s dialogue is also a conversation about speaking and
interpretation. In quasi-French, Mutt begins it by interrogating Jute’s language:
"Come on, fool porterfull hosiered women blown monk sewer” (FW 16.4-5)? He
then moves on to other hybrid languages: "You tolkatiff scowegian You spigotty
anglease" (FW 16.5-7)? The continuing discussion becomes more of an interrogation
of interpretability of the codes of language, as spoken, because, according to David
Herman, ”both interlocutors check up both on the code to be used and on the
physical (in this case, auditory) channel conducting messages from addressor to
addressee." However, the interrogation of the language used and the voices
represented reveals the inherent hybridity of discourse. Voice is represented in this

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scene as paradoxically physical and immaterial. Jute comments to Mutt, "You that
side of your voise are almost inedible to me. Become a bitskin more wiseable" (FW
16.23, italics mine); in other words, Mutt and Jute are hearing as well as consuming
each other through their voiced conversation; the words ”inaudible" as well as
”inedible” are both present. Jute also advises Mutt to become a little bit smarter as
well as more visible ('bitskin" from the German a bisschen and "wiseable' can be
read as ”wise-able” and "visible)." They are represented as speaking, but again their
discourse is visibly and obscurely delivered to the reader as written. Because of the
"ink/air" split, a written conversation, or written voice, potentially possesses a
physical/non-physical dualism: the ink and the paper have mass and dimension but
their signiﬁcance returns the words to the world of shadow and image, "He who
runes may rede" (FW 18.6-7).

The conversation is therefore metacommunicative, 'hold[ing] up a range of
conversational methods and models . .. [and] encouraging reﬂection on the whole
gamut of interpretive principles,"7 because, as Herman suggests, reading is a form of
conversation too, with the text, the author, and the personae of the text. However,
Joyce complicates the practice of reading by presenting everything already existing as
moving hybrids. Writing is interchangeable with speaking, because the sound values
resonate equally with the letters’ appearances. Mutt and Jute are likewise
substitutable, once they determine the system of codes that will potentially enable
them to speak with one another: in the same sentence above, Jute tells Mutt, ”Become
a bitskin more wiseable, as if I were you" (FW 16.24, italics mine). Mutt and Jute
are likewise acknowledging that for conversation to take place, interlocutors must
mix; addressor must blur with addressee. Thus, conversation is more akin to the

197

 

 

soliloquy, even when two exist, because interpretation requires a loss of individuation
among the speakers, just as F innegans Wake requires that reader becomes writer. To
”rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world” we must move in multiple
directions, become ”abcedminded to this claybook" and recognize its unoriginality and
substitutability: "it is the same told of all the meandertale, aloss and again" (FW
16.17-23).

The recognition of the substitutability within the text remains paramount to our
attempt to understand Finnegans Wake. Mutt and Jute can obviously switch places
with each other, and they are also Shem and Shaun, the twin sons of HCE and ALP;
Shem-the penman and Shaun-the postman are also divisions of a type of soliloquy:
production and presentation. As Adaline Glasheen’s extensive chart reveals in A
Third Census of W, personae are never static nor conﬁrmed in
Finnegans Wake. This ﬂuidity extant between personae in Finnegans Wake, likewise
repeatedly presupposes the ﬂuidity between voice and body. Finnegans Wake is
entirely constructed through bodiless voices that represent as well as disrupt
representation; voice conﬁrms and denies the physical body, as the interchangeability
of the personae and principles show. In a related study, Patrick O’Donnell in "Sub
Rosa: Voice, Body, and History in Absalom, Absalom, " states that ”body and voice
are conﬂated and conﬂicted the desire for a fully separate, fully ’integrated’
identity and the concomitant desire to transcend history through the merging of
bodies/ identities in a continuous process of disarticulation and rearticulation. ”8 The
ﬂuidity of the personae, through voice, suggests the instability of the body as a

representable construct in the novel: "the boundaries between ﬂesh and the non-

198

 

 

corporeal are dissolute. "9 Therefore, the blurring of voice and body in Finnegans
Wake calls into question, ”the integrity of identity," both textual representations, as
well as physical manifestations, such as the reader, assumably present outside the
text. Jute’s allocation of voice to the ”inedible" -- both inaudible and uneatable --
suggests a loss of stasis between the physical and non-corporeal, as O’Donnell’s
reading of Faulkner likewise suggests. If personae may switch relative positions
without concern, then differences between self and other are diffuse and likewise
relative: “identity,” states O’Donnell, "is a ﬁction (a ’voicing’) that rests upon the
shifting, groundless movements of its own representations. "0 In Finnegans Wake,
the main characters eventually become sigla. As well, HCE becomes identiﬁed and
diffused with his stutter and Issy with her lisp; even the misspelling of ”hesitancy"
blurs and reorients history and ﬁction, as I will discuss later.

As the narrator(s) of Finnegans Wake tell(s) us, the closer we look into the
novel and think about it, the more trouble we get into. Voice is constructed in such a
way that it can never be singularly deﬁned, because reading or interpreting voice
always involves recognition of other voices speaking, as well as the interplay of the
reader’s voice, all ringing simultaneously; as well, the type of reading that Joyce
insists upon in Finnegans Wake involves the dissolution of arbitrary boundaries that
are often construed as essential, such as individual identity and authority:

Closer inspection of the bordereau would reveal a multiplicity of personalities

inﬂicted on the documents or document and some prevision of virtual crime or

crimes might be made by anyone unwary enough In fact, under the closed

eyes of the inspectors the traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their

199

 

 

contraries eliminated, in one stable somebody (FW 107.23-30, Joyce’s italics).
Despite a supposed coalescence in one ”stable somebody,” the italicized words disturb
any content the above passage might hold by disallowing any singular, static
interpretation to exist: ”bordereau, " a French word for inventory, calls one’s attention
by its sound value in English to the relative borders among those multiple
personalities. ”Chiaroscuro” is deﬁned as the disposition of darker and lighter masses
in a picture, which in this passage are said to coalesce, but interpretation shifts as we
read. Such is easily understood in the sense that as one reads, new information
collides with ideas already known, all of which contribute to the processes of
thinking. Finnegans Wake is commenting on the nature of reading -- words form a
picture in the imagination of the reader, directly through a process that involves
looking at the page, which already possesses images or words of greater or lesser
contrast in relation to the white of the paper. Finnegans Wake is also a type of dream
vision, and so this shifting is also a process of disruption -- the words are not static
long enough to interpret completely. Meaning remains provisional and representation
is unﬁxed and blurry, moving forwards and backwards, so that only portions of the
content are understood at any given moment. Contraries may be eliminated, but their
elimination does not bring cohesion and clarity, rather the danger of generational
"prearranged disappointments” (FW 107.33).

Voice-as-mirror contributes to this continuing development and dissemination
of elements often falsely posited as essential and fundamental. The speciﬁc
differences between self and other dissolve and simultaneously assert themselves, with
the recognition of the mirror in front of the subject: "I am, thing Sing Larynx, letter
potent to play the sem backwards like Oscan wild or in shunt Persse transluding from

200

 

 

the Otherman (FW 419.23-25). "I am, thing Sing larynx,” if spoken, is produced in
the throat, in the larynx. The passage presents and questions voice’s ability to
articulate presence, as well as language’s power to mirror and distort empirical reality
and the book’s self-reﬂecting abilities. The line "letter potent to play the sem
backwards like Oscan wild" can be doubly read as ”a letter points to play the same
backwards, " intimating a chiastic understanding of Finnegans Wake, as if the text
could be "read” or ”interpreted" in two directions, forward and backwards,
simultaneously, which may render two different books or the same book twice.

”Sem" speaks of ”Shem” who is the ”penman,” a writer, who like Wilde (Oscan
wilde), "transludes" or transforms/translates/alludes to himself in his writing and also
plays a part, which is largely textually constructed, as Michael Gillespie discusses in
Oscar Wilde and The Poetics of Ambiguity. The ”Otherman” is simultaneously an-
Other, as well as a transposition of the self through representations of voice; voice, in
Finnegans Wake, divides between the subject and the subject speaking, as if the two
could be independent from each other, as separate entities on either side of the
mirror.

Voice serves as this doubled axis of representational capability, simultaneously
reﬂecting and separating two elements involved in that representation, represented as
the speaking subject and audience: playing the same backwards, transitioning
into/alluding to the other(man). As lacan points out in his discussions of the Mirror
Stage, the mirror serves to project the self out into the world of the other,
momentarily reorienting the fragmented subject, traumatized by the acquisition of

language and its entrance into the Symbolic Order. Finnegans Wake is constructed as

201

 

a dream vision, and the ”Circe” episode of Ulysses underscores that ”Dreams goes by
contraries” (UG.15.3929); therefore the book itself, resounding with voices, is a
mirror of a dreamer’s subconscious, ungrounded during sleep, representing the
dreamer, fragmented, disoriented, and reoriented, all simultaneously. Identity and
subjectivity are conﬁrmed and denied by virtue of this re-presentable power inherent
in the construction of voice, implied as a reﬂection and simultaneous source of that
image.

The Greek word for mirror, ”eidolon, " means both image and ghost,
suggesting as the voices in Finnegans Wake, both the presences and absences of the
material subject paradoxically producing, as well as produced by, the image
represented. This same reﬂective process is proposed in relation to voice -- as Bloom
suggests in Ulysses with his idea to place phonographs next to graves so people can
recall a person’s voice. The unmitigated self dissipates in the act of voicing itself; in
order to communicate, the singularity of the subject position, untouched and
uncontested, must be challenged: ”Arise sir ghostus! As long as you’ve lived there’ll
be no other” (FW 532.4).

The story of the "Ont and the Gracehopper" presents both the shadowiness of
language and voice, as well as the necessary inter-connection between items and
persons presented as seemingly distinct and individuated. It is the re-telling of la
Fontaine’s ”Fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper,” but in Finnegans Wake it is
Shaun-the postman (not Shem-the penman, who is typically presented as the writer of
the family) who transforms the classic story for his ”deer little cousis,” after a request

for a song and just prior to a loud clap of thunder or a coughing ﬁt:

202

 

"husstenhasstencafﬁncofﬁntussemtossemdamandamn carcarcaract" -- Husten is
German for cough, tussem is latin for cough, etc11 (FW 414.18-20). Shaun’s story,
like La Fontaine’s, tells the story of the ant and the grasshopper as opposites in their
approach to work: the ant is industrious and stores sufﬁcient food in preparation for
the winter; the grasshopper wiles away his time and is starving when the winter
comes. Shaun’s story, as has been delineated numerous times, insinuates the
interplay between artistic creativity and the practicalities of life in society; neither
value is presented as supreme, even though Joyce himself was more like the
Gracehopper, but the story certainly questions the rather narrow, middle-class
morality of the Ont. The story is also a replay of the sibling rivalry between Shem
and Shaun, as well as the cultural divisions between capitalism and art.

The story is written on "re’forloined notepaper a pinch of scribble, not
worth a bottle of cabbis" (FW 419.30,32). It is, in other words, written on re-stolen
paper and is practically worthless as far as its elemental or mass value; however, this
motif has historical sources that are represented in well-known traditional folktales,
Romances, and contemporary ﬁction: " These twain are the twins of that tick Homo
Vulgaris" (FW 418.26, Joyce’s italics). Twins are always signiﬁcant, as René Girard
explains in The Violence and the Sacred, because they are always already potential
rivals, construed as identical in appearance and desire: ”It should of been my other
with his leickname for he’s the head and I’m an everdevoting ﬁend of his. I can
seeze tomirror in tosdays We shared the twin chamber and we winked on the one
wench" (FW 408.17-21). Shem and Shaun are interchangeable throughout Finnegans

Wake, as are their alternative representations; therefore, rivalry and desire are the by—

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products, as well as the sources for strife. Their voices, too, like Esau’s and Jacob’s,
are not individuated but easily confused in the representations of writing and
speaking. Therefore, "The Ont and the Gracehopper" likewise presents the
simultaneous grounding and foundationlessness of identity and authority.

Soon after Shaun tells his story, like Bloom’s speech in "Circe" during his
Nighttown fantasy, it comes under attack: it is harshly critiqued, rejected, and
regarded as "used up slanguage tun times as words as the penmarks used out of sin
script with hesitancy by your celebrated brother" (FW 421.17-20). The spoken story
is deﬁled as less than Shem’s written work and then it is reinterpreted as an oral
forgery of one of Shem’s stories, speciﬁcally with the use of the word ”hesitancy.”
This word becomes a motif in Finnegans Wake, and especially its misspelling,
'hesitency," because of an actual forgery: According to William Tindall in A Reader’s
Guide to James Joyce, "The verbal motif for forgery is ’hesitency, ’ a word made
famous at the trial of Richard Piggott for forging letters to implicate Parnell in the
Phoenix Park murders. ”‘2 Story-telling is, in essence, imitation or verbal and
written forgery, as well as what Kimberly Devlin calls it in Wandering and Return in
W ”incessant verbal deﬁgurations and reﬁgurations of the self. "3
Therefore, story-telling moves in multiple directions simultaneously,
forward/backward, general/ speciﬁc and always re-presenting the self; like Glen
Gould’s ”The Idea of North," which records voices talking over voices but all nearly
incomprehensibly talking about related subjects, Finnegans Wake is a representation of
the story-telling process, using ideas such as the forgery and the (forged)-palimpsest --

imitation and layers of imitation -- and constructions of overlapping voices. ”The

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theme of forging and forgery comes to a climax here,” according to Tindall,
"where literary creation is fake in two senses: ﬁrst in the Aristotelian sense of
imitation; second by popular estimate. Not only a story or something made, a ﬁction
is a lie. "“

Finnegans Wake continues the study of voice and language begun in Joyce’s
other books, only voice becomes problematically independent of character and
narrator, presenting, as Finnegans Wake does, voice prior to language as the primary
interest. One is hard-pressed in this novel to assign speciﬁc voices to speciﬁc
characters, because voices move and speak without relative position and without
reference to physical logic. Vocal characteristics often reﬂect the character, as well
as complicate characterization. Although one can often identify Issy’s lisp and speech
impediment -- "Have you evew thought, wepowtew, that sheew gweatness of his
twagedy" (FW 61.6-7) -- or HCE’s stutter that utters his guilt -- "First he s 5 st
Steppes. Then he st stoo stoopt. Lookt" (FW 339.30) -- these traits are motifs rather
than signiﬁers of identity and subjectivity. Voice is no longer representing characters
in this book. The voices that speak in Finnegans Wake hardly speak with individual
agency; they are types and principals, i.e. ALP is the resounding feminine principal,
as HCE is her masculine counterpart. These types are pluralizations of relative
utterances and identities that move, merge, separate and distort notions such as
identity and characterization.

Voice and voice-traits, both "shadows" , are the conventional means of
identifying and obscuring characterizations in the text. However precise,

representation of identity remains impossible, because motifs allow characteristics and

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therefore personae to blur: HCE blurs with Finn MacCool, Tim Finnegan, and Perse
O’Reilly (”perce—oreille" is French for ”earwig"); Issy becomes identiﬁed with Iseult
and with the two girls in Phoenix Park to whom HCE exposes himself; and ALP is
the River Liffy, as well as the other washer women. The novel is not constructed as
a mimetic text but composed of tropic discourse(s), as Susan Sailer explains in On the
Void of To Be: "Writing recognized as tropic emphasizes language as discovery and
production; writing recognized as mimetic sees language as recovery and
reproduction. ”‘5 The two are obviously related, ”mimetic language is deeply

tr0pic,” Sailer tells us; Finnegans Wake, however, is less concerned with recovering
language than it is with discovering and producing that which lies beneath the surface
of a moving and living discourse.

Bakhtin presents us with the situation that what we speak is largely contingent
upon what has already been said, and yet one can never return to that point of
origination. All language and all voices are already moments of dialectic
representation. Language is always inherently dialogic, with ”utterance" as the
primary component of novelistic discourse. The utterance, according to Pam Morris,
”actively responds to other utterances and equally shields itself in anticipation of an
addressee’s response. ”‘6

Joyce, in kind, presents the reader with voices that are speaking and
responding before and after any person/character may or may not have spoken. As
well, Finnegans Wake presents and distorts the means of representing identity through
voice as a written construct; the differences between direct and indirect discourse are
obscured; their borders have eroded. The text admits that levels of discourse and
interpretation are simultaneously blurred and multiplied, primarily through the

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transcription of voices and words to the printed page:
[I]ts page cannot ever have been a penproduct of a man or woman of that
period or those parts is only one more unlookedfor conclusion leaped at, being
tantamount to inferring from the nonpresence of inverted commas (sometimes
called quotation marks) on any page that its author was always constitutionally
incapable of misappropriating the spoken words of others. (FW 108.30-36)
The above passage underscores the look of the page, as well as the possibilities
surrounding its creation. As voice, it is and it is not a "penproduct," because voice is
typically represented as spoken or somehow inherent to the character; however, the
juxtaposition with ”its page” underscores the written quality of the text. ”The
nonpresence of inverted commas, " however, does not mean that the passage is not
voiced. No one, like Odysseus-cum-NoMan, is speaking the above passage, because

voice and discourse exists a priori the speaker. Therefore, Joyce is trying to present

 

Finnegans Wake simultaneously conjoined with those bodiless speaking voices; they
are not misappropriated words, because they cannot be possessed.

Finnegans Wake, therefore, is an extreme example of Bakhtin’s "Reported
Speech”: "speech within speech and utterance within utterance, and at the same time,
speech about speech and utterance about utterance. "7 F innegans Wake is less a
story than it is an intense interrogation of the means to tell and interpret a story
through the use of voice. The differences between spoken and written voice are
confused and elided, because we do not speak with punctuation marks but require
them to ”read" voice. The dual perspective of this passage asserts that representation

is always that simultaneous act of reﬂection and projection.

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In relation to this duality, concave mirrors have the ability to reﬂect, as well
as project an image outside the mirror, like a hologram, seemingly independent of
both body and mirror. The representation of voice is largely involved with this
principle, since the representation of voice is part of the metonymic chain,
substituting for the novel, identity, and authority. Obviously toying with the ﬁrst line
of the Gospel of John, ”In the becoming was the weared, wontnat" Joyce is assigning
to that proclamation, namely the power of the voice to create, the simultaneous power
to defer or, more to the point, to multiply its signiﬁcance through resisting
monologic, serious speech: "The voice is the voice of jokeup, I fear” (FW 487 .20-
22).

"Jokeup' is obviously a play on joke, but simultaneously it recalls Jacob, who
with a physical disguise, convinced his blind father that he was his brother Esau and
stole from him his legacy, which was bestowed verbally and could not be given twice
or taken back. Jacob lied to his father and stole from his brother, but paradoxically
followed God’s will. Voice in Finnegans Wake is this marker of diﬁ’erance, because
voice is the site at which language becomes most problematic. Voice presents, as
well as disrupts the material reality assumed to be represented within the text, and
therefore revises the materiality of the sign. Voice is also that which allows
Finnegans Wake to ﬂip representation on its head, since the book’s ability to tell a
story remains provisional at best. The singularity of either Jacob’s or Esau’s voice
does not seem to matter as much to Isaac, the father, as Bsau’s hairy chest; Jacob
easily disguises his lack of hair with fur. Voice, which is meant to be the site of
authority remains ambiguous for the role of inheritor.

Connected with this idea of ”voice as site of authority," Christine Van

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Boheemen-Saaf points out that ALP’s letter, unearthed by Biddy Doran’s (the Hen)
scratching, reveals the simultaneous ”tinkering with the conventional logic/logos"
because that letter allows ”one word to chime with a combination of contradictory
signiﬁers. " This "double practice of at once afﬁrming and denying, violates the
principle of identity [and] thus the logic of the signiﬁer."“B Finnegans Wake, via
this loss of equilibrium, attempts to dislodge a pivotal component of metaphysics; the
novel reveals that our understanding of material reality and identity are only based
upon suppositions of perception. Identiﬁable markers that would unite character and
voice remain ﬂuid, violating conventional perceptions of categorizability in a text that
is obviously written. Finnegans Wake, in other words, presents a "both/and"
aesthetic principle, whereby personae within the novel exchange positions and can
move "furrowards, bagawoards" without concern for conventional, linear methods of
reading or experience, like Benjy’s narration in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
(FW 18.32). The book, therefore, performs continuous translations that are never
precise; only Joyce assumably knew what he was doing, and it is up to the reader to
ﬁgure out a key that may or may not be easier to understand than the text: "Like
things are m. ds. is all in vincibles. Decoded” -- if ”similarities or ’like things’
render reality invisible" is the decoded message, interpretation of the text or the
translation remains muddled (FW 232.26).

Voice, like the mirror, doubles the focus of representation. One tends to
believe that for a mirror to reﬂect, it requires a material object as the source of that
reﬂection. However, the various manifestations of the mirror (the speculum mundi or

book or world as mirror), just as with voice (novel as voice) present one with the

209

 

 

absence of the material object. Joyce uses both voice and mirror throughout
Finnegans Wake, both of which present to the reader the improbable task of re-
authorizing the material subject that may not exist. The Speculum Mandi can create a
reﬂection, and the world, circuitously, is that reﬂection, just as reading voice suggests
a body behind the voice. Along this signifying chain, Joyce uses both to cast doubt
onto the authoritative presence of materiality, which in turn deconstructs principles of
identity and subjectivity by precluding their existence because of their representation.
It inverts the relative relationships of body/voice and body/mirror, because in
Finnegans Wake there is never a material subject serving as the source of the
representation.

Finnegans Wake obsesses over problems of signiﬁcation inherent with voice

and the mirror, as problematic means of representation, and continually reminds the

 

reader about the differences between perceived reality and that which exists.
Finnegans Wake calls our attention to the discrepancies between image and
imagination, repeatedly represented through constructions of identity and subjectivity,
both cast as elements within the means of representing a character. What one gets is
the proclamation of existence as an eternal replicator of voice and image. "A
wouldbe martyr . . . revealed the undoubted fact that the consequence would be that so
long as Sankya Moondy played his mango tricks under the mysttetry there would
be ﬁghts all over Cuxhaven" (FW 60.16-22). The ”Sankya Moondy" is the "Sakya
Muni, " another name for Sihhartha Guatama, the Guatama Buddha, the founder of
Buddhism who achieved enlightenment yet, by his own choice, is eternally reborn.

The buddha were continuously reborn through Samsarra, the eternal cycle of rebirths,

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by their own volition to assist others in achieving Nirvana. In a sense, every buddha
is a reﬂection of his previous incarnations, if one could learn to ”see” them.

The understanding of perception, therefore, cannot be based on a linear
concept of cause and effect. The mystery can never be solved, because the
differences among incarnations do not belong to notions of "true" and ”false, " or even
Augustine’s seeming and being. Furthermore, the Guatama intimates that the speciﬁc
difference between "true" and ”false, " is not relevant; rather an approach to a
resolution lies in the method of questioning. According to traditional Buddhism, even
to hint that ”this world is true and all others false,” is simply dismissed as "not ﬁtting
the case. "‘9 Traditional Buddhism expresses the notion that life is a stream of
becoming. There is nothing permanent in the empirical self. One thing is dependent
upon another. This is the law of dependent origination. Even the self is a composite

of perception, feeling, volitional dispositions, intelligence, and form. All these forms

 

change according to the law of karma.20

This association works very well with Finnegans Wake, because Finnegans
Wake is also based upon the interdependence of voices and discourses, as well as the
transitoriness of substances or individuals, as Adaline Glasheen’s near-exhaustive
chart, "Who is Who When Everybody is Somebody Else” in A Third Census
illustrates. Voiced discourse remains unstable, because representation through voice
cannot sustain substantiation, because of the instability of spoken and written voices
caused by the "ink/air” split.

With the fall came doubt and instability, and from the Tower of Babel came
linguistic confusion inherent to identity and naming. From this confusion, the mirror
can be read as a doubled metaphor, and therefore a doubled-double for knowledge,

211

"propounded for cyclological a semblance of a substance for the membrance of the
umbrance with the remnance of the emblance" (FW 220.30-33). The recognition of
the similarities among substance, shadow, and symbol suggests the possible overlap of
these three seemingly exclusive concepts; voice, as an immaterial marker of shadow
and substance, can represent all three in equal terms through metaphor and analogy.
We gain knowledge by looking at the world, but we perceive it "through a glass
darkly” (1 Cor: 13. 12) -- through a mirror whose reﬂection is dark and distorting.
The reﬂection could be false, facilitating imperfect interpretation, just as voice can be
distorted and mimicked. Finnegans Wake reduces the difference between ”seeming”
and ”being" to a point of irrelevance within the layers of typological and exegetical
interpretation. Finnegans Wake is a ﬁctional novel, but it is also a book that refuses
empirical reality as essential. For Finnegans Wake, materiality and immateriality are
inter-connected, related in their sameness, in terms of their mutual representation
through voice: ”Putting truth and untruth together a shot may be made at what this
hybrid actually was like to look at" (FW 169.8-10). Finnegans Wake mimics real and
imagined voices through the dream, distorting accents and allowing for the dual
nature of voice and language to come to the forefront, allowing the sound of voices
and the appearance of words, as well as ﬁgures represented to resonate
simultaneously.

The personae of Finnegans Wake always remain self-contradictory types, in
another sense. As the dream progresses, they become less developed and more ﬂuid,
despite the enormous amount of information the text tells us about them all: for

example, inexplicably Shaun-the postman, becomes Jaunty Jaun, Yawn, Jacob, Esau,

212

 

John Joyce, and the list goes on. For these personae, voice reﬂects elements of
personality, and contrarily disturbs forces of cohesion that would create characters.
Voice, in this sense, represents shadows cast by an undetermined, unspeciﬁc
body, or no body at all. A shadow functions, in part, like a mirror, obscurely
recasting features of the object, as a camera obscura allows one to look at a solar
eclipse. The umbra, or ”umbrance” as Joyce writes, is the shadow cast by an eclipse,
as well as the darkest region of a sunspot. Portions of the image are blocked,
because a shadow does not create a direct, "true" image. However, a shadow can
indirectly present that which cannot be represented, because of the absence or
overabundance of dimensionality: a shadow can offer ”the canonicity of his existence
as a tesseract” when a complete, dimensional representation is impossible (FW
100.35). A tesseract cannot exist in our Newtonian universe, because, by deﬁnition,
it is a four-dimensional cube; but one can create a ﬁgure that can re-produce a
tesseract’s shadow, since a shadow reduces dimension. As an element of the
imagination, the possibility of a fourth dimension, of which the concept of a tesseract
is a shadow of an example, allows for a different perspective on the third and reveals
the diffusive relativity of seemingly essential differences. The book, in this sense, is
also a shadow, as voice is a shadow of an assumed speaker, reducing while
simultaneously representing the person. Finnegans Wake presents the immaterial and
the false over the material and the true, in part, because if there fails to be any
fundamental distinction between these concepts, all are illusions. As readers, we may
be "a band of fact ferreters" (FW 55.13), but we only discover ”the unfacts, did we
possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude [with] the
evidencegivers by legpoll too untrustworthily irreperible" (FW 57.16-18); we learn

213

 

 

 

that ”Madame’s Toshowus waxes [are] largely more lifeliked (entrance, one kudos;
exits, free) and our notional gullery is now completely complacent, an exegious
monument, aerily perennious" (FW 57.20-22) and that because our own existence is
more "seeming” than ”being," we are no longer ourselves; instead merely ”We seem
to us (the real Us!) (FW 62.26, italics mine).

Along with these issues of "seeming" and ”being” that voice obscures, the text
obviously mocks the way English sounds through another’s accent, and yet the
phrases call attention to the way the words look and what they can mean. One such
example is a dialogue between St. Kevin, speaking Nippon English, and the arch-
Druid: "If it was, in yappanoise language Augs and ohrs with Rhian O’kehley to
put it tertainly, we wrong? Such as turly pearced our really’s that he might, that
he might never, that he might never that night? Treely and rurally" (FW 90.27-31).
The discussion is on HCE’s alleged guilt for exposing himself to the girls in Phoenix
Park, and possibly to Issy (”pearced our really" recalls Perse O’Reilly; "perce-oreille"
is French for ”earwig"; and Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker is one linguistic
manifestation of HCE). Therefore, ”seeming" and ”being” are rendered relative, as
the look and sound of English becomes more problematic to the supposed speaking
subject. The swapping of Irish for German myth: "with blessure, and swobbing
broguen eeriesh myth brockendootsch, making his reporterage a Fastland
payrodicule" (FW 70.3-6) reveals the hybrid relationship of languages and offers a
greater story; voice is always interdependent with other voices and reveals to the fact-
ferreters, ”a word as cunningly hidden in its maze of confused drappery

[betraying] learning at almost every line’s end” (FW 120.5 ,24). The loss of

214

 

 

equilibrium proposes a movement between identity and identiﬁcation, as voice
suggests an obscuring between ontology and language.

Derek Attridge, in ”Joyce and the Ideology of Character," states that
characters in Finnegans Wake must be deﬁned with a "double sense," and possibly
more. Instead of deﬁning a character as "an assemblage of consistent personal
qualities,” it must be reassessed as an "arbitrary sign in a conventional, historically-
determined system. '2‘ There is a loss of stasis and correspondence between identity
and representation in the Wake. Attridge’s method illustrates that HCE et al. are
persons "only insofar as they are at the same time letters scattered across the text. ”22
Their personal traits that we can identify are better considered as voiced
characteristics reﬂecting the personae -- the book is telling us about them, as well as
telling us about telling us about them: ”There are sordidly tales within tales, you
clearly understand that" (FW 522.5). We encounter the Wakean personae as allusions
and motifs or as moving letters: Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker is any arrangement
of the letters "hee," as Anna Livia Plurabelle is ”alp."

The cognitive value of a sentence has little to do with the individual letters that
make up the words of that sentence. When we read, we perceive words in relation to
one another and focus on the individual letters for their sound value. The personae of
Finnegans Wake, however, are also anagrammatical. They are recognized by the
repetition of a speciﬁc arrangement of letters, i.e. ”hoe,” ”alp," and not necessarily
for their relatability. Joyce’s "anywaywords", however, go to the level of the letter
and then to the letter’s sound value: "Pure chingchong idiotism with any way words

all in one soluble. Gee [G] each [H] owe [0] tea [T] eye [I] smells [spells] ﬁsh" (FW

215

 

 

299.F3, my additions). G.B. Shaw pointed out that "GHOTI" can and does sound the
same as ”Fish”: ”pronounce as in enouGH, wOman and naTIon.”23 Without names,
these representations do not possess any agency, and the cryptic sigla further remove
identiﬁcation from any traditionally inscribed signiﬁers. Identiﬁable qualities become
odd shapes used to stand in for the already ambiguous anagrams and abbreviations of
types: ”those gloompourers who grouse that letters have never been quite their old
selves when to the shock of both, Biddy Doran looked at literature" (FW 112.24-
27).

Joyce’s use of the siglas“ continues the process of scratching away at
language’s ability to present anything with certainty, as well as our ability to interpret
anything that isn’t already multiplying exponentially. The book itself presupposes that
the barriers to interpretation are always created by the prioritizing of the senses, for
example the eyes over the cars. We read Finnegans Wake, but Finnegans Wake
insists that the sound of the words echo with our reading and that the buried sounds
hidden within the distorted written words get their say as well; they ”begin again to
make soundsense and sensesound kin again" (FW 121.15). The text emphasizes the
look of the page, ”those haughtypitched dispotted aiches" (FW 121.16) and that it may
owe its presence and appearance to more than the authority of the writer: ”our copyist
seems at least to have grasped the beauty of restraint" (FW 121.30). Through it all,
Finnegans Wake alludes that there is a lot of activity going on behind the scenes and
insists that there is always ”an echo in the back of the wodes" (FW 126.3) where
meaning could reside.

Despite the challenge that the senses will never gain access to Finnegans Wake

216

 

 

directly, the book tells us to look at the page, listen to the sound of the words, and to
read its story. The eyes and the ears must work together, harmoniously as well as
contrarily, to snatch the tale that is being told in this obscuring book: "while the ear,
be we milealls or nicholists, may sometimes be inclined to believe others the eye,
whether browned or nolensed, ﬁnd it devilish hard now and again even to believe
itself. Habes aures et num videbis ? Habes oculos ac mannepalpabuatl” (FW

1 13.29-30).

As any reader of Irish can attest, often the words’ written appearances do not
mirror their sound value. The solution is oddly a confusion of the senses, and since
all sensing takes place in the brain, the difference between sight and hearing is not
necessarily strict. For example, Joyce summarized and commented on one chapter,
FW 111.2, to Harriet Shaw Weaver:

after a long absurd and rather incestuous Lenten lecture to Izzy, his sister,

{Shaun} takes leave of her "with a half a glance of Irish frisky from under the

shag of his parallel brows”. These are the words the reader will see but not

those he will hear. (Letters 1.216)

As space-time is a joined term in physics, Joyce joins sight-sound, telling us to read
the text with a combination of the senses of hearing, sight, and speech: "Shutmup.
And bud did down well right. And if he sung dumb in his glass darkly speech lit face
to face on allaround" (FW 355.8-9). The senses here are as jumbled as the references
to the Bible, ”glass darkly” and to Ulysses, ”But Bloom sang dumb," as McHugh
shows in Annotations, implying that it is their combined abilities, or equally their

inabilities, to perceive that may approach the signiﬁcance of voice in this text.

217

 

 

language and voice undermine presence; we come to the page falsely assuming that
the words have real value (res), when they are only signs of a spoken language --
signs of signs (verba). The elision of sound-sight reminds that interpretation is
contingent upon perception as well as the means of perception.

Finnegans Wake assigns little individuality to those voiced siglas and letters.
They re-sound as "a sample jungle of woods," with the reader ”lost in the bush" (FW
112.2,1). Any novel’s ability to represent presence is always suspect, because voice
can only suggest materiality; it can only imply it, as a mirror’s reﬂection implies a
physical object standing in front of the glass. The cryptic use and explanation of the

siglas continues the deterioration of identity and subjectivity, as well as the process of

telling: "why not take the former [A] for a village inn, the latter for an upsidedown

bridge [E-rotated 90 degrees], a multiplication marking for crossroads ahead [X] ...”
(FW 119.27, additions mine). The personae, via the siglas, lose their names and

become ﬁgures, in a sense, with no relational value to any identity or reason for their
use. A could just as easily be ALP, as it can be an "upsidedown bridge,” and neither

could be contradicted or afﬁrmed. Their names had already become any
representation of various sounds or arrangement of letters, but the siglas reveal that
the potential for reading can be further deconstructed to the point that we can never
even associate a sound value to the ﬁgures on the page. They were originally Joyce’s
shorthand but came to be useful as relative signiﬁers for the text itself and for its
personae. Nothing ties meaning to the siglas, except for their repeated association to
the various characterizations and types, and the siglas possess no recognizable sound

value that we associate with letters. Whether shorthand or obscuring marks, they

218

 

 

eventually come to occupy the same cognitive space as the letters did. We as readers,
'ﬁll in the missing pieces to recognize and associate the motifs, but it is still voice that
constructs these scripted, falsely non-relational signiﬁers.

The siglas represent Joyce’s attempt to move backwards, retreating from our
"naturalized" alphabet to recall the arbitrariness of the sounds and the identities
assigned to the marks on a page. People who can read music have little trouble with
this concept, because the marks, although called ”notes” are obviously not the sounds
that come from the instrument; however, reading words, 'GHOTI“ for ”ﬁsh”
becomes problematic, because we forget the arbitrariness of the link between the
word and its deﬁned sound value. Writing in the Wake is a process of
defamiliarization with regard to its relationship to voice.

The Wakean concept of ”vocable scriptsigns," poses an elision between
speaking voices and written text, an elision that blurs vocal and textual qualities.
Written text in the Wake possesses the power to move and associate, just as voice

does. "[A] goodishsized sheet of letterpaper originating by transhipt from Boston

 

(Mass.)" (FW 111.8-10) that Biddy Doran, the Hen, scratches up, shows that the
meaning intended may or may not correspond accurately to the letters transcribed:
”locust may eat all but this sign shall they never" (FW 111.18) is the boast, but the
indelible sign has altered nonetheless. The unchanging sign has been signed over, in
a sense, by an inanimate, accidental forger: ”The stain, and that a teastain (the
overcautelousness of the masterbilker here, as usual, signing the page away), marked
it off on the spout of the moment as a genuine relique of ancient Irish pleasant

pottery” (FW 111.2043).

219

In bringing the letter to light, Biddy Doran alters its appearance, making
portions of it illegible. Despite its dubious physical presence, its lack of stasis
undermines its implied physicality. No one can read it properly, and as if by
consequence, it seems to be disintegrating, with the causal relationship running both
ways. Moreover, the letter itself, an image in a dream, moves and alters as reading
is attempted; it is like looking at an unclear photograph whose "negative had partly
[been] obliterated” we see that "some features palpably nearer your pecker to be
swollen up most grossly while the farther back we manage to wiggle the more we
need the loan of a lens to see as much as the hen saw” (FW111.35-112.2).

ALP’s letter, unearthed from the garbage heap, is obviously distorted, because
of its contact with the pile. It has taken on qualities that it may not have had prior to
its discard and to the hen scratching it. The acts of bringing it to light and retrieving
it have altered its meaning and our ability to interpret it. The discovery is also a
redoing; the passage about the unearthing of the letter belongs to tropic discourse.
Joyce, however, places another dubious term within the context; the passage states
that we now require "a lens” to see the letter’s meaning. ”A lens," on one level
means that we require eye-glasses to read the letter, because so much of its form has
altered, making it more difﬁcult to see the words and letters; a mirror is also "a
lens." A mirror functions as a lens, distorting light to clarify or obscure: "For an
anondation of miriﬁcation and the lutiﬁcation of our paludination" (FW 372.23-24).
The process of using a lens for 'mirror-ﬁcation" both creates wonders (miriﬁcation)
and well as deceptions ”ludiﬁcations," making the entire process of interpretation
more cloudy, and "paludine" means pertaining to a marsh. The letter has become
encrypted, perhaps with a secret language, that can only be read with the use of a

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special lens, like a mirror, to attempt to return it to its original meaning, ”in a
murderous mirrorhand" (FW 177.31). The page has other meanings besides the
letters written on it, because with the use of a tool that either increases the power of
the eye or that alters the look of the page, new and different meanings can become
apparent, but they may not be true representations; they may be ”very many piously
forged palimpsests slipped in the ﬁrst place by this morbid process from his
pelagiarist pen” (FW 182.2-3).

This forged palimpsest is integral to a reading of Finnegans Wake, because it
images a layering of forgeries. Typically, as with currency, forgery is discouraged
by encrypting layers of text that assumably cannot be copied. Since a palimpsest is,
by deﬁnition, a layering of text or a place or a thing that reveals its own history, a
forgery of that layering questions the inherent value we place on originality. Voice
lies tenuously behind all written representation in Finnegans Wake, as a type of a
priori marker of representation, because of the duality of the material and non-
corporeal paradoxically simultaneous with voice. Finnegans Wake as a forged
palimpsest underscores that it is original only because it refuses to adhere to the rules
of traditional narratives. Its story and its plot, as far as there is one, are not
innovative. The method of multiplying perspective through the use of multiple,
continuously re-deﬁned voices reﬂects the verbal qualities of all discourse. Such a
process seems unfamiliar, because we falsely make distinct the ideas of writing,
reading, and speaking. Reading, even silent reading, still mobilizes the words in
speciﬁc verbal patterns, returning the dry ink to the realm of voiced imagination.

Light does more than allow the reader to see an object as it is; light obviously

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affects the object, revealing and potentially altering or obscuring. Ultraviolet light
can reveal what lies beneath the surface of a palimpsest, allowing, in a sense, layers
of reading to exist simultaneously. Light can also distort interpretation, making
something appear more or less than what it may be; as already stated, with a convex
mirror, light can make a reﬂected image appear outside the glass, seemingly three-
dimensional. Light itself is both particle and wave, mutually exclusive terms in
normal, physical existence, ”contraries eliminated” in one "stable somebody."

Light alters physical reality as well. At the level of subatomic particles, the
energy required to locate the locus of an electron causes that particle to move to a
higher energy level. Thus, the act of observation changes the thing itself. Often
construed only in a positive sense, i.e. with light comes understanding, light can
destroy objects, like photographs or paintings. Our interpretation of a thing brought
to light is likewise obscured, even when we seem to comprehend the object fully,
because shadows are created by light colliding with a dense object. Light waves are
absorbed and reﬂected to varying degrees by physical matter as well; when we see an
object as green, green is actually the only light wave that is reﬂected. Reﬂection,
therefore, is less a statement about what a thing is than what it is not; reﬂection, in
other words, can re-present falsehood.

Voice as an illuminated reﬂection or representation of the personae is self-
contradictory and self-negating, as proposed continuously by the Wake, an actual book
which obviously requires light to read in the ﬁrst place:

Yet on holding the verso against a lit rush this new book or Morses responded

most remarkably to the silent query of our world’s oldest light and its recto let

out the piquant fact that it was but pierced butnot puctured (in the university

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sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a prolonged

instrument. (FW 123.34-124.3)
Light and sound (book of Morses or Morse code as a transmission of words by sound
later retranslated back into words) calls our attention to the effect of light on the page
that allows us to read. Finnegans Wake also calls attention to its creation and
construction, as if it is looking at its own pages, ”recto” and ”verso," and
commenting, out of context, on the letters printed on the surface of the paper.
Finnegans Wake defamiliarizes us from words that seem English (or even those
seeming most ”unenglish") by emphasizing what they really may be: codes, jabs,
pierces, and gashes made by a pen.

As the multiplicity of the verbal positions continues to grow, the reader’s task
of deﬁning voice becomes more arduous, because a voice often speaks from more
than one antecedent or from none in particular. It is no longer a valid question to ask

of Finnegans Wake, ”who is talking?" because voice lacks speciﬁcity. It can

 

represent potential traits, but it cannot conﬁrm them or their origin. Voice is the
process whereby one’s assumptions regarding individuality and identity come under a
full attack. Previous clues that Joyce once gave us -- the dash to represent dialogue;
italics for discourse and voices out of context; or even clues to negotiate difﬁcult
switches in focalization -- are absent in Finnegans Wake. All these markers are still
used, but they never become grounded again. Dialogue comes about when there are
no speakers. When there are interlocutors, bits of indirect and direct editorializing
from the point of view of some narrative voice alters the words and phrases.

MaMaLuJo, the combined, crotchety evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,

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pop in and out, usually demanding that the ﬁsh be passed. And italics, which for
Stephen represented parody or mimicry, are used inexplicably. Their presence to the
text remains ambiguous, and yet their indiscriminatoriness offers some clues: the
entire book is a representation, as are all novels. Therefore, everything is already
removed by a matter of degrees -- everything is already parody and mimicry. We
know this intellectually, but Finnegans Wake shows that intuitively we still expect the
text to be "naturalized" and ideologically reconstructive of our culturally contingent
reality.

Since Finnegans Wake is a book of multiple styles with multiple voices
participative in those styles, reading and interpretation become endless peregrinating
processes. Yawn, for instance, speaks, but we never really have much of a
description of him that will ground the voice in a body. He is, in one sense, a
transformed Shaun, but for all intents and purposes, there is no deﬁnite transcription
from Shaun to Yawn. To elide the two completely would mean to impose a discrete
deﬁnition onto Yawn that Joyce chose not to impose; the elisions one ﬁnds to
associate the two are most notably the pronounced sound of the two names.
Furthermore, we learned in Ulysses that even when the narrator is not representing a
character’s interior voice, the reader was still often privy to a character’s focalization,
as Katie Wales argues throughout The Language of James Joyce; and sometimes, as is
the case with the ”Penelope" episode, "voice and focalisation are identical.”5 The
narrative construction, through free indirect discourse, is affected, not only by the
character’s idiom, but by his/her perspective. The novel allows discourses to interact

and collide, albeit very often bodiless, to interrogate the relationship between

224

U

 

 

discourse and perspective, as Colin MacCabe states in James Joyce and the
Revolution of the Word, ”What we recognize as we read through the juxtaposition of
various discourse is that the world we see is determined by the discourses we
speak.”

In Finnegans Wake, identiﬁable voice- or linguistic-traits affect the narrative
by continuing the dissolution and dissemination of personality; these traits, aligned
because of the juxtaposition of discourse and perspective, often take the form of
”collated words which get repeated and come to represent a character by functioning
as motifs,"28 according to Wales. Discourse always hinges upon the repetition of
formulaic patterns, as Bakhtin illustrated with his ideas that speech precedes speaker.
Finnegans Wake reduces the realization of linguistics to the point that identities, as
well as names and personalities, can likewise be reduced to repeating symbols and
phrases, like the Odyssean epithets: "grey-eyed Athena” or "quick witted Odysseus. "
As someone who is illiterate may use an ”X” or a symbol in lieu of a signature, the
absence of a written, determined alphabet calls attention to the circularity and
interplay between identity and voice, independent of written language.

In Book-3 of the Wake, the book is held up as a mirror of a world, and the
reader is constructed from within the text, addressed as a co-creator: "I can tell you
something more than that, dear writier, profoundly as you may bedeave to it, he was
oscasleep asleep" (FW 476.20-22). Posing or pretending to be an-other is very
signiﬁcant in the Wake, where any attempt to delineate individuals is always
impossible. The references are to Oscar Wilde, who was accused of "posing as a

somdomite (sic)" by the Marquis of Queensbury, and to Yawn who is potentially

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posing as both the dreamer and as Shaun’s twin, who is Shem’s twin. ”His dream
monologue was over of cause, but his drama parapolylogic had yet to be affact' (FW
474.4-5). Yawn is described as waking and closing his dream speech, but his
position as Shaun’s doppelganger, as well as the creator of the dream seems
unsatisfying and unlikely, especially since much of it seemed to emanate from HCE,
the father. Once again representation has multiplied into numerous sounding
characteristics, which can neither conﬁrm nor deny identity and authority over
anything. Yawn, therefore, is a false story-teller, another forger in a book of forgers
and forgeries.

Yawn is a forger, and therefore a liar, and F innegans Wake states explicitly
that it is repeatedly lying; however the reader is too by participating in the voicing of
the text, suggesting a universal and totalizing loss of identity and agency: "Are you
sure of yourself now? You’re a liar, excuse me! I will not and you’re another" (FW
96.18)! The text is contingent upon the active presence of a reader, and Finnegans
Wake constructs a reader, hoping for an ideal reader but willing to accept whoever
opens the pages. The narrative voice constructs the presence of the reader through
the addresses that appear throughout the text, which often rightly assume that the
”physical” reader existing outside the dream and the book is having difﬁculty
understanding Finnegans Wake. In a passage that seems to be discussing potential
gun violence, "he would surely shoot her, the aunt, by pistol” (FW 63.3), the text
begins by calling attention ﬁrst of all to the split inherent within re-presentation -- the
idea that we exist in the text and potentially in life as facades of a hidden reality: "We

seem to us (the real Us!) to be reading our Amenti in the sixth sealed chapter of the

226

going forth by black” (FW 62.25). The obscure references to the Egyptian Book of
the Dead, "Chapters of going forth by day” as well as the Egyptian underworld,
”Amenti," offer the idea of the transitoriness of this existence. However, The Book
of the Dead attempted to resurrect once living beings, as voice reanimates the words
on the page, as John Bishop explains in Joyce’s Book of the Dark, ”In Joyce’s book
of the dead, the opening of the mouth accomplishes the same miracle treated in its
Egyptian antecedents: it resurrects. ”29 However, the presence of the reader is never
concretized; our projected presence in the text, us-vs-the real US, renders the very
concept of a reader of Finnegans Wake less distinct rather than more. Like the
personae in the book, each time we are addressed or constructed, our representations
are fading, and yet the book still needs us to be involved directly, ”But how
transparingly nontrue, gentlewriter" (FW 63.10)!

This connective contingency to the reader also presents an odd representation
of the narrative voice as a presence reading Finnegans Wake to a reader: "Listen now.
Are you listening? Yes, yes! Idneed I am" (FW.201.3)! The pose creates regressing
levels of reading, with the presence of the reader becoming more problematic: is the
narrator addressing the reader of the text or the reader in the text, and are they the
same person? The answer "Yes" forces the reader to admit that s/he is participating,
but the ”idneed" implies that the tri-partite corner where narrator, implied reader, and
actual reader all meet represents a type of absence, namely the id -- the unconscious,
primitive drive. The site where the narrative voice reads also lacks identity, I.D.-
need: it is a voice without form or discreet speciﬁcations. John Bishop explains this

ambiguity in terms of the dead Egyptian’s connection to Osiris; they all ”identiﬁed

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with Osiris and bore his name. This is rather what happens in the Wake, where the
name of the real sleeper gets lost, with his consciousness and identity to be recast
in thousands of [emblematic] forms. "3° Thus, the representation of voice in
Finnegans Wake recalls our own contingency with all the voices speaking inside and
outside the text, underscoring the absence of speciﬁcity within subjectivity and
identity: we can all exclaim "idneed, I am!"

The narrative continues with the pose that it is reading, "Well now comes the
hazel-hatchery part We’ll soon be there with the freshet I can’t rightly rede you
that” (FW 201.25-28). As with Joyce’s earlier works, the narrative voice knows more
than it is telling; however in Finnegans Wake, it ﬁnally admits forthright that it will
not, or cannot, tell everything. Previously it was always left for us to infer that the
narrative voice was hiding something from us, but Finnegans Wake tells is directly
that it is full of "hides and hints and misses in prints” (FW 20.11). In other words,
because of mistakes, as well as meanings unknown via the associative power of
language, everything cannot be told or known at any particular moment in time.

The addresses to the reader also represent an anxiety over his/her abandoning
the text and quitting the whole process of reading Finnegans Wake: ”Turning up and
ﬁngering over the most dantellising peaches in the lingerous longerous book of the
dark. Look at this passage about Galilleotto! I know it is difﬁcult but when you
goche I go dead" (FW 251 .23-26). The representation of verbally calling the reader
back illustrates the necessary presence of voice in this book; the passage above has
the text miming the process of pointing to itself, "Look at this ...” as well as making

a translation joke, ”when you goche"; it sounds like ”go," refers to ”gauche,” the

228

 

French for "left," and so the joke takes us full circle: when the reader leaves the
narrative disappears. F innegans Wake is dependent upon the living, ever-present
voice of the reader, inside and outside the text, because its narrative, like all
novelistic narrative voices, must remain ever-present, or as the book states it, “One
continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all moodmoulded cycle history"
(FW185.36-186.2).

Many of the addresses to the reader denote the book’s failing attempt to keep
on track; it is self-consciously and obsessively digressive. These false re-starts imply
a narrative voice that is easily distracted by language’s associative powers: like a free-

association game, Finnegans Wake cannot stop itself from talking about other things,

 

and yet those other things are always somehow related to the nature of how a story
unfolds in the "cyclewheel [of] history." "But resuming inquiries" (FW 66.10), "Now
to the obverse" (FW 67.28), ”Will you hold your peace and listen well to what I am
going to say now?” (FW 207.30-31). Each of these three passages, and there are
quite a few others, reveals the text’s inability to continue in this "Tobecontinued’s
tale" (FW 626.18). Finnegans Wake’s original title, Work In Progress alluded to the
same issue: it will never be ﬁnished as long as voices of readers enter into the text.
The process of continuous reading is structurally represented in the lesson
chapter with the twins’ notebook. The page illustrates a similar kind of war among
voices that the entire book has been doing on a larger scale. On either side of the
page, we have marginalia, one in italics that seems to be rather silly and the other in
capital letters that seems to be more scholarly. Furthermore, at the bottom are

footnotes that most often do not have anything to do with the notebook or with the

229

margins. At various points, the marginalia switches sides for no apparent reason, and
at other points they switch characteristics, i.e. the italics seem more scholarly and the
capital letters seem silly. As Joyce told Frank Budgen in July of 1939:

[T]he technique here is a reproduction of a schoolboy’s (and schoolgirl’s) old

classbook complete with marginalia by the twins, who change sides at

halftime, and footnotes by the girl (who doesn’t), a Euclid diagram, funny

drawing, etc. (Letters 1.406)

The page itself, as well as the text’s repeated telling us to ”look,” reveals that the
problematics of telling are compounded by the processes of writing, and both
processes are dependent upon, as well as deconstructed by, the elusiveness of voice.
Finnegans Wake is never ”unspeechably thoughtless over it all here” (FW 238.36).

Finnegans Wake obviously plays obsessively with these difﬁculties, in terms of
identifying the position and context of the voice that is telling us this "last word in
stollentelling. " In part, the representation of voice in this text reveals itself to be a
similar kind of intersection where seemingly unrelated details and characteristics
collide, merge, separate, and switch relative positions. In this sense, voice becomes
the interstitial place whereby presence and absence simultaneously exist to forestall
interpretation.

Using an analogy for this forestalling, Colin MacCabe comments that the
sound of the ocean does not exist in the shell or the ear, but in the space between.
His comment is partially incorrect, since the shell serves as an ampliﬁer of one’s own
heartbeat, which emanates from the ear. The example is still useful, since it is the
interaction of the properties of the shell and the ear that produces the false ocean
sound. It may seem to be the sound of the ocean, but it is an accidental simulation.

230

 

Finnegans Wake creates a similar accident, since the text appears to be aware of itself
as a book with pages and words. That sense exists in the imagination of the reader
projecting it onto the book. Obversely, the book calls its pages ”reﬂections," and like
a mirror, it alludes that the act of reading is a simultaneous projection outward, from
the text to the reader, as well as a reﬂection of the reader him/herself. Like being in
a mirrored fun-house, it is difﬁcult to tell what is "real" and what is illusion. Joyce
validates both, illusion and reality, as equally sufﬁcient to tell a story. Voice, meant
as a projection of the speaking subject, is as illusive as the sound of the ocean in the
shell, since in Finnegans Wake we do not "hear” voices, but in order to comprehend
the text, we must pay attention to sounds and therefore to the sound-value of those
represented voices.

These various and often contradictory representations of verbal characteristics
serve to highlight the indeterminacy of binary constructions: male/female, self/other,
or moral/ immoral. The speciﬁc differences between past and future elide as well, but
Finnegans Wake tells us there is a cost to such relativism: ”forgo the pasht! And all
will be forgotten (FW 96.20)! Finnegans Wake, however, does not forgo the past; it
refuses to forget anything, but memory is, like voice, associative as well as
discriminating. These seemingly speciﬁc, exclusionary categories, from within the
contexts of voice, are often self-negated and/or redoubled, because of the nature of
their ambiguous, "both/and” positions. As Margot Norris comments in Joyce’s Web:
The Social Unraveling of Modernism, ”These binaries are neither moral categories nor
essentialist archetypes, but rather perceptual and hermeneutical expressions of the

conﬂict between desire and knowledge in our relation to reality, that result in the

231

 

indeterminacy of the representational act. ”3‘

F innegans Wake exempliﬁes that voice constructs and deconstructs the
narrative, revealing the weakness and ambiguity of mutually exclusive constructions.
Voice presents to the reader the intersection between desire and truth, which is the
cloudy difference between "I want” and "I have. " These are not necessarily mutually
exclusive conditions, but causal factors that can easily disturb even the simplest
conversations, as Alice learns at the Mad Tea Party when she mistakenly equates
meaning, thinking, and speaking:

”Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "Why you might just as well say

that ’I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ’I eat what I see [or] ’I like what

I get’ is the same thing as ’I get what I like.”32
Memory, as well as syntax, confound these differences by projecting through the
imagination. With memory, we recall the past, and with imagination we conjure the
future. We exist, nonetheless, in a present, an axis between these two,
conceptualized by a single, multifarious, and potentially inﬁnite brain, and expressed
and reﬂected through voices in a simultaneously tri-partite state: I have spoken, I am
speaking, and I will speak. Norris’ comment about truth is less signiﬁcant to
Finnegans Wake than her point regarding desire. As a dream or as a book, desire is
paramount to any representation; truth is simply irrelevant, since Finnegans Wake is
neither concerned with truth or its relative difference from falsehood. Finnegans
Wake does not deny experience or empirical reality, only one’s ability to interpret and
articulate it.

Part of the graduating difﬁculty of interpretation is that everything is divisible

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and based upon the associative values of potentially unspeciﬁc elements; the
arrangement of matter is not easily determined or deﬁned and can often appear
illogical because of an obscured associative order. Similarly, linguistic
communication, either writing or speaking, is also associative and often difﬁcult to
assuage, as Philip Kuberski discusses in The Persistence of Memory:

An atom, as imagined by Democritus and Leucippus and as maintained until

the twentieth century, was primarily a word pointing to an idea; literally a-tom

meant an entity which could not be split33 . . . Thus Lucretius, whose De

Rerum Natura takes the atomic theory as its foundation, persistently links the

formation of matter out of atoms to the foundation of words out of the

alphabet. Matter and language observed the same logic of combination: both

were simply arrangements from a table of elements.34
In other words, F innegans Wake represents that the linguistic and the verbal are
already destabilized and deconstructed, just as quantum mechanics understands matter
to be at the atomic level. If solid matter is not ﬁxed, then the reiﬁcation of language
is founded on a falty notion regarding the stability of the material. To speak about a
thing or to give a thing a name does not concretize the thing itself. Moreover, the
thing itself is hardly reiﬁed and stable.

Kuberski continues that via the splitting of the atom, "The world, both its
material and its verbal aspects, was shown to be -- even at its most essential --
combinatory, relative, connective.” What the atomic age did was to scientiﬁcally
conﬁrm Hindu spiritualism: everything we perceive as real is an illusion created by

other illusions in an inﬁnite digression. To speak of a thing is to tender its relational

233

 

value to other things but it does not stabilize the thing’s individual nature and
existence.

These components belong to every facet of representation through voice, which
would be meaningless without its ability to relate and connect, like puzzle pieces; the
obvious difﬁculty with Finnegans Wake does not necessarily lie with this statement
regarding its combinatory, relative and connective tissues, but with the number of
possible, potential patterns of arrangement. Like the name of God in Hebrew,
constructed with both numbers and letters, the implications are inﬁnite. We tend to
reify our systems of communication, like our scientiﬁc systems, believing that
language is somehow based upon essential, concrete letters and sounds, just as science
evaluates matter based upon the periodic table. However, as Kuberski emphasizes,
both are "artiﬁcial paradigms of [the ﬁeld of causes]. "3‘ The Wake underscores both
systems’ artiﬁciality and ﬂuidity through the representation of voice, which always

already lacks concrete and stable construction.

 

For Finnegans Wake, voice represents this ironic and problematic intersection
between reality and representation. However, because of the bodiless and
unidentiﬁable positionings of voice, and because of the multiplicity of associations,
voice conﬂates with style as the story is told, in a method that Michael Begnal, in
Dreamscheme: Narrative and Voice in W, calls 'Everystyle. " In other
words, a voice speaking from an undetermined position within the text, lacking
physical description, is a stylistic construction, emanating from a text which exists
inside and outside time. The text is written but the story is perpetually present.

The narrative voices of Finnegans Wake self-consciously exist as this type of

234

construction. Begnal points out that the narrative voice, again through free indirect
discourse, distributes, in a sense, the relative character voices. Whereas in "The
Dead, " the narrative voice speaks with the characteristics of Lily the caretaker’s
daughter, Finnegans Wake blurs any distinctiveness among the voices of the Wakean
personae or the various narrative voices: ”the voices of the characters have begun to
color the landscape [and] are carried along by a narration which includes them in
almost every aspect of the storytelling”37

Finnegans Wake is, after all, meant to be a dream, and in dreams, elements
are ﬂuid. HCE can be alluded to as those three letters, as Humphrey Chimpden
Earwicker, or as portions of other words: ”hesitency" has the three letters and
therefore makes HCE present. F innegans Wake is like a colloidal suspension where
particles are tenuously distributed equally throughout -- indistinguishable deﬁnitively
but relatively relevant to the perpetuation of the balanced mixture. The landscape is
not only colored by the personae’s voices, these personae become the represented
landscape: HCE is the sleeping giant, Finn MacCool, with his head at Howth, and
ALP is the River Liffy.

Double-voiced discourse and echoes of other writers were present in Joyce’s
earlier writings, but Katie Wales, in The Language of James Joyce, speciﬁcally
targets Finnegans Woke. The vast number of voices speaking multiple languages
complicates the reader’s attempt to assign relative identities to any of the utterances
that are represented. Multiplicity of voices and identities in the novel complicates
reading to such a degree that ﬁnally what one is faced with is the potential inability to

read Finnegans Wake, as Derrida claims in his essay "Two Words for Joyce,"

235

 

because one discovers an exponential number of Wakes at any given time for any
given reader:

I’m not sure one can say reading Joyce the utterances ”I am reading

Joyce", "read Joyce”, ”have you read Joyce?" produce an irresistible effect of
naivety, irresistibly comical Of course, one can do nothing but that.38
”The war is in words and the wood is the world, " is the warning the narrative gives
us. (FW 98.34-35). The doubled warning reminds us that discourse remains exterior
to the individual speaking, but the conﬂict is always internal, i.e. within language and
voice, as well as in the minds of the readers and the writer. Finnegans Wake presents
the reader with the simultaneity of suspended closure and suspended meaning, a
reﬂection, which is always a re-presentation, hovering somewhere between the subject
and the mirror, as an aesthetic principle for reading.

Associated with the idea of suspended closure is verbal imitation or mimicry.
Mimicry involves the distortion of voice to re-present and re-ﬁgure. Mimicry
presents to construct, as well as destabilizes representation along the ever-growing
complexity of the metonymic chain set in place by the book. Mimicry represents a
voice, but contaminates it with verbal qualities of the mimic and simultaneously
reduces the voice under scrutiny. It destroys a one-to-one correspondence between
identity and voice, because mimicry is another form of forgery that destroys linear
interpretation. The Wake warns us about such problems:

Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content

of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves

circumstantiating it is just as hurtful as sound sense (FW 109.12-15)

236

 

The signifying chain remains disturbed, because origins and causal relationships are
never linear nor singular; it is a limited, Cartesian understanding of causal
relationships that endorses the singular direction of cause and effect.

Furthermore, to be literal is to read in one direction equating words with the
things they represent. Instead, one must come to terms with the idea that for Joyce,
according to Kristeva in The Revolution of Poetic Discourse, ”reading means giving
up the lexical, syntactic, and semantic operation of deciphering, and instead retracing
the path of their production; ”39 reading is always about discovery, as well as
recovery, and Finnegans Wake tenuously joins the tropic with the mimetic.

Like the paradoxically unifying power of the pun, Finnegans Wake emphasizes
the multiplicity of meanings within language and the absence of linearity in causal
relationships: ”And whereas distracted (for was not just this in effect which had just
caused that the effect of that which it had caused to occur?) the four justicers laid
their wigs together” (FW 92.33-35). In other words, the direction of the causal
relationship remains unclear in terms of experiential reality: causes and symptoms of
causes contaminate each other, as mimicry contaminates representation and
problematizes individual primacy by creating a hybrid voice. The mirror, like
mimicry, becomes a hybridizing axis between the elements on either side. The mirror
does not distinguish between the original and the representation, i.e. the cause from
the effect. Voice, too, presents this ﬂuid and reversible causal relationship. The
soliloquy is a reﬂection of and by voice -- it is a dialogue with a single self, as if
there were two, implying that even the single voice is already a hybrid, as the voice
mimicked and the voice mimicking are hybridized. Within the soliloquy, the speaker
divides him/herself into both speaker and audience: ”Mustforget there’s an audience

237

 

And you’ll see if I’m selfthought" (FW 147.1-9). The riddles of Finnegans Wake
contribute to an overall form of an oblique soliloquy that I have been presenting.
Like Stephen’s riddle of the fox burying its mother in Ulysses, the answer often does
not ﬁt the question in any logical fashion. ”The riddle is a complex and misleading
metaphor,"o according to Patrick A. McCarthy in The Riddles of mm,
which works well with a text that refuses linearity or simple one-to-one
correspondences:

4. What Irish capital city (a dea 0 deal) of two syllables and six letters, with a

deltic origin and a nuinous end, (ah dust, oh dust!) can boost of having a) the

most extensive public park in the world, b) the most expensive brewing

industry in the world, c) the most expansive peopling thoroughfare in the

world, d) the most phillohippuc theobibbous paupulation in the world: and

harmonise your abecedeed responses?

Answer: a) Delfas b)Dorhqk c) Nublid (FW 140.8-27)

The riddles in Finnegans Wake possess verbal puns and associations, as many riddles
do, once again to emphasize the connection and disruptive power of language through
voice. Simultaneously, like a child’s game, there is no logical answer to the
questions posed; it seems the right answer should be Dublin, and although all the
answers sound close to Dublin, they are also similar in sound to other cities. Thus,
the riddle, like the pun, is a falsifying hybrid which suggests multiplicity and
circularity as an answer and key to reading voice in this novel.

Finnegans Wake is a soliloquy itself; it is a manifestation of a dream, and

therefore the dreamer is both of the dream, as well as the producer of the dream.

238

 

The event creates confusion, but one must recognizes that identity and subjectivity
are not fundamental aspects belonging to existence and representation; they are
constructs that break down when their backdrops shift, as in a dream. Therefore the
reﬂective value that one places so highly on the representational powers of voice and
the mirror are suspect from the start, because how they represent identity and
subjectivity is always unstable and moving. With a reference to classical rhetoric as
"the clothing of words" Joyce insinuates that associative attributes problematize
identiﬁable traces. A name substitutes for the presence of a person, as voice may
substitute: ”did it ever occur to you, qua you that you might, bar accidens, be
very largely substituted in potential succession from your next life by a
complementary character, voices apart" (FW 485 .35-486.4) A novel deletes the
physical person, therefore name and voice substitute for an absence, ironically as
constructed as those means of representation. This construction, signs of signs,
allows for a great freedom, permitting ungrounded ﬂuidity to appear or disappear, or
exist in the same place at the same time:
Who in his heart doubts either that the facts of feminine clothiering are there
all the time or that the feminine ﬁction, stranger than the facts, is there also at
the same time, only a little to the rere? Or that one may be separated from the
other? Or that both may be contemplated simultaneously. (FW 109.30-34)
With Finnegans Wake, one can say that the impossible is possible through the
imagination; as Bloom tries to convince himself, ”If you imagine it’s there you can
almost see it,” we are encouraged to try, even if we too admit "Can’t see it" in the

end (UG.8.562-3).

239

 

Finnegans Wake reminds us that it is our own voice which speaks from within
the pages of Finnegans Wake. The Wake anticipates the reader, calling for that ideal
reader with an ideal insomnia to take up the cause of penetrating its secrets. The

reader recognizes his/her place within the construction of this novel, similar to

 

catharsis in Greek drama and thereby establishes him/herself as the primary persona --
perhaps even the dreamer of Finnegans Woke. The voices of Finnegans Wake, a
collection of letters throughout the book and potentially identiﬁable linguistic markers,
are brought to life in the imagination of the reader, whose responses are obviously
affected by the voices of the text in a continuous loop, which in turn alters those
representations, as the text admits, "The next word depends on your answer" (FW
487.5-6). Recalling Stephen’s theory on Shakespeare from Ulysses, the playwright
plays each role in his play always creating himself, and his performance of his theory
makes his audience his willing accomplices. Finnegans Wake makes us accomplices

too, both by its gaps and by its insistence that the reader becomes part of the creation,

 

as well as one of its creators.

This potential chaos of or loss of certainty in Finnegans Wake does more than
thwart an easy interpretation; Joyce represents seemingly random events in order to
broach that which is unrepresentable --- in this case, the unrepresentability of the
speaking subject, in much the way that Kristeva articulates. The subject is always in
a state of "Becoming; a movement wherein both [Nothing and Being] are distinct, but
in virtue of a distinction which has equally immediately dissolved itself. "“ In
between the subject and its representation is a "metonymic slippage," as there is in

any act of translation of a moving, living discourse; there can never be a one-to-one

240

correspondence with representations of voice as spoken or written within a ﬁnite book
or with speaking voices in contact with other speaking voices. The speaking subject
is better conceptualized as a process, rather than as a static being:

The subject never is. The subject is only the signifying process and he only

appears as a signifying process, that is, only when he is absent within the

position out of which social, historical, and signifying activity unfolds.42
Subjectivity, like voice, can only be approached but never fully articulated or
captured, because, as a process, it moves and changes. Kristeva, however,
essentializes the absence of the subject from culture and history, whereas Joyce
proposes that culture, subjectivity, and identity are all interdependent as processes
represented through voice.

As an interplay of scientiﬁc theories, Finnegans Wake also does something
else. The representation of voice in Finnegans Wake poses both the impossibility of
true representation, as well as the fallaciousness of the notion of random existence.
Finnegans Wake is anything but random and chaotic; it is a carefully composed novel
by James Joyce written over a seventeen-year period. Afﬁrming its highly technical
order, Thomas Jackson Rice states, in Joyce, Chaos, and Complexity that:

[Finnegans Wake] represents one of several, highly individual contemporary

reactions against Cartesianism that reject both imposed orders and, their

logical antithesis, chaos to demonstrate an intuitive recognition of the "deep
theory to the order we see in nature (Lewsin 181), simplicity at the root of
complexity: "Sink deep to touch not the Cartesian spring" (FW 3Ol.24-25).‘3

In other words, voice in Finnegans Wake represents and denies the means of

241

 

establishing an aesthetic principle based upon uncertainty. The Uncertainty Principle
of Quantum Physics does not state that reality is impossible to perceive, but that it is
impossible to have the whole picture of the whole thing at any given point in time or
space. Harry Burrell points out in Narrative Design in W that,
corresponding to the idea that it is a carefully written book, ”the Wake has a
straightforward message that is developed from beginning to end. The language is far
more elaborate, comprehensive, poetic, and artistic than any dream could be.“4 It
is important to keep in mind that Joyce is always playing with constructions of voice
as they exist in a written novel, as well as how they are interpreted in daily existence
as substitutions for the persons who speak them. Finnegans Wake is a carefully
ordered universe that is composed of provisional and circuitous voices.

Voice within the narrative may substitute for the speaking subject, although
that representation is hardly straightforward, but the signature is also often posed as a

substitution for the presence of authority. That substituted presence, however,

 

possesses no authority, it ”conceal[s] the concealer” because writing is as imprecise as
speaking, although we mistakenly endow writing with more authenticity (FW 484.14).
Handwriting can be easily substituted or forged, because it is already a substitution
for voice: ”The gist is the gist of Shaum but the hand is the hand of Sameaus" (FW
483.3-4). In other words, because Shem and Shaun are twins, the possibility of one
primary and singular signature is called into question. Behind this anxiety of
substitutability is the obvious textual connection to Jacob and Esau, whose voices,
despite their physical differences, seem as well to be interchangeable. Recall from

”The Ont and the Gracehopper, " that Shaun’s story is ﬁrst devalued in comparison to

242

Shem’s written work, and then ironically called a forgery.

The signature also stops interpretation and hinders the ﬂuidity of language and
discourse, as Derrida explain in The Ear of the Other. If one approaches Finnegans
Wake as a text that belongs to a speciﬁc author, James Joyce, then absence of his
deﬁnitive authority, his signature over the text, renders the text ﬂuid and unstable.
Joyce refused to allow linearity or singularity in preference for provisionality and
multiplicity, as his artistic aesthetic principle: ”So why, pray, sign anything as long as
every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace is a perfect signature of its own” (FW
115.6—8)? The refusal to sign comes as a recognition of the text already possessing a
signature by the words, letters, and voices. Authority, therefore, remains ﬂuid and
unstable, because the signature, like voice, remains relational.

Derrida also explains that any act of reading is already an act of translation,
because the reader modiﬁes the original, which in the case of Finnegans Wake is a

text that always refuses ﬁnality or originality: "Translation augments and modiﬁes the

 

original, which insofar as it is living on, never ceases to be transformed and to
grow. ”‘5 Translation not only allows for continual growth and change, it highlights
the "kinship of languages,” in terms of the relative relationships among all languages.
We come to develop an understanding of the whole by developing an understanding of
the constituent fragments, and in so doing, we both succeed and fail at the attempt to
create a faithful translation.

Derrida continues: "A translation never succeeds in the pure and absolute
sense of the term. Rather a translation succeeds in promising success, in promising

reconciliation. "‘6 We may approach the meanings of Finnegans Wake, but only

243

asymptotically. Even the approach is questionable, because the text is delivered to
the reader as a written text that possesses transcribed or translated representations of
ﬂuid, unﬁxed, contrapuntal and contradictory voices: ”They had heard or had heard
said or had heard said written" (FW 369.16). People speak languages, but the text
represents speaking voices to show the relationships among languages and to forestall
any deﬁnitive interpretation of those relationships.

Umberto Eco, in a Wakean fashion, creates a similar problem with his
character Salvatore, in The Name of the Rose, who speaks, at any one time, several
languages simultaneously:

[Salvatore] had invented for himself a language which used the sinews of the

languages to which he had been exposed and once I thought his was the

Babelish language of the ﬁrst day after the divine chastisement, the language

of primeval confusion I [later] realized that he was not so much inventing

his own sentences as using the dissecta membra of other sentences."7
The kinship of languages is never made clear, and the interpretation of what Salvatore
is saying remains provisional, imprecise amalgams of other people’s speech.
Finnegans Wake is about, in part, this inter/intraplay of meaning created via exchange
through representations of voice. Translation is its core obstacle, because translation
operates with an assumption that the text is alterable. Translation changes the book in
order to approach the meaning of the words, producing the dissecta membra of the
original, which was already a ”membrance of an umbrance,” recalling and obscuring
the echo or image potentially behind it. However, voice also lends itself to other

issues inherent in the text, also largely to do with issues of representation. A novel

244

 

does not give the reader reality; rather, as Kuberski explains in The Persistence of
Memory, it gives an ”apparent reality by copying and re-presenting our ordinary sense

perceptions. By presenting the symptoms of reality, these simulations are taken as

 

real.“8 Joyce contends that voice works as a type of oscillating metaphor that can
easily move from the slippery threshold of the imagination to the durable universe of
experiential reality. Through voice, we are given cyclic representations whose
original is only a promise, like translation itself. Voice is the pivot on which
translation and representation turn.

"Reading" Finnegans Wake not only means re-reading but developing and
exploiting a heuristics that most texts could not support and that most readers would
not put up with. And yet, so much of the Wake is a restatement of what has already
been said, written and spoken; it is simultaneously foreign and familiar. Translation
can create this type of defamiliarization, because translation is always a continuing
process, as opposed to a ﬁnished product. A key to consider would be the term’s

own two-fold meaning, because of the afﬁx ”trans.” As with ”transition,”

 

"translation" implies loss of stasis; the reﬂection in the mirror can be unreliable,
because of the movement of the body in front of it, just as the movement from one
discourse to another creates an unﬁxed representation: ”The mouth that tells not will
ever attract the unthinking tongue and so long as the obseen draws theirs which hear
not so long till allearth’s dumbnation shall the blind lead the deaf" (FW 68.32-34).
The translation from the spoken to the written, which is what represented dialogue is
attempting to do, jumbles the senses of perception, as well as the means and direction

of expression -- ”the obseen draws [those] which hear till allearth’s [damnation]

245

shall the blind lead the deaf."

As Fritz Senn argues, part of Joyce’s creative impetus was to present ”the
process of recognizing English as foreign and of using it in ways that would make
that recognition available to others. "9 Voice becomes an essential part in that
process because of the two-fold nature of translation represented in Finnegans Wake.
It is, in part, a representation of a written translation of voice, and it is an
experiment, just as Derrida playfully announces of his own essay "Ulysses
Gramophone” with the very impossibility of creating a "faithful” translation; there
will always be slippage between the two languages that disrupts interpretation: "But
can oui be quoted or translated?” Derrida begins his essay by calling attention to the
fact that his talk will be initially translated into a written text, and eventually into an
English written text, which will make portions of it illogical, "Yes, yes, you are
receiving me, these are French words. ”5° Translation always dislodges speciﬁcity,
as voice dislodges permanence in textual representation.

Voice is the problematic representation of the subject, because voice-as-written
is already translated from the arena of speech. Voice therefore is already
participating, as soon as one reads the ﬁrst line of Finnegans Wake, in that play of
metaphoricity within a metalinguistic dialogue that is posited among the range of
voices in the text, as well as that between the text, author, and reader. "riverrun,
past Even and Adam’s, from swerve to shore to bend of bay, brings us by a
commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth’s Castle and Environs” (FW 1.1-3).
We are already, just on the ﬁrst page, completing the book, since this sentence begins

on the last page and loops around back to the beginning. It offers both ﬂuidity, since

246

 

 

the river through a process of moving is recirculated, and translatability, since in the
process, the state of water can change. If translation can be deﬁned, as Kuberski
suggests, as the transport of a semantic content into another signifying form, the
translation of voice from spoken to written, but implied as still spoken, always
already highlights the problematics inherent in any process of reading.’1

Kuberski’s position of the concept of complementarity, as well, works to
approach a concept of reading in Finnegans Wake: ”the idea that a single physical
phenomenon can be represented accurately in utterly opposing ways that form a tacit
unity."52 In other words, if voice is the means of representing the speaking subject,
those opposing forces that would deconstruct that subject, simultaneously implies a
type of signifying cohesion. This, in turn, afﬁrms Rice’s presentation that there is a
normative order inherent in chaos. The duality of reading voice, which entails both
uniﬁcation and separation, is the crux. Joyce likened writing Finnegans Wake to "an
engineer boring through a mountain from two sides. If my calculations are correct
we shall meet in the middle. If not ...."’3 Finnegans Wake insists that we read and
interpret every facet of its universe in seemingly self-contradictory methods, non-
linear, chiasmic, negativing, yet simultaneously submitting a logic within the bizarre,
disjointing patterns developing within the narratives.

In Finnegans Wake, Joyce presents subjectivity as already fragmented and
disrupted, intimating that the material subject is always disuniﬁed and unﬁxed within
language, history, and experience. Finnegans Wake insists upon our conceptualization
of its voices as the interplay of presence and absence, simultaneously; the novel

represents voices speaking independently of bodies and the entire novel presents voice

247

 

and language to the reader as the conﬂicting means of telling and untelling a story.
The voices of the Wake, like the voice of Esau according to Colin MacCabe, ”cannot
establish identity, [they are] not sufﬁcient to ensure paternal recognition. ”5‘ The
characteristics of HCE, the male principle, father of Shem, Shaun, and Issy, and
husband of ALP, cannot be substantiated and yet paradoxically some of HCE’s verbal
characteristics participate in the process of reading and identifying voice. We
recognize certain speech characteristics of the personae in Finnegans Wake (Issy’s
lisp, HCE’s stammer), but those characteristics, like those persons, are ﬂuid and
unﬁxed. This notion does not destroy one’s means of reading and interpreting the
text, but it does suggest that the disunity and ﬂuidity of voice multiplies identity
across a wide range of provisional interpretations.

Notes:

1. Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1974: 4.

2. Stewart, Garrett. Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext. Berkeley:
University of California P, 1990: 5.

3. Gillespie, Michael Patrick. Reading the Book of Himself: Narrative Strategies in
the Works of James Joyce. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1989: 212.

4. Herman, David. "The Mutt and Jute Dialogue in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: Some
Gricean Perspectives." Style. 28 (1994): 229.

5. ”The Mutt and Jute Dialogue,” 227.

6. McHugh, Roland. Annotations to Finnegan Wake. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
UP, 1991: 14.23.

7. "The Mutt and Jute Dialogue,” 228.

8. O’Donnell, Patrick. ”Sub Rosa: Voice, Body, and History in Absalom, Absalom.”
College Literature. 1989 (Winter): 29.

9. "Sub Rosa," 30.

248

 

10. ”Sub Rosa," 43.
11. McHugh’s Annotations, 414.18—19.

12. Tindall, William York. A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce. New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1959: 260.

13. Devlin, Kimberly J. Wandering and Return in Make: An Integrative
Approach to Joyce ’s Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991: 67, Devlin’s italics.

14. A Reader’s Guide, 259.

15. Sailer, Susan Shaw. One the Void of to Be: Incoherence and Trope in F '
Wake. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan P, 1993: 111.

16. The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov. Ed.
Pam Morris. London: Edward Arnold, 1994: 61.

17. The Bakhtin Reader, 62.

18. Boheemen-Saaf, Christine Van. "Joyce, Derrida, and the Discourse of ”the
Other.” James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth. New York: Syracuse UP, 1988: 90.

19. A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy. Ed. Sarvepalli Radhakrishan and Charles
Moore. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973: 291.

20. A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy, 272.

21. Attridge, Derrick. "Joyce and the Ideology of Character.” James Joyce: The
Augmented Ninth. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1988: 154.

22. "Joyce and the Ideology of Character,” 154.
23. McHugh’s Annotations, 299.F3.

24. Although, as McHugh states in The Finnegans Wake Experience, ”Finnegans
Wake must always mean many things at once,” the siglas may be deﬁned as follows:
CI = Finnegans Wake; A = ALP; E (rotated in any direction) = HCE and the giant;
A = Shaun; c: = Shem; I = Issy (as well as T and .L).

25. "Eyes have they, but they see not. They have ears, but they hear not They
have hands, but they handle not” (McHugh’s translation of the Vulg. Psalm 113:5-7,
Annotations 113).

26. Wales, Katie. The Language of James Joyce. NY: St Martin’s P, 1992: 90.

27. MacCabe, Colin. James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word. London: The
Macmillan Press, 1978: 102.

249

28. The Language of James Joyce, 118.

29. Bishop, John. Joyce ’s Book of the Dark: W. Madison: The
University of Wisconsin P, 1986: 119.

30. Joyce’s Book of the Dark, 105.

31. Norris, Margot. Joyce’s Web: The Social Unraveling of Modernism. Austin:
University of Texas P, 1992: 141.

32. Carroll, Lewis. The Annotated Alice: Alice ’s Ag‘yentures in Mam and
W. New York: Wings Books, 1998: 95.

33. Kuberski also explains that the Indo-European root of atom, tern, "means cutting,
splitting, or slicing and produces such words as tome and not surprisingly temple.
The Greek preﬁx ’a’ negates these senses and maintains that an ’atom’ is an exception
to the general rule that everything can be cut: books, words, hair, human bodies”
(Kuberski 49).

34. Kuberski, Philip. The Persistence of Memory: Organism, Myth, Text. Berkeley:
University of California P, 1992: 49.

35. The Persistence of Memory, 49.
36. The Persistence of Memory, 54.

37 . Begnal, Michael H. Dreamscheme: Narrative and Voice in W.
Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1987: 76.

38. Derrida, Jacques. ”Two Words for Joyce. " Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from
the French. Ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferret. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1984: 148.

39. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. NY:
Columbia UP, 1984: 103.

40. McCarthy, Patrick A. The Riddles of W. Cranbury: Associated
UP, 1980: 17.

41. Revolution in Poetic Language, 112.
42. Revolution in Poetic Language, 215, Kristeva’s italics.

43. Rice, Thomas Jackson. Joyce, Chaos, and Complexity. Urbana: University of
Illinois P, 1997: 140.

44. Burrell, Harry. Narrative Design in Finneng Wig: The Wake Lock Picked.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996: 5.

250

45. Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference,
Translation. Ed. Christie V. McDonald. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York:
Schocken Books, 1985:122.

46. The Ear of the Other, 123.

47. Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Trans. William Weaver. San Diego:
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980: 47.

48. The Persistence of Memory, 118.

49. Senn, Fritz. Joyce’s Dislocations. Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins UP, 1984: xviii.

50. Derrida, Jacques. ”Ulysses Gramophone: Hear say yes in Joyce.” James Joyce:
The Augmented Ninth. Ed. Bernard Benstock. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1988: 27

51. The Persistence of Memory, 118.
52. The Persistence of Memory, 51.

53. Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of ﬂames. Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1960: 320.

54. James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, 120.

251

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(In)Conclusion:
”who will somewherise for the whole anyhow?" (FW 602.7)

In an early essay, Joyce made an observation of the three novels by A.E.W.
Mason, that seems both applicable to this study of voice, as well as any study of
Joyce’s writing:

These three novels, much as they differ in their subjects and styles, are

curiously illustrative of the truth of one of Leonardo’s observations -- the

tendency of the mind to impress its own likeness upon that which it creates.

(CW 130)

Although Stephen says much the same thing in the library during the ”Scylla and
Charybdis” episode with regard to Shakespeare, the idea that Joyce equated
representation with self-presentation is indeed interesting and illustrative of the type of
odd complexities that he interwove into his tales. Interestingly enough, one can apply
the above observation to any three of Joyce’s books as well, and simultaneously
realize that the insight does very little to tell us about his aesthetics and his creative
impulses. It would seem hardly worth mentioning that Joyce is present in his tales,
because his stories have already told us that; the narratives, in one fashion or another,
recall their author, at times even naming him. Joyce was rarely one to hide himself
perfectly within the texts, and so the new game became how to ﬁnd a seemingly
inﬁnite number of references to the author himself -- anticipating a neurotic form of
”Where’s Waldo?”

The issue of voice, as represented and representing, within Joyce’s works is
one of the more interesting ways to read Joyce, because the conceptualization of voice

is never static nor sufﬁciently deﬁned. It is therefore, from within these narratives, a

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paradox that constructs verbal parallax: "A paradox” because voice lacks corporeality,
as well as dimension, and yet can represent bodies and materiality. We believe when
we hear a voice that it is produced by a material entity. ”Verbal parallax”, because,
like the issue of light with perspective, Joyce shows that relative position affects not
only visual, but aural representations as well. Joyce’s ﬁctions, in this sense, suggest
a type of readerly/writerly doppler shift, as if the texts were moving relative to our
own position and mobility. Their moVement in relation to our own causes a change.
Furthermore, the texts use mimicry and narrative ventriloquism to dissolve any
deﬁnite elision between identity and voice as represented in these stories.

From the ﬁrst page of Dubliners, where one reads ”There was no hope for
him this time” to the circuitous rounding of Finnegans Wake, "A way a lone a last a
loved a long the riverrun," it is voice and its multi-directional representational
powers that both includes us as co-creators in these stories and keeps us guessing
about the stories, about their author, and about the nature of story-telling. Joyce’s
works harken back to the bardic, oral tradition of Ireland, where the poet’s voice
conjures the ﬁgures of Irish mythology before the listening audience; her voice was
her power to entertain, as well as teach her listeners to remember. It is no accident
that in Irish the poet was also the cultural historian; her function was never to "forgo
the pasht." As well, Joyce’s works are obviously grounded in writing; although
portions of them can be read aloud and understood by a listening audience, they are
meant to be read -- aloud -- for the reader, who is always part of the performance as
speaker and listener. F innegans Wake hinges on the sound and appearance of words;
one can read the text but to remain unconcerned for the words’ sounds is to miss the
duplicitousness of Joyce’s book. This realization, however, forces one to return to

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everything Joyce wrote prior to the Wake and discover that this duality was always
there.

It is voice that allows for this co-existence, because voice both conﬂates
uncompromising entities, as well as reorients them in ways that call attention to their
relationships to other languages, to each other, and to their arbitrary nature in the ﬁrst
place. Spoken language seems to be less of an accident than its written counterpart,
but neither has primacy over representation. The books themselves are all caught
between worlds -- stuck in translation. The verbal can never be free from the
written, nor the written from the spoken; the use of multiple languages and play
between native and imported words whose relationship to English is not always
”naturalized” create tensions within the translation and reading processes -- recall that
”tundish" is, as Stephen learns, an English word afterall. The self-consciousness,
furthermore, of an Irishman composing and altering an imposed language mixes
relative voices and discourses, as the stories in Dubliners tell of young boys who
grow up to be bitter men and of women who subsist because of men or who triumph
over their husbands’ weaknesses. Translation is always an incomplete process,
achieved more through consensus than accuracy, and therefore always vacillating
between relative meanings and states of consciousness.

Voice occupies a tenuous position between the text as a whole and
representation of a signiﬁcant portion of that whole, illustrating the essential
interdependence between representation and represented, as well as that between
self/other, source/image, and cause/effect. In poetry as in music, voice creates sound
as well as meter or rhythm, and in A Portrait Stephen relates rhythm to this
developing relationship, ”Rhythm is the ﬁrst formal esthetic relation of part to part

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in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its parts or of any part to the esthetic
whole of which it is a part” (P 206). Voice can be thought of in Joyce’s texts as the
ongoing play of this repeating reversible relationship.

Such an oddly constructed and constructive relationship posits that identity and
subjectivity, both constituents and constituted by voice, are simultaneously present and
absent within this polylogic conceptualization of narrative and discourse. In other
words, who we are as readers and writers, as well as a-textual beings, is oddly
understood through continuously shifting parameters largely based upon voice.
Difference itself is shown to be relative via articulation; we acknowledge differences
and similarities most often through the use of metaphor and simile, as well as
relationships through synecdoche and metonymy. Since voice lacks materiality, its
representation is likewise immaterial, yet it remains substantial enough for narrative,
story-telling, and therefore history and existence. Like the onion or the atom, there is
very little at the core of it all and yet everything we know is founded on that
foundationless center.

Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake,
as well as the Critical Works, Stephen Hero, Exiles, Giacomo Joyce, and James
Joyce’s poetry, not to mention his letters, are primarily about the evolution and
construction of a unique consciousness, awake and asleep. Despite a deﬁnite
progression in their artistic and creative merit, Joyce’s tales speak -- to the reader, to
themselves, and to each other, in a method that both conjures the characters and the
readers, as well as makes Joyce present in some paradoxical way. Voice is the

"Here, weir, reach, island bridge. Where you meet I" (FW 626.7) As a symbol for

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these stories and as an element within them, voice is the ever-present, disruptively
uniting construct that breathes life into their narratives and makes us a direct part of

the process of story-telling from the very beginning.

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