II—
OVEREADINGS

4—
Graphonic Tension in English Poetry

Re: reading. In the case of phonemic reading, always potentially a rereading on the spot, a double taking, one sound overtaking another in sequence. Such reading-over is only in this sense an over-reading, trans-segmental, transegmental. For this recursive reading, then, that is thus also a rewriting, read: over eading. All we have to do, and cannot help doing, is to listen as we read—not listen to but listen as our reading. Do this, and the letters list and slip, push and are shoved, fan out or vanish, pun on themselves or double under. The words formed on the run by these letters overlie each other through aural coincidence, the overlapping of graphically indicated phonemes (by elision) or their holding over (by the ligatures of liaison or gemination) from one word to the next. Having already located such slippages in the textual system, indeed in the lexical code itself, first within a broad spectrum of transformational functions in Shakespearean verse, and then within a wider field of phonemic exercise in the habits of English rhyme, and having further considered the linguistic and textual implications of such slippages for a revisionist theory of reading, we are now ready to survey—across the whole range of English literary texts since Shakespeare—the variety and functions of such evanescent effects in action, in context, in force. This is a matter, and a manner, of reading the unwritten, of unwriting the word.

"By Parting Have Joyned Here"

Even by comparison with the typographic exaggerations of Herbert's rhyming triads discussed in Chapter 2, it is Donne among the immediate successors of Shakespeare who offers the most arresting reactivations of the lexical code from within its own erosion. Donne texts everywhere demonstrate the hold that semantic sense has on the textual sensorium: the reader's relentless tendency to control the phonemic in the form of the morphemic, to bracket

free play by syllabification. Despite appearances to the contrary—despite lettering and spacing—even Donne's penchant for monosyllabism subserves the interdependence rather than the discreteness of lexical sequencing. His words are often overrun by each other, under mutual siege. In this sense, Dr. Johnson's famous definition of the metaphysical conceit—"heterogeneous ideas . . . yoked by violence together"—points us toward an equivalent violence at the morphophonemic level. In a transegmental thematization of lexical yoking that amounts to a "metaphysical" troping of juncture under the sign of an amorous coupling, Donne's knotty epigram "Pyramus and Thisbe" portrays two lovers who, by parting "love and fear," have themselves "joined here ." In "Love's Exchange," the persona's emphasis is placed on how the woman "knows my pains," a necessary condition lest that "tender shame m ake me mine own n ew w oe." The geminated consonants only begin to articulate the phonemic subtext, the transegmental reading effect, of these lines. In a semantic echo of "paines," the two yoked vocables "Shame make" may well release the syntactically extraneous "ache." At the same time, the lover's recognition of the speaker's pain ("she knows") is transegmentally echoed—as "my known"—along the antiphonal slope of "mine own." The line thus instates a mating of reciprocal empathies across a syntax otherwise engaged. Then too, once "mine" is layered upon "own" to form the unwritten "known," so may the blending of n 's and w 's serve to condense the last three monosyllables; they may thus be overead upon each other in a metrically aided imbrication that elides out "new" altogether, muting the "e" (to /¶ /) in one long-drawn groan of enunciation: "own n (¶ w) woe ."

It should be growing clear that the overead text is related to a sense of "overheard" vocalizations, but only in a special sense. We eavesdrop, but only on our own inner voicing as it sorts through the phonic strata of written language—often in excess of semantic necessity, sometimes of semantic capacity. Texts can be tongue twisters even when the tongue is not in motion; a line of poetry can depend for its effect on plosive alliteration when no lips move. Impedance is a textual as well as a vocal category, as is smoothness, as is flux, and so forth. We might, indeed, think of it this way: words as well as other structures have their own "eaves." To try listening from within such an extension of their basic framework is to overhear the inner workings of linguistic as well as textual structuration. Words have eaves, at least extended edges, abutments; making claims on adjacency, they have leanings and allow easements. The overead text as an overheard text is in this sense the registration of the passive phonemic incursion or overlap across adjacent sounds—not if they were realized by enunciation, but only in the continuous conjecture of the as if . Literary language is not conditioned by voice; rather, vocality remains its persistent conditional, a modality in abeyance.

Miltonalities

In moving forward from Donne into the later seventeenth century, it should be useful to refocus the notion of textual vocalization on certain major texts of the English poet for whom all texts, including his own, came to exist only as a system of phonemes, no longer letters. The blind Milton will not prove anything per se about sighted writers or sighted readers. Nor will his blindness prove anything about the way his verse sounds or should be sounded. Yet can we doubt that, in the tragic fortune of his blindness, Milton became preternaturally alert to one of the intrinsic rather than fortuitous dimensions of text production—its phonic texture? Milton would be worse than useless here if our investigation of his verbal effects were construed to suggest that all poets really take dictation from their own voices and that his need for amanuenses was only a special case of the general phonocentric process of composition-as-utterance, of text-as-transcript. We can, however, come at the issue differently. What is indisputable about late Miltonic composition might well illuminate what elsewhere must at least be held open for investigation. If what we hear in Milton's verses resembles, albeit at times in a more concentrated form, what we register in the contours of much English poetry, or in his own work before blindness set in, then the exceptional facts in his case suggest an overdetermined version of a phonological bias prevalent anyway in English poetry. Milton's texts thus become invaluable as the exemplary intensification of a tendency. It is certainly appropriate in this regard that the famous sonnet on his blindness (Sonnet 19) should provide a transegmental example in the opening line: "When I consider how my light is s pent." The elision that transforms expenditure into confinement is confirmed by binary opposition in the second line, with its image of the mortal prison's "dark world and wide," as well as enhanced by the possibility of a more compressed rhyme with "bent."

Beyond such local effects, Milton happens to be the only writer in this book to have another book entirely devoted to his techniques of lexical contraction under metrical duress, "the cutting out or slurring of a syllable in the flow of speech."^[1] This is the general subject of Robert O. Evans's Milton's Elisions , in which the metrical effects of verbal contractions are explored and debated. A prevalent technique in Milton's prosody for sustaining a metrical pattern across what amounts to a surplus of graphically indicated syllables is what Evans, alluding to Robert Bridges's borrowing of the classical term, calls "synaloepha," defined as "the suppression of hiatus (that is, vowel clash) between words by the cutting out or partial reduction of a vowel" (7). A typical, typographically indicated example from Paradise Lost would be "th' Ethereal sky" (1.45). Well beyond the purview of Evans's analysis, however, are those homophonic elisions, graphically counterindicated, that are found

bridging other lexical gaps than those turning strictly on the hiatus of consecutive vowel sounds. In a cautionary speech by Michael in Paradise Lost , female lasciviousness is imaged as the urge "To dress, and troll the Tongue, and roll the Eye" (11.620). In conjunction with the implied etymology of "trollop" in "troll," there is the transegmental ghost of "droll" (an archaic intransitive verb, functionless here) in "and roll ." It is part of what we might call a phonemic lubriciousness that—by internal echo with the dentalized overdetermination of "and troll"—unifies the image of promiscuous degeneration through a kind of lexical lowest common denominator.

The transegmental phenomenon is, of course, not confined to a version of elision or to its counterpart in liaison. By simple conjunction it can create from two whole words a third. In Samson Agonistes , when the hero blames himself for his sexual ensnarement by Dalila, characterizing himself as "vanquisht with a peal of words" (1.235), we overead the overt seductiveness of "a=p(p)eal" in the explicit denomination of a sound. Direct lexical punning of this sort—stable in its perfect ambivalence, poised exactly between the graphic and the phonic—is less frequent, however, than the passing graphonic ambiguity, lexically operable for only the split second of a sheared lexeme. This can be a fleeting evocation, in sound, of a murmuring whisper of sound: a phonemic mimesis. There is the image of a swarm of flies in Paradise Regained that, no matter how many times it is beaten back, still "returns as oft with humming sound" (4.17). It is a buzzing hum whose very sibilance we can scarcely avoid reading , though we can never see it in the line as written. In Paradise Lost , forewarning of God's "ire" (2.155) were it to be loosed again to fan the "grim fires" (2.170) of hell, the smooth-spoken Belial reiterates the idea of divine retribution twice over, as "rage" (2.170) and then again "vengeance" (2.173), before, three lines later, enfolding effect back into cause for the segmentally ambiguous "Cataracts of F ire" (2.176). Adam later, lamenting the "only consolation left/Familiar to our eyes" (11.304–5), contrasts this narrowed human scope to the unlimited power "Of him who all things can" (11.309). Despite the strange intransitive syntax of that last clause, the touchstone of divinity evoked by it is clearly omnipotence, a limitless enablement ("all things can"). At the same time that other chief attribute of the deity, omniscience, is made to seem consubstantial with the text's very phrasing through the momentary hint (by liaison, and despite the wrong verb number) of "all things (s)can."^[2]

Elsewhere, in Satan's fleeing from God's immediate "ken," there is the image of the archangel as "he wings his way / Not far off Heav'n, in the Precincts of light " (3.87–88). Or the more loaded phonemic irony of Eve's meditation on the apple as "the Cure of all, this Fruit Divine" (9.776). This obverse prolepsis for the subsequent cause "of (f)all" is an irony further

supported by the Latin overtone of "cure" as "care" or "trouble,"^[3] which also appears through repetition in Belial's speech about the fallen angel's only hope in death: "our cure / . . . sad cure" (2.145–46). In such a manner Paradise Lost establishes a phonotextual system in which a phrasing like "With Serpent error wand'ring, found thir way" (7.302), already etymologically redundant (errare : to wander), can never be entirely free of "serpent terror"—and one in which phrasing itself may be all the more readily thematized. In his response to Abdiel's speech about the "Word" by which "the mighty Father made / All things" (5.833), a universe "named" by the language of fiat, Satan Scoffs at this notion of created origin. He instead asserts his own being as "self-begot, self-rais'd" (5.860). His semantic stress on self-generation does not, however, quell the homophonic overtones of that phrasing, for in Satan's hubris we may also hear him claiming to be, through his own incarnate Word, "self-phrased." Beyond this, the additional ironic sense of the fallen archangel as "self-razed" would surface as an unsuccessfully repressed self-indictment, a Miltonic slip of his own fallen tongue.

Whatever Milton may or may not have recognized about his demonic allegiances in Paradise Lost, Blake himself was certainly of Milton's party at times, and knew it. And worried it. In an essay called "Re: Naming MIL/TON," Thomas Vogler evokes the breach or bisection of the precursor's name in the title plate of Blake's poem, going on to suggest that the bardic or Urizenic domain of patriarchy is contrasted with the zone of Beulah, whose "rhythmic babble" anticipates the "prelinguistic, semiotic chora described by Kristeva."^[4] In specifying what we might thus characterize as Blake's "Beulalangue," we can turn to the lateral biplay of an ironized transegmental drift in the Book of Thel . The title figure, anxious about accepting the mantle of human existence, stays sequestered from the toils of mortality in the unpotentiated sphere of Har, a place-name of obscure and undetermined origin. Its etymology might seem, in isolation, a monosyllabic irony, a pun (on "are") that exposes the entirely pre existent limbo (bordering on nescience) of Thel's state, the otherworld of all those things that are not . Once activated by the verse line, however, its thrice-repeated place in the refrain "vales of Har" (plates 2.1, 2.10, 4.22) seems finally to measure as well as to mourn Thel's timorous flight from the demands of being. By the time she has "Fled back unhindered till she came into the vales of Har ," we may well have recognized her symbolic purlieus as a realm removed forever and afar from life's immediate vale of tears. Such vocalized irony taps the semiotic flux beneath the symbolic regimentation of diction without collapsing back into it; its sheer phonic undulation is recuperated by the phonemic order of pertinent differentials as soon as it begins to slip away. By the very fact of irony, of human perspective, the dream of an unfallen invulnerability to the world is

mocked by the iambic twist of what might otherwise be read as a linguistic symptom of that otherworld's own amorphous evocation.

Esemplastic Voicings

For all this, Blake is by no means the most venturesome of the Romantic poets in these transegmental instigations. One thinks immediately of Shelley, then of Keats. The earlier generation of Coleridge and Wordsworth is also given to such phonemic bridgings and slips. Minor poets, too, make certain phonemic tendencies of the period baldly apparent, not just the punster Thomas Hood but Robert Southey as well. In a little-known, comically exaggerated, but in some sense quintessential Romantic text, Southey's 1823 "the Cataract of Lodore," we encounter "In Rhymes for the Nursery" (so the subtitle has it) the description of "Sounds and motions for ever and ever . . . blending," including a stupefying cadence of textual sounds designed to simulate, and finally subsume, the cascading of nature. Almost a dozen lines of dyadic participles—many alliterative, like "Flying and flinging" or "Turning and twisting"—give way to over twice as many pairs of such internally echoing participles as "threading and spreading," "pouring and roaring," "waving and raving," "foaming and roaming." The pattern then fans out to triplets: "Dividing and gliding and sliding," followed relentlessly by "And falling and brawling and sprawling, / And driving and riving and striving"—and so on, through more than another dozen lines of mixed pairs, triplets, and fourfold rhymes tumbling out in a deluge beyond all nursery patience or mnemonics. Cataractic phonology matches the steady plunge of a waterfall in a remorseless fluency of effect, including that transegmental tightening of the chime at the lexically reflexive juncture of a "riven" word in "Andd riving andr iving"—which can thus be taken as two of one or two of the other. Either way, first by elision, then by ligature, internal rhyme converts to exact echo.

Coleridge certainly shares this Romantic instinct for phonetic iteration, especially in an imitative descriptive context, though he never carries it to anything like these lengths. When "Bard Bracy" is asked to address Sir Leoline in Christabel, he speaks like the poet he is, describing a dove "Fluttering, and uttering fearful moan" (1.535) so as to stress the containment within one word of its own released echo. Coleridge is elsewhere capable not just of such insistent paronomasia but of unreserved homophonic punning even more ingenious and strained than Hood's. Coleridge was indeed a self-conscious exegete and theorist of such wordplay, as well as an avid practitioner in both prose and verse. There is a densely punning passage in his 1821 letter to James Gillman that includes two transegmental oddities as lexically defiant as almost anything in Joyce. First there is an aside involving the bilingual deformation of "Poor dear Jew!" into the French "pour dire adieu,"

with its junctural elision of a weak vowel (or synaloepha), and then (in connection with a wound Coleridge has suffered, and with apologies for his "Punarhoeia") the English liaison of "leave it's card on your arm."^[5] The pronoun "it's" in that clause is punctuated with the apostrophe despite its possessive form; it is then glossed by Coleridge as if the apostrophe were a transegmental signal: "Now that last Pun, my dear fellow! is I admit, rather obscure [itself presumably italicized for its play on "cure"]—but if you will imagine a various reading in the margin, 'leave it scarr'd', all becomes clear as a Thames Fog." Coleridge had indeed planned an "Ode on Punning" as well as an essay on the subject, had defended Shakespearean wordplay, and had at one point in his notebooks tossed off the trisyllabic punning aphorism "Anymadversions of an Author's meaning now a days pass for animadversions."^[6]

This leads us inevitably to wonder what signs of this hypertrophied verbal imagination might be visible, or audible, in his poetic texts. From such puzzle-like breaks with spacing—or spacings of the break—as that which converts "its card" into "it scarred," what crossovers are possible in a general verse practice very far from comedy or verbal farce? Any such homophonic alternatives, if mobilized in poetry, would indeed readily find theoretical justification in Coleridge's account of the Shakespearean oxymoron, whose meaning remains "unfixed and wavering."^[7] Likewise, the pun that plays between meanings, especially the phonic doublet that does so by playing between lexemes as two alternate aural segmentations of the same sequence of letters, seems a perfect instance of imaginative instability, "still offering what is still repelled, and again creating what is again rejected" (104). This is very close, in fact, to Christopher Ricks's characterization of the "anti-pun," of which there is a twofold, phonemically sprung instance (not mentioned by Ricks) in a reiterated line from the Ancient Mariner : "With throats unslaked, with black lips baked" (ll. 157, 162). Until he "sucked the blood" of his own arm, the Mariner was "mute" with drought, unable even to hail an oncoming ship. Twice over, though, the straining toward speech is actually there to be heard in the enunciatory torsion of "lips baked "—a "mute" liaison phrasing exactly that active preterite which is ruled out by being swallowed up in the past participle. At the other end of this doubled refrain we may also hear a transegmental antiphone in which the impossible, the paradoxical "s=unslaked" holds out a mocking chance of relief from within the very source of feverish desiccation.

Or take the famous passage in "The Eolian Harp" added some two decades after the poem's original publication (here as printed in the Errata):

O! the one Life, within us and abroad,
Which meets all Motion and becomes its soul,

A Light in Sound, a sound-like power in Light,
Rhythm in all Thought, and Joyance everywhere
(ll. 26–29)

In textual terms, what exactly dictates the "rhythm" of this "thought," what syncopation and elision, what contrapuntal beats? Here it is worth examining the most direct evocation of the wind harp's seductive melody, whose "long sequacious notes / Over delicious surges sink and rise" (ll. 18–19). This is a music characterized in the next line as a "soft floating witchery of sound," where the slackening tendency toward elision in "soft floating" only enhances the airy delicacy of the described notes. With actual semantic force, too, a hint of immanent will slips into the collocation "delicious surges " by way of elision at the sibilant juncture. This further argues for the shading of personification in the archaic term "sequacious," which in musical parlance indicates only a strict metrical succession but which in its larger range of denotation (now obsolete) refers to the easily led, the intellectually tractable, the ductile, the pliable, the readily moulded. To the will of the wind, to the "urges" of that nature which is "within us and abroad," to the very breath of life which alone these notes make audible, they are at the same time subservient, dutifully attuned. It is worth recalling here that moment in the Biographia placed as an epigraph to my Prologue, where Coleridge describes the course of reading itself as a wavelike pattern resembling "the path of sound through the air." In this sense, his poem of Eolian visitations might well be meant to identify the "sink and rise" of wind as a trope not only for vocal production but for the very pulse of even silent reading.

The real crux of Coleridge's passage, however, is the metaphysical tenor to which its symbolic wind song is vehicle: the unifying interpenetration of "A Light in Sound, a sound-like power in Light." These "figures are technically oxymorons," writes M. H. Abrams early in an extensive investigation of the "cognitive infrastructure" organizing the lines.^[8] He sets out to broaden that received reading into an awareness of the larger scientific context of the "figures" provided by Coleridge's studies of optics and acoustics. Revising Newton's holdings on the properties of light, Coleridge came to believe that sound and color were coefficients of each other: "'Color is Gravitation under the power of Light while Sound on the other hand is Light under the power or paramountcy of Gravitation'" (166). Sound, in other words, is light weighted toward a kind of palpability. Though Abrams does not develop his argument in linguistic directions, his researches can help to draw out the transegmental play—the ligature of "alight" in the image "A light in sound"—introduced before the more scientifically couched corollary of the answering notion, "a sound-like power in light." Abrams does note in the first half of the line a

deliberate echo of divine fiat as well as of post-Newtonian physics: in the uttered Word that brought Light. This should only confirm a sense of the lines as playing in their own right between sound and light, sound and the medium of vision—between, in one sense, listening and script, phonic and graphic signification. The phonic ambiguity offers, in short, a reflexive analysis of reading itself under its alternating "paramountcies" of eye and ear. Taken in this way to name the procedures of its own decoding, "A light in sound" becomes "Alight in sound" in the double sense of "brought to light" in sound (lit, lighted, imaginatively kindled) and descended, settled, or come to rest therein (alighted). The past participial form, alight (for alighted ), is already obsolete by Coleridge's day but not therefore less operable as a poetic overtone. If the first version of this transegmental meld only spells out the sense of the oxymoron as scripted ("a=light" as implying "lit in"), the second (the archaic "a=light" as "descended") seems to evoke what Abrams demonstrates (though without mention of the wordplay) as the primary allusive intertext of the line: that theoretical hypothesis which sees sound as light virtually weighted down by a gravitational pull. What Coleridge called the "reciprocal neutralizations" by which the particular qualities of a thing arise in proportional relation to other properties co-present in the object would thus seem to apply as well to that reciprocal elision and reinstatement of the junctural break that determines the morphemic proportion—and, hence, lexical properties—in this perfect aural ambiguity. The "rhythm in all thought" has thus become the rhythm of reading with the ear, an access to the space of imagination beyond the constraints of sheer mental demarcation. Here is that profound coefficiency of light and sound, of eye and ear, in all reading that will not be more subtly—or more indirectly—addressed in English letters before Stephen's meditation on the reciprocal modality of the visible and the audible in the "Proteus" section of Ulysses .

Coleridge the extravagant punster, Coleridge the scientist of optics and acoustics, Coleridge the philosopher of the imagination and the fancy all meet on such a textual terrain. By not resting content with the "fixities and definites" which he claims in chapter 8 of the Biographia ("On the Imagination, or Esemplastic Power") are manipulated by fancy without that resynthesizing power of the imagination, lexical transmutation of the sort we have examined "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates." It erodes, in particular, the readerly threshold between eye and ear—between a written sequence and a malleable phonic sequacity—to produce the transegmental or esemplastic reassemblage "alight." In this sense, the poem's titular symbol itself, the wind harp—a structure of taut lines awaiting the breath (or inspiration) of the wind, a material symbol of a latency whose music is potentiated only by the breath of "vocal" performance—is therefore a "meet emblem" (to borrow Coleridge's

phrase from this same poem) of the poem itself, this and any poem. It is an object whose parallel lines are activated only by an inner (at least) enunciation that manifests the two senses of "sequacious," submissive (to creative urges) and sequenced. This is the pliability (within progression) of passively voiced script. The poem, like the wind harp, is thus a model for that "one life within us and abroad" which is the metaphysical touchstone of this whole conceit of collaboration between the natural and the constructed. The conceit is extended, and so reinforced, by the entirely nonmetaphysical fact of silent reading—as in its own way a responsive internalization of the outer text by a voice held always "within us."

The subjective (as well as subvocal) interanimation of textuality is part of the thematic of empathy which energizes an even more pivotal phonemic biplay in Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode." In the concluding stanza of the ode's revised address to the generalized "Lady," the feminine Other, in which her freedom from despondency is actively willed by the morose persona, an apostrophe to sleep is generated out of the desire to spare her the wakeful "vigil" from which he suffers: "Visit her, gentle Sleep! with wings of healing" (l. 128).^[9] In the speaker's originating "wan and heartless mood" (l. 25), he must admit that "I see, not feel" (l. 38) the beauty of nature's forms. Feeling is, from this second stanza on, the negated and unsaid impulse of the text, its vanished power. It nevertheless hovers—in the drift of a wavering fricative—behind the climactic phrase "wings of f (h)ealing," manifesting the psychic cause of that blessing's transferred effect. The more familiar(izing)—and resocializing—phrase, "wings of feeling," denoting that uplift which is feeling (by way of what Christine Brooke-Rose calls the "genitive metaphor") is thus the unsaid cliché whose paraphonic activation is here a self-fulfilling prophecy of the speaker's own restoration, the repeal of the "heartless" by empathy. To vary Wordsworth, feeling comes in aid of healing—and vice versa.

Wordsworth himself is, of course, not a poet of such luxuriant phonic texture as Coleridge nor a writer (despite his name) with the same punning bent. Yet segmental ambiguity still operates in the Wordsworthian text, in both overt and more elusive ways. When, in the narrative poem "Ruth" from Lyrical Ballads , Wordsworth's eponymous heroine, deserted by her lover, goes mad and is summarily "in a prison housed" (no external agency mentioned for the passive verb), it is a metaphoric as well as literal internment from which the mind, well before the body, achieves release. As with the image of the "prison house" everywhere in Wordsworth, what is required is that the imagination break itself free. True to form, Ruth wanted neither "sun, nor rain, nor dew, / Nor pastimes of the May" (ll. 200–201), for, as suggested by the pun on "pastimes," all these joys are recoverable by memory: "They all were with her in her cell" (l. 203). Permitted by the iambic rhythm, though

jolting the syntactic parallelism—unshackling, that is, its semantic grip-lock—is the transegmental sense that this beneficence of nature is so far internalized that it floods the "inner cell" of her spirit (as one might say, "they were all with her innermost soul").

There are other phonotextual effects, just as suggestive, which do not so neatly fit the iambic cues of the given graphic script. By contrast to the clear-cut homophony in "Ruth," the rhetorical question on which the whole consolatory logic of the "Intimations" ode turns—"What though the radiance which was once so bright/Be now forever taken from my sight" (ll. 179–80)—leaves only the least trace of "from eye -sight" in the metrically divergent "from my sight." The (not unwelcome) result is that the difference between "my sight" (figurative as well as literal) and "eyesight" is thrown open to question in the space of an ambiguous lexical juncture. It is, in fact, at exactly this climactic turn of the poem that sight is redefined as a faculty of spirit, paraphrased later as "the faith that looks through death" (l. 189; my emphasis). Hence the rhythm of the verse might seem to have muted but not entirely suppressed the earlier transegmental pun, "fro/m eyesight," as an impertinent equivalence to that keener incorporeal seeing which the ode is striving to define even in the midst of its nostalgia for present and unmediated vision. It is the soul's sight, the mind's-eye-view of retrospect, in particular, that permits each of us (as recovered "seer blest") to envision the "immortal sea" of our origin, "And see the Children sport upon the shore" (l. 168). What in the general sense of these lines is there to veto the probability of the antiphonal phrasing "children's port," designating the threshold of life, the harbor of all arriving and unfettered energies? This is indeed the textual equivalent of those "intimations" the ode has set out to trace, fallings from us, here phonemic shavings, vanishings.

A similar instance, but harder yet to disambiguate—especially if read aloud—is also a case that illustrates more directly the interrelation between expressive sequence and lexical order or, in Paul de Man's terms, between rhetoric and grammar. This is the opening line from the short lyric, "The Solitary Reaper," whose junctural ambiguity, like that of the "in her"/"inner" pun in "Ruth," operates within a strict iambic format. Two of the three vocative gestures toward the reader in the opening stanza of "The Solitary Reaper"—"Stop here, or gently pass!" (l. 4) and "O listen!" (l. 7)—tacitly identify the reader as inhabiting the same space as the "Highland Lass." Depending on how we hear the poem's opening line—"Behold her, single in the field"—this stationing of the reader is either implicit still or actually explicit. Either each reader, by a transegmental blend (across the aspirate), is isolated as a lone "behold(h)er" on the landscape (even as the momentarily fused noun form can also describe the lass herself), or else (the more "obvious" reading) the

scripted imperative grammar asserts itself simply to enjoin our role in beholding. Either way, our identification with the reaper (herself perhaps a beholder too) extends to the figurative sense of reading as its own version of garnering in solitude. Moreover, from a theoretical perspective associated originally with a critique of Romanticism, that epoch's entire aesthetic of imaginative manifestation comes into focus in this arguable ambiguity on "behold=(h)er"—as involving both subject and object, both rhetorical addressee and paragrammatical denomination. As we saw in Chapter 1, Paul de Man makes the figure of prosopopoeia, or its special case of apostrophe, the touchstone for a deconstruction premised on the working of literary language as a figural "giving face" to absence. This is a sustained rhetoric of the literary which he insists—against Riffaterre's more representational semiotics—must be understood as the activity of sheer inscription rather than description. We have at hand a peculiarly compressed test case. That apostrophic gesture, "Behold her," constitutes an address to an always, in one sense, absent reader who, even when present to the words of the text, beholds never more than words. If and when this conjuring gesture is heard to collapse, from a mere accident of inscription, into either the actual designation of (rather than summons to) the onlooker's role or into the correlative designation of the posited viewer's posited object—"beholders" each and all—we are that much more likely to perceive the latter, and our relation to "her," as sheerly a function of marks on a page, marks variously "realized" under the opportunistic laws of lexical convention. If so, we here confront a quintessential instance of poetic address—poetic inscription—as the reciprocal nullification, through mutual evocation, of both the referential object and the textual subject, the latter a reading "I" as implied vocative object "you." Retreating to the graphic security of script alone, to retrieve "(You) Behold her" again from the phonotextual ambiguity of "Beholder" is thus to give rhetorical face once more to the sliding effacements of grammatical metonymy: to effect, by insistent apostrophe, the very prosopopoeia of prosopopoeia. Wordsworth's line offers in this way a troping of the trope dependent entirely on the material inscription of the written text and its syncopated production as read. The self-"dis-figuring" inscription analyzed in de Man's deconstructed rhetoric may therefore be further isolated and unstrung—according to the present deconstructive linguistics —within the dyslocutionary force of phonemic reading.

Unheard Melodies

Rather like the "Eolian Harp" in Coleridge, with its rows (or lines) of latent instrumentation waiting to be breathed upon, Keats's sculptural symbol in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" may at one point be more directly an emblem of

poetry as text, as inhibited vocalization, than has been recognized. Everyone finds in this ode a parable of art and imagination. But when the musicianship pictured on the urn, as in turn rendered by the ode thereon , is characterized as producing "ditties of no tone" (l. 14), there would seem to be more textual auto-commentary at work than just wholesale aesthetic meditation. In texts, as in plastic representation, "melodies" are not less melodious for being "unheard" (l. 11), for keeping the silence of their unspoken vocalizations. Rather than being generated for the "sensual ear" (l. 13), the unintoned "ditties" portrayed on the urn's surface are registered solely in the mind—yet registered as music, not just as the idea of music.^[10] Then, too, Keats has even more in common with Coleridge than this may so far suggest. In his correspondence he is a homophonic punster as well, who gives Coleridge's "any-madversions" a run for its money—for its lexical short-changes and syntactic overdraft—with his complaints about the "{hie}rogue glyphics in Moors almanack."^[11] In that rebuslike syllable, Keats's drifting phoneme (carried by the grapheme gue ) doubles by liaison for the g of "glyphs" (just as the r of "hier" could have been made to operate in this way with the fuller spelling "hier-rogue-glyphs"). Such "rogue glyphs," loosed by phonemic slack, can, as in Coleridge, certainly inflect the graphonic contours of a verse line as well. In the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," for example, there is a transegmental overlay in the very thought that art's idealized and wholly imagined music would not pipe or pander to the "sensual leer," to that fevered gaze of desire that animates the male lovers on the urn. From this we infer some sort of sensory luxuriance apart from aggressive sensuality: a rarefied state which the line, by thematically positing, also phonemically enacts.

In Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," we have already noted the critically debated rhyme on "sole self"/"deceiving elf," with a potential homophonic ambiguity at the sibilant juncture that returns more unmistakably in Lamia, where the title creature is either "some penanced lady elf ," or, if not, "Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self " (1.55–56). In the multiplicity and logical contradiction of these lines, an uncertainty turning on identity-versus-possession would readily serve Keats's purpose. So with the proleptic irony of Lamia uttering her first words in the poem "for Love's sake" (1.65). As we saw in Donne's "Love's Exchange," the elided underside of the possessive "Love's s ake" sounds a warning of that "ache" which attends the possessiveness of love in the tragic remainder of the narrative. In Lamia's own description of Hermes' nymph, the fourfold repetition of her going about "unseen" (1.96, 99) also impresses a narrative logic upon transegmental ambiguity: "From bow'd branches green, / She plucks the fruit unseen, she bathes unseen" (1.98–99). The virtual redundancy (for the sake of rhyme) in "branches green" is rescued by the sense of it being precisely their leafage which creates the "branches'

screen" that provides her privacy (recalling Shakespeare's "summer's green " in Chapter 1). Such is Keats's ear for the thickening textures of the literary tradition.

In the second part of the poem, well after Lamia has taken up with the hero, Lycius, the climax is precipitated by the appearance of his stern mentor, Apollonius, at the wedding feast. Once within sight of his pupil's bride, the dry rationalist begins to puzzle out the mystery of the snake lady, her embodied ambiguity. The task is described as a "knotty problem" that "had now begun to thaw, / And solve and melt" (2.161–62). It is another highly Shakespearean moment in this poem. Keats would indeed seem to be consciously alluding here, and in the process normalizing, Hamlet's famous sequence, "melt, / Thaw, and resolve," while retaining a related pun on resolution in "solve." It is a pun that is submitted in Keats's line to a transegmental drift as well. Holding the place at once of rational "solution" and of metamorphic "dissolution" (as immediately restated in "melt"), the punning lexeme gives out laterally. In a silent voicing of the line, that is, the slight sibilant hiss of "And solve" is all that is necessary for the inner ear to generate, following the dental sound, the near equivalence of "And (d)(i)s olve." Elsewhere, evidence of Keats's revisions also supports such a transegmental audition of his texts. The well-known change in the "Bright Star" sonnet—from "feel forever its warm sink and swell,"^[12] describing the pillowing breast of the speaker's love, to "feel forever its soft fall and swell"—has everything to recommend it, including the transegmental echo in "soft fall an d" of the snow's "soft fallen mask" four lines earlier. Also in favor of the change is a no doubt unwanted transegmental possibility in the original: the hint of "swarm" welling up from "warm" as if by way of a transferred epithet confessing the persona's inundation by erotic thoughts. It is in the very nature of such phonotextual tendencies that they come unbidden—and must sometimes be avoided by rephrasing, just as the reader must at times censor their irruption in order to keep to the track of sense.

Keats's odes are a rich field of such effects at their most openly activated, however, as we began to see in Chapter 2. The famous fifth stanza of the "Ode to a Nightingale," which begins with the speaker admitting that he has "been half in love with easeful Death" (l.52), closes with his imagined relation to the nightingale's song once he has given up consciousness: "To thy high requiem become a sod" (l. 60). Without relating it back to Milton's synaloepha (his metrically determined eliding of vowels), Walter Jackson Bate, in The Stylistic Development of Keats , notes instead the "extreme and persistent" tendency toward "hiatus" or "vowel-gaping" in Keats's early sonnets. But what of the cross-lexical shunt that moves to span this gape, this gap—or, should we say, threatens to?—even at the expense of meter, in a phrase like "thy high

requiem"? To have ascribed that song to the nightingale, in the context of the speaker's wished-for return to earth, is to have defined it, by contrast, as "high." In this sense it is fitting (indeed, by a close phonemic fit) that the pronominal adjective seems to entail, to trail off into or be taken up by, the epithet. This is so even as the full measure of "high" (in a kind of kinaesthetic enhancement of the referential elevation) would tend with its "high" vowel to lift away from "thy" in enunciation—against the enforced prosody of Keats's own iambic requiem, where "thy" rather than "high" would take the accent. The inner speech of the body as reading site must negotiate in this way between two contradictory impulses, transegmental and kinaesthetic. If held to metrical regularity, this phrasing thus suppresses that normal hyper-articulation which might otherwise work to offset thematically the languid blurring of "a(s) sod" at the close of the line.^[13] Just as the reflexive recognition of "the very word," like a bell, will help the persona recover from his death wish a stanza later, the tension here in both phrases between hiatus and elision, enforced juncture and conflation, might equally be felt to hold alert (even if under constraint) the verbal consciousness (ours by proxy for that of the "speaker"), to keep the mind and body energized at one crucial point of their intersection: in silent as well as spoken enunciation. In this, the self-conscious literariness of graphonic tension encodes the very force of its utterance as a will to (still) living speech.

The subsequent stanza now ends on the belling note "Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn," where the subjective admonishment slipping into the phrase through the elision of a transegmental drift—namely, the chastisement of "perilous (s) eas(e)"—registers the indolent mood of mind from which the speaker is about to rebound into the chastening echo of the next stanza. Given that the "full-throated ease" (l. 11) of the nightingale has initially led the speaker to his thoughts of "easeful" death—the latter adjective used in Keats's day, both passively and actively, for "slothful" as well as "easing"—the word "ease" has cut deep, always potentially recurrent, grooves in the poem. The lexical risk incident to a sibilant juncture like "perilous s eas" is therefore all the more likely to let slip into "production" the text's more telling noun, for which "seas" is part of a figure here anyway. Against the grain of the written phenotext, that is, the phonotext has once again sounded (at the level of a suppressed matrix) the implicit tenor to a metaphoric vehicle operating at the scripted surface of a phrase.

The easy slipping in of the verbal rather than substantive form of "ease," though without the monitory overtones of the "Nightingale" ode, is even more self-enacting in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," where "ease" carries the sense less of torpor than of aesthetic release. The synecdochic urn, silently inscribed vessel described entirely by the sheer inscription (to recall de Man's

terms) of the poem "on" it, is apostrophized in the last stanza as precisely that (quasi-textual) "silent form" which—in a self-illustrating animation of such silence—"dost tease us out of thought" (l. 44). It is just that formal second-person-singular ending ("dost "), insignia of direct address (of prosopopoeia in the form of apostrophe), which permits the very slip in inscription that draws off the (in context) synonymous "ease" from its less predictable variant, "tease." If "seas" edging to "ease" in the "Nightingale" ode seemed confirmed by the prehistory of that noun in the same poem, so may this climactic image from the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" be at least encouraged by comparing its earlier formulation in the "Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds," where imagination's desired objects cannot be willed into existence: "Things cannot to the will / Be settled, but they tease us out of thought" (ll. 76–77). As noted, it is the later shift into the formal vocative case, "dost," that introduces the possibility of elision into the ode. In this sense what we find there is a Riffaterrean matrix that could be said to undergo deconstruction by its very apostrophizing inscription—but a deconstruction negotiated in the play between graphic (in particular, here, ekphrastic) inscription and the "sensual ear" of the phonotext. The artifact's teasing us free of anxiety, its role in aesthetic appeasement, is indeed possible, given the urn's exclusively textual embodiment, only through the tease of inscription itself—which pretends to address the object as present to us, to give plastic face and form, shape and dimension, to its sheer imaginary status.

Another, later "closure" comes to mind. Keats breaks off the unfinished Fall of Hyperion with a vision of the title deity rushing past the dreaming speaker, his "flaming robes" streaming behind him. The poem then closes with a portmanteau blur of their flaring and his wayfaring, as if Hyperion were burning up distances in his speed: "On he flared." A comparable ear for the power of lexical compression is, earlier in this late poem, directed against the terrible verbal power of Moneta's awesome disclosures. Containing in their narrative the whole englobed tragedy of the Titans, her words seem shaped by the vastness and devastation on which they report. By a transferred epithet from the mythic sphere whose fallen world they evoke, her language is characterized as "an immortal's s phered words" (1.249). By elision and another transference, here from cause to effect, the words naming her words thus also characterize the narrator's recoil from this "feared" revelation. Such a wording on the text's part is rounded to contain its own microdrama, its own tension between utterance and response.

Mon Blanc

In just this sense of textual repletion, it was Keats who gave phrase to the rhetorical mission of second-generation Romanticism in urging that poetry

should "load every rift with ore."^[14] Shelley's Defence of Poetry may be read in part as an expanded meditation on this impulse. In Shelley, however, the rifts and crevices that must be made full are explored as the poet's natural province because of their extratextual relation to the gaps, blanks, and lacunae of lived experience, the slumps and dead spots of existence, which the poet exists to animate. The term "interstices" recurs suggestively in the Defence . In celebrating the poetic imagination for its "unapprehended combinations of thought," Shelley argues that these new admixtures "have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts," forming "new intervals and interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food."^[15] Filling gaps in our consciousness that we never before knew existed, by linkages and surpluses never previously engaged, is the task of a poetry whose own gaps and lapses remain real enough. No poem is all sustained inspiration. The craft, rather than the genius, of poetry is the fashioning of serviceable bridge passages, a more or less "artificial connexion of the spaces between by the intertexture of conventional expressions" (504). All the rifts can never quite be swollen with gold. That Shelley here argues home his point in evocations devoted to the maneuvered interval and trace, the phonic visitant and larded interstice, does not of course in any way demonstrate that his defense of poetry is mounted explicitly as a theory of style. I am merely noticing how much his prose seems to evoke what he calls later in this paragraph, in figures again of perceptual blank and traversed interval, "the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life" (505). Far more than his prose, the Shelleyan verse text can be found replicating these interlunations at the micro-level, finessing their ruptures, thickening their interstices with the music of his own "evanescent visitations," a play of phantom ripples and echoing traces.

With his stress on "vanishing apparitions" and "interlunations," Shelley's anticipation of Derrida's trace-under-erasure seems phonetically activated in another image from The Triumph of Life . The only "trace I find," says the persona, is "as of foam after the Ocean's wrath / Is spent upon the desert shore" (ll. 162–64). Rather like Keats's "become a(s) sod," though by elision now rather than reverse liaison, the collocation "as of foam" is virtually interchangeable—by way of phonemic meltdown as well as descriptive reference—with the analogic construction "as a foam." So, too, in the "Mutability" sonnet, where human life in the collective is analogous to "forgotten lyres" with "dissonant s trings," the very noun "dissonance" manifested across its own transformed adjectival bond. In "Lines Written among the Euganean Hills," the "sun upsprings behind" (1. 100) on "the level quivering line / Of the waters chrystalline" (ll. 102–3). In this volatile dissolve of sound, the noun "sun" seems to have merged into a fuller subject, "sunup," before its second

syllable is claimed by the verb. Moreover, the aurally overrich rhyme on "line" and "l/line" actually risks phonemic redistribution in the pleonastic rephrasing "Of the water's crystal line"—a quivering of segmentation itself, with the ambiguous "liquid" phonemes as lexical solvents. Quite apart from the motifs of quivering evanescence, Shelley's phonemic transmutability can, for instance, work toward the consolidation of an outer power through apostrophe. This fluidity thus provides yet another interfusion of representation and verbal registration. In "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," the climactic invocation voices the hope "That thou—O awful LOVELINESS, / Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express" (ll. 71–72). But "these words" themselves attempt to encompass such sublimity—in exactly its quality of majestic pervasiveness —by a sliding synaloepha at the all but double elision "thou—O aw ful." For a moment it is as if address, exclamation, and attribute were all one suffused epithet. Indeed, the founding prosopopoeia of this invoked loveliness here seems generated, evocalized, out of a distended ablauted matrix still in the process of morphemic consolidation, a genotext still gathering the expressive force of a phenotext.

As against such swollen aurality and metaphysical repletion, barrenness and vacancy as textual conditions also, as we have seen before, phonemically impinge on the Shelleyan text. The title "Epipsychidion" refers to that projected soul which makes full the "bare and void interstices" (l. 482) of nature. Here, quite explicitly, the style and theme of the interstice are made to coalesce—as do the lexical units of the line themselves, for "bare and void" is likely to be evocalized in passing as "barren void," an anti-pun quickly readjusted by syntax. This takes place according to a logic which the poem has earlier exemplified by spelling it out in an enjambed description of the lunar cycle, "whose changes ever run / Into themselves" (ll. 278–79). So, of course, do the phonemic changes of language, as in such acoustic—if nonsemantic—elisions as "ever(r)un" (compare the first word in Joyce's Wake : "riverrun"). In Prometheus Unbound , there is the image of a geologically retarded assault, "crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears" (1.31), with its harrowing vision of suffering time spatialized as the inching forward of primordial masses. The phrase is arranged so that the temporal drift of reading itself encroaches upon the scripted logic of phonemic spacing—to create the proleptic first thrust of "spears" in "glaciers pierce ." Later in Prometheus , the loss of life's animating moments "leaves this peopled earth a solitude" (2.17), the phonotext itself thus bewailing that very "dearth" feared by the speaker in the spiritual vacuum so portrayed.

In the context of Chapter 2's attention to the closing rhyme of "Mont Blanc," we can observe an earlier transegmental effect that cooperates in the text's resistance to void. Inaugurating the closing apostrophe to the mountain,

we have heard how the "secret strength of things" (l. 139)—rhyme word for the final "imaginings" four lines later—forever "inhabits thee" (l. 141). Here is another prosopopoeia whose rhetoric is underwritten by inscription at one level and interanimated at another by phonemic reading. Indeed, in those vexed closing lines already examined, it is exactly at the point of nearest abutment between the outer world and the inner landscape of response that a transegmental restitution sets in. At the very point of enjambment, that is, in "if to the human mind's imaginings / Silence and solitude were vacancy?" the pluralized subjectivity of "imaginings," figuring their variety without enumerating it, blurs over into—takes up or is taken up by—that existential "silence" with whose signifier the previous plural will fuse and whose vacancy such multiplicity may infuse. The text itself is thus less "silent" here than it seems, energizing the very gap at the end of a line with a sibilant ligature. The unsaid matrix of this whole interrogative image is blankness , with its suggestion of external void but also of emotional depletion. The constitutive textual blank itself, however—in this pivotal moment halfway between the portentous chimings of "and sea" / "-ancy" explored in Chapter 2—would defeat and repeal that implicit nullity, rendering it connective. Invocation ("thou") depends upon inscription, yes, but inscription depends upon, and may even be rectified by, the energies of evocalization. Mon(t) blanc , Shelley suggests in French, is never to be taken for granted in his English texts.

"A Sound But Half Its Own"

The oratorical apostrophes and incantatory lamentations of Adonais might also be expected to inspirit the phonic interval, to breathe life into the lacunae of its dirge. They do. The text's early invocation of the blind Milton is a call to the author of a precedent elegy, "Lycidas," a poet summoned as the "Sire of an immortal strain" (l. 30). With "strain" meaning "song" as well as "generic lineage," the monosyllable "Sire" is all the more likely to release its aspirated homophone, "sigher," both opening up and at the same time filling in an internal phonemic juncture where none exists in the scriptive form of the lexeme. A transegmental variant of such phonemic decontraction may hover as well over the image of the Muse Urania in Adonais , whose "distress / Roused Death: Death rose and smiled, and met her vain caress" (ll. 224–25). At this chiastic pivot, the paronomastic chiming of "Roused" against "rose" works less to enforce our instantaneous aural recognition of the second verb than to delay it. We expect more variety from the syntagmatic sequence. Instead of this etymologically related "gradience" (in the manner of Hopkins), we are just as likely to hear the antiphonal phantom phrase, "death throes." Yet even that most terrible motion native to death is beyond possibility in "the death chamber" where Keats lies stilled.

A related anti-pun in Adonais , again phonetically poised across a lexical juncture, and again brushing the written utterance with the shadow of a false hope—a trace of wish fulfillment in the gaps of the elegiac—appears in the clause "cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay" (l. 351). Reversing the original effect, before revision, of Keats's juncture in "Bright Star," in the phrase "its=swarm sink," here the paronomastic inner echo of "swarm" against "worms" only encourages a more strictly alliterative parsing of the sequence as "cold hopes (s )warm." Elision thus unleashes a verb antithetical to the adjective "cold," as if the dead dream were being warmed to renewal by the very delusion these words half seem to generate. A later elision describes the "lofty thought" that "Lifts a young heart above its mortal l air" (l. 393), where "air" as "atmosphere"—and, by extension, the human "sphere" or "clime"—would serve only to literalize the metaphor of mundane shelter and containment in the figure "lair." In so doing, the transegmental drift might also dislodge an equally secreted pun on "air"—for the lost poet's remembered song. In an earlier image of "lofty" ascent, the dead Keats is already seen to have "outsoared the shadow of our night" (l. 352), saved thereby from "the contagion of the world's slow stain" (l. 356), a phrasing in which only a mimetic slowing of the last three monosyllables could prevent a reemphasized designation of the world's "low" contamination in its contrast to the soaring release of death.

The shifting, ephemeral power of junctural irony or of segmental indeterminacy in verse is most intriguing perhaps in the case of Adonais 's very title, a combination, as Earl Wasserman has argued convincingly, of Adonis and of Adonai : the Greek figure of perfection crossbred with the Hebrew name for the Lord. The first two incantatory appearances of the name, in the poem's first two lines, are deployed around an internal chime that accentuates the is syllable and its homology with the verb of being, here in the oxymoronic predication of "being dead": "I weep for Adonais —he is dead! / O, weep for Adonais!" The vocative "O" renews itself, along with the internal rhyme, two stanzas later: "O, weep for Adonais—he is dead!" (l. 19). The next half dozen mentions of the proper name, distributed over three dozen stanzas, appear without that synecdochic echoing of the is, until the doubled anticipation of "'tis Death is dead, not he; / Mourn not for Adonais" (ll. 361–62; my emphasis). This last consolatory imperative is then reversed into a rhetorical question six stanzas further along: "Who mourns for Adonais?" (l. 415). Five stanzas later, the remaining five stanzas space out alternately the last three appearances of his name. First: "What Adonais is, why fear we to become?" (l. 459), which abuts unmistakably with the part-echo of predicated existence. Next: "'Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither" (l. 476), a phrasing which reiterates the is in slightly strained elliptical grammar, amounting to "It is

Adonais (who) calls." And, finally, as the syntactically surcharged climax to the whole pattern, sparked by a double grammar itself energized by phonetic ambiguity:

Whilst burning through the inmost veil of heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
(ll. 493–95)

The genealogical portmanteau that has kept Adonis and Adonai vying for lexical and semantic space in the proper name—across fifty-five stanzas inaugurated by "Adonais—he is"—is finally unpacked and momentarily redelegated. Punctuation cannot stop it, the pull of grammatical and semantic probability being for a split second too strong; the middle line above thus reads as a momentarily stabilized and grammatically complete unit, whose verb simply posits the deathlessness of its subject in a divination (both senses) of poetic powers—"The soul of Adonai is (,) like a star." In such a phonemic reading of this line, the poet is compared to a star that "beckons"—or "beacons" (as the text has it in an anti-pun on the more likely verb). He is compared in either case to a shining exemplar, a light in darkness, a no-longer mourned artist whose refulgent genius above all, and despite the grave, is.

To audit Shelley's verse texture in this fashion is to sense that the most telling microcosmic statement of his verbal purposes may not lie primarily in The Revolt of Islam 's phrase for a "subtler language within language" (7.3112).^[16] We might find it more specifically in the figuration from "Mont Blanc" of a river's continuous music amplified by the adjacent tumult of nature, the rushing water murmuring "with a sound but half its own" (l. 6). Given the graded cross-lexical paronomasia of "sound . . . its own, " the phrase is indeed self-exampling, each partner in the internal slant rhyme a part-echo of the other. So "speaks," so we speak, the flowing Shelleyan word, tributary to other lexical sounds into which, in the phonemic stream, it perpetually feeds. As the paronomastic turn two lines earlier in "Mont Blanc" has it, each word may be found "lending splendour" to its neighbor, turning contiguity not just to equivalence (Jakobson's rule for poetic combination) but to overlap.

This phonemic layering and exchange can aspire in The Revolt of Islam to the highly Miltonic "road of Hell's s ulphureous s urge" (11.4305), with the variant recurrence of ell in ul encouraging the sense of "all-furious urge." Or it can be arrayed in a more uniquely Shelleyan vein, its evocations nearer the heart of the Romantic program. In the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" we hear sung the very birth of the hymnist, as well as his theme. The vocation of the Romantic poet seems materialized in the crevices of his own language. The fourth stanza begins with a panorama of evanescence typical of Shelley, where

natural ephemera are arrayed at the turn of an enjambment to image the slippages and recuperations of the mind: "Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart / And come, for some uncertain moments lent" (ll. 37–38). This is again the lent "splendour" of inspiration, but it is contextualized here as an epiphany of commitment. Within four lines, the spirit of beauty is being lauded as a "messenger of sympathies" (l. 42), a harbinger of love, like the "winds" that "are wooing" vitality out of the earth in the next stanza (l. 56). Nature is a solicitation, the incipient poet all ears. This is, of course, nature in its undeconstructed state, or status: nature as yet unexposed as the referential figment of a vocative inscription. Apostrophized itself as voice, this image of nature helps figure in turn the attentive response of the lyric subject. Further, it is in this same stanza that the speaker describes the onset of his vocation, the moment when the "shadow" of intellectual beauty "fell on me" (l. 59), sealing an ecstatic pact. As we hear in retrospect at the opening of the sixth stanza: "I vowed that I would dedicate my powers / To thee and thine" (ll. 61–62). The text's earlier transitional image, concerned with the mutability of those elevated thoughts that are only "for some uncertain moments lent," takes on now a prescient overtone. Call it an interstitial anti-pun, or antiphone, or transegmental drift, but in any case the inner ear may well be made alert to the suggestion that it is ultimately "for summons" ("for some unc ertain") that "certain moments" are indeed briefly "lent" to the craving spirit. In the flux of language itself, then, esemplastically transformed, we are to hear the invitation to another life, a life perhaps dedicated to the very words that have, in every sense, shaped its calling .

In a famous passage from Prometheus Unbound , Shelley writes that "Language is a perpetual Orphic song," a "Daedal harmony" designed to unify "a throng / Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were" (4.415–17). Even before the flickering agrammatical hint of "swir(l)" in "s-wer," it has been precisely the resistance to such transegmental adhesion in the sibilant-laden collocation "else senseless" which is necessary to make sense of that adjectival phrase. Without language, without pertinent oppositions, without a respect for lexical borders, there would be only the swirl of sound and aimless perception. Enacting the very consolidation of the lexical out of phonemic sequence, the Shelleyan text has here mounted one of those transegmental effects that is actively, even metalinguistically, ruled out by context. Thematized in such a line, then, is the need for the kind of hyperarticulation of juncture that—turning back to Keats—would provide a further differentiation between first and second versions of "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." In the 1819 text, the phrase "The latest dream I ever dreamt / On the cold hill side" is shuffled in refrain to the possessive "And I awoke, and found me here / On the cold hill's side," a variation flattened out in the 1820 revision.

In the original version, the phonic densening of the doubled sibilant—to the point of almost unforestallable elision—seems to retard the enunciatory process in a minuscule equivalent of the knight's arrested quest, his drugged heaviness of mind in desolation.

In Shelley, however, as elsewhere in Keats as well, the transegmental temptation is usually situated so that it should be succumbed to rather than resisted. In the most luxuriantly plotted phonemic exercise in all of Shelley's work, the "Ode to the West Wind," the speaker, in apostrophe to the wind, imagines a boyhood vitality wound up to the point where "to outstrip thy skiey speed / Scarce seemed a vision" (ll. 50–51). Enhanced by the dynamic of enjambment, the syntax must outstrip its own lineation in order to round out a last strained phrase that may at the same time homophonically regroup itself to "thy sky's speed." Sense would permit this, since the wind's speed is visible as "skiey" only insofar as it pushes clouds on before it. Phonemes too, then, are outstripping themselves there. Against the semantically intriguing, albeit somewhat thick-tongued, metrical regularity of "skiey speed," the no-longer iambic rapidity of "sky's speed" scuds past. This etherial rush at last comes bearing down on the inspired present speaker for the inverted copulative clauses of "Be thou, Spirit fierce, / My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!" (ll. 61–62). With the first comma again "unheard," the enjambment would move to close off one possible, slightly elliptical grammar—"Be thou (a) spirit fierce"—only to have it reopened and adjusted when the tentative predicate nominative is displaced in retrospect to an appositive. The speaker's own "spirit" next takes up the grammatical slot following the equative verb, only from there to be swept up into the second appositive phrase, "impetuous one," across the vernacular solecism of "me" in the objective case. Once again, grammar deconstructs rhetoric by exposing a self still subject to—still object of—the wind with which it hopes to fuse. Yet the wind's spiritualized velocity impels identification, impels fusion—so the speaker dreams. It is an impetus that, once scripted as the quatrasyllabic "impetuous," introduces—by way of phonetic rebus—the pronoun "you." That encrypted pronoun is placed, and suddenly played, against the first person authorial plural of "us," though still in the objective case. It thus takes part in a swift but no less emphatic positing of subject and object that—given the spondaic precedent of "Be thou me"—blends into the phonemically lent splendor of impet/you/us/one . Such is a desideratum—difference subsumed to unity, lack transcended—written only in the chord progressions of a natural harmony, not traced anywhere upon the legible face of things, whether of nature or of poem. Indeed, it is produced as text only by what the next tercet reflexively highlights as "the incantation of this verse" (l. 65)—to be heard and not seen.

Romantic Interlunations

Jerome McGann, in The Romantic Ideology , makes claims for a stylistic component in his "revisionist critique." Stressing, first of all, a reading of texts in and against "the socio-historical ground" of their production and consumption, he is quick to insist: "This does not mean that 'purely' stylistic, rhetorical, formal, or other specialized analyses cannot or will not be pursued."^[17] Few books of such frankly historicizing ambitions are so professedly open to stylistics, and so McGann's work might serve as a test case for the always elusive rapprochement between linguistic and socio-historical reading. But what kind of "stylistics" are in order? Nothing is ever spelled out by McGann, only ruled out. In order to support his sense of the radically destabilized ideological ground of Romantic assumptions in the major texts of the period, their uneasy compromise with their own contradictions, McGann resists what he sees as the critical compromise that takes the texts as part of a "poetry of process" (28), exploratory and irresolute. In such an (unsatisfactory) view, the exemplary Romantic texts, searching, tentative, and ambiguous, participate in their own uncertain interpretation, an approach related by McGann to the "reader-response school." In his view, any such method passes the buck. It makes over the poetry's deep self-divisions, the rifts and contradictions of its insufficiently examined purposes, into a capacious dialectic in the hermeneutics of reception. For McGann more is at stake, and at peril, in the Romantic text. What, then, might any sort of stylistics have to offer by way of elucidation? How are the fissures of Romantic ideology conveyed to, or carried by, the verbal topography and tropology of a text? The closest we get to a direct confrontation with such questions in McGann's book is his reading of the last four stanzas of Adonais , with their poignant tension between a sense of irreparable human loss and a consolatory "futurism" (123) of poetic immortality. Lest the reader relax into the "sentimental idea" of the latter, McGann proposes "an historical analysis" that would help "distinguish the ideological, the stylistic, and the emotional aspects of poetic work." Though issues "stylistic" are twice invoked in this culminating paragraph of McGann's chapter on Shelley, and though he quotes as full an excerpt from any Romantic text as we will find submitted to commentary in his entire study, there is no adduced evidence whatever of specifically "stylistic tensions" (123)—except, perhaps, in the closing tonal contrast between "cold mortality" and the shining "abode" of Keats's immortally fixed "star." A tension in metaphor ? Even this is not specified.

The present discussion, of course, has earlier closed in on more strictly stylistic—or morphophonemic—details of this passage. If we were now to recast the tenor of earlier observations in terms of emotional contrasts widen-

ing to ideological contradictions, if we were to register moments when the verbal texture of the poem protests too much its own visionary resolution, we might first return to that recurrent echo of the verb of being, "is," in "Adonais." By the close of the poem, predication itself, displaced and sacralized, is absorbed into the strained and grammatically unstable plural of the last rhyming word: "The soul of Adonais, like a star, / Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are." "Beacons," as we have seen, is not quite "beckons"—indeed, not quite as inviting as "beckons." At the other end of the line, capitalized and reified, "the Eternal" might emerge as if it were an abstract singular noun, requiring (students regularly assume so) a singular verb (as in the earlier "A portion of the eternal" [l. 340]). Until, that is—in a reader-response trajectory? surprised by sublimity? by anonymity?—we realize that Keats's single "star" is put in rhyme with, even while erased in its singularity by, the plurality, the host, of those who have gone before to their immortality. Romantic individualism in a stylistically coded tension with meliorative eschatology? Poetic eternity as cold comfort for the intensified subjectivity that attends life in the flesh? Ideology at odds with desire? And this a tension that is itself part of the uneasy ideology of the transhistorical long view?

Looking again at the final stanza, which McGann has not so much read as simply delivered wholesale into evidence, we can notice a transegmental marker of just such a gulf between human feeling and visionary schedule, between mourning and ideological manifesto:

The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, . . .

The smiting loss of all that might have been is converted to the "might" of poetic inspiration, fanned by the breath of the lost Other only when internalized as the living speech of creative continuance. The comma that interrupts the more natural enjambment at "driven / Far from the shore" seems momentarily to mark the poetic "drive" in its other sense, as the thrust of literary ambition. This repeated lexical tension is prolonged by the homophonic double of "spirit's bark" (the rather quaint metaphor) in the more clichéd and predictable "spirit's spark," related to the earlier image of the poetic "fire" that "outlives the parent spark" (l. 408). For one thing, the suggestion of "spark" draws on the "breath" of inspiration descended upon the living poet earlier in the line. Second, by way of a more distant early prediction, the poem has long before imaged the sad remains of a death without poetic immortality as the "sparkless ashes" of an "unlamented urn" (l. 360)—as opposed to the urn of aesthetic permanence in the Keatsian

intertext. The closing transmutation of Keats's dying breath into Shelley's inspiration is, after all, more likely—as "spark" rather than "bark"—to fan the soul than to put wind in any sails. When this transegmental alternative, or matrix, is thus repressed by the paraphonic variant ("spark" by "bark"), what has happened is that the normal resuscitative energies of a mourning friend and poet, lifted to new confidence in the name of the Other, is graphemically recast—sobered, if not chastened—by the more ominous figuration of the bark's deathward voyage, "darkly, fearfully, afar." In short, the disturbing ideological cross-purposes of this climactic passage—wavering between an elegiac fervor converted to furor poeticus and a more distant philosophical consolation—are kept alive in the cross-lexical phonemic ambivalence of "spirit's spark" versus "spirit's bark."

All this said in amplification of McGann's sparse gesture toward the work of "stylistic tensions" still leaves us far from any systematic understanding of the relation of style, let alone the activity of the phonotext, to the "sociohistorical ground" of literary production. Yes, ambiguities—whether understood as textual mechanisms or as reader-response signals—may negotiate (or embody or enact or thematize) various contradictions and cross-purposes. Given the self-conscious architectonics of certain texts, one might even be willing to say that a verbal cleft, a lexical blank, a consequent segmental slippage may actually replay a conceptual irruption or schism in the ideological superstructure determining a poem. But what about an ideology of the text itself, as textuality? McGann early on explains that he will substitute the term "ideology of poetry" for "theory of poetry" (10) in his deliberations. But is that emphasis meant to imply the relegation of both poetics and aesthetics? Moving even beyond the literary text, can we responsibly subordinate all of linguistics and philology to the ideology of a historical epoch as well? Here, of course, our questions verge again upon Foucault's archaeology of the human science of language. Understood in Foucault's terms, the Romantic moment—exemplified, for instance, by Shelley's expressive tensility of phrase, his romancing of the phoneme—stretches as watershed between classical conceptions of discourse as representation and the modern ontology of language as a thing in itself.

Yet this epochal turning point of Romanticism finds that its ideology of language—conceived as the means of an independently articulated armature of human communication—is an ideology, and an ideal, mediated at crucial literary turns by the lyric operation: as in itself a suppressed crisis in subjectivity, a site of anxieties less expressed than covertly enacted by language. These anxieties have, in fact, to do in good part with the relation of language to time passing, of record to history, of writing to things recoverable. In all the Romantics, history is in some sense or another rewritten as the Fall, first in

Blake, where recovery involves an at least intermittent access to the unhindered tongues of Beulah. This would entail no reversion to mere babble but, rather, the achievement of an organized lingual innocence—available to the poetic effort within and against, not simply before, the Urizenic or rationalist hegemony. If for the Romantic enterprise as a whole in one of its important aspects—as for Shelley, in particular—language is identified as "a perpetual Orphic song," the underworld to which it makes its foray and from which it retrieves its visionary treasure is the unconscious itself. This is the locus of expressible desire still in touch with a poetic impulse before symbolic acculturation, though later absorbed into it (ideally, without too extreme a denial). To dwell in these alogical depths is not only the beginning but also the end of speech; to visit there, however, in the visionary raids of Orphean adventure, is to mine that song waiting at the very root of speech, that rhythm underneath reason, that lyric pulse before linguistic ordering—in Kristeva's terms, if we choose, the semiotic stratum upon which the symbolic is mounted. But to do so programmatically could never be a matter of a poet's conscious decision from line to line. Any cogent sense of such Orphic power in Romantic poetry, therefore, resides merely in the recognized tendency to a certain excessive and unregimented texture, to the preferred surplus of signifier over signified, to Coleridge's "soft-floating witchery of sound" (validated by analogues in nature, to be sure: this is its most obvious ideological component). These are the resonances and reverberations that, in other terms, inflect the Shelleyan interlunations of both world and text; of world and text together, the one in the other's image: as Wordsworth put it, of nature's meanings half-created, half-received. One avowed philosophy—or ideology—of language in Romantic poetry rests just here: in a recognition that its lyric aspirations work toward a "Daedal harmony" connatural with what is visible and audible in the labyrinthine symmetries of the experienced world—a synesthesia, for instance, no more artificial than nature's own admixtures and sensory interfusions.

This program entails a more perplexed ideology, whose contradictions thus go unexamined, when it requires for lyric transmission a theory of the uttering subject, of subjectivity as utterance. This is a verbally conscious subject whose anxious discontinuities—whose psychic caesuras and ellipses, ambivalences and elisions—must also be mapped, along with the landscape of nature, onto the topography of a text. Romanticism, it may be shown, arose contemporaneously with the dawn of philology in an independent but parallel gestation, birth, and development. It continued to flourish, or at least survive, in Victorian and even twentieth-century revisions only as long as the systematic study of language, the scientific rigors of linguistics, did not threaten the cherished metaphysics of individual selfhood. Inspiriting as they were to the

style of poetry as part of the generalized spirit of an age, its verbal predisposition, these linguistic investigations could thrive only as long as their rigor was kept from deconstructing exactly that lyric subjectivity, that bardic centrism, lending authority to a philologically preoccupied art of words. But the frictions that would become fissures were already apparent, even in high Romanticism, already seeking appeasement by rhetorical deflection. The ideological cleavage McGann spots at the end of Adonais might in this light be recast as the living poet's recognition that in the death of Keats, the death of the Author as Other, lies the innate destiny of all authorship, the fixity of a presence only within the structured absence which is any and every text. In or out of the elegiac mode, all prosopopoeia is merely figural, funereal—and on both sides of the personifying contract. As the almost dead-metaphoric "spark" of Keats's living genius is scriptively overruled, to become instead the more insistently figural "bark" of immortal destiny and reputation, something like a true "stylistic tension" has thus opened consciousness to the potentially terrifying void between even the persona's own psyche and his text, between all voice and any poem. Here, then, is an ideological irreconcilability—to be laid bare a century and a half later in Derrida's term "thanatopraxis"—which Romantic instances of the elegiac genre disclose only to contain.

If the Romantic ideology of language is such that the word is seen to absorb and transfigure experience, then the extreme malleability of language—when highlighted, for instance, at a junctural slippage—may offer a stylistic emphasis to an even more oblique metalinguistic tremor of the text. Here we may look aside for a moment from Shelley to a comparable instance in his nearest peer. There is no overt evidence in the "Ode on Melancholy" that the Keatsian persona is speaking as a literary voice, that he is writing his way into a poetic stance. For all the florid staginess of his conceits, there is, in short, no mention of writing, of the melancholic as writer. The "speaker" appears to be merely setting forth the existential rather than literary premises of the melancholic visionary, who sees, among other things, the beauty of the fleetingness of beauty. He addresses the first two stanzas in second person to a kind of spiritual advisee, if implicitly to himself at one remove. It is only by extrapolation from the "sovran shrine" of a personified Melancholy that the courted goddess may become in fact the Muse, the presiding genius of that poetic wisdom won from the bittersweet of luxuriance. Explicitly in the lines, it is merely the human agent, as "poetic" sensibility, not in particular the poetic craftsman, whose fate is sealed at the close of the poem, in a stanza that has shifted into a general third-person formulation: "His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, / And be among her cloudy trophies hung." But if Melancholy is not only a general inspiration to the Romantic spirit but, after all, the specific Muse of Keats's verbal artistry, his one hope of that bardic

immortality which would enshrine forever his insights about a terrible pleasure feeding deep on loss, then the closest hint of this may appear in a poetic warping of the final juncture: literally, letterally, the poem's last word(s). Anticipating this, it is easy to imagine a figural transference in the last line from him who can "burst Joy's grape against his palate fine," the ultimate credential for melancholic service, to the poetic use of the mouth in lyric utterance. Following from this, it is then by the overtone of a sibilant liaison in "trophies s (h)ung " that the "him who" of this last stanza becomes a melancholic dedicant specifically hymned into the pantheon of spiritual insight. In our phonemic adjustment of Riffaterre's terms, to have one's achievement "sung" among those of the goddess's other adulants is the avoided cliché; to be "hung" among them, incarnate, is the more striking paraphone of that monosyllabic matrix. Once again, phonemic reading can work to sustain the Romantic dream of verbal embodiment, the very stuff of "cloudy" and evanescent incarnation.

Precisely because so many of the phonotextual instances we have noted fall within the always-churning realm of the contingent, no direct ideological link can be demonstrated, except by way of the general inclination toward such a thickened, excessive, and hence polyvalent style. This is just what would doom to confusion any programmatic attempt to read off some Romantic "ideology" from the unregimented verbal flicker and phonemic slip. There is, we can readily see, an ideology (read, "poetics") of the Romantic lyric, an ideology (read, "aesthetics") of Romantic euphony therein. Both, moreover, predispose such texts to a richness given (and sometimes given over) to phonic accidents poised against the graphic grain. This predisposition is, in fact, part of the largest antirationalist bias of the period, its nostalgia for the unfallen state of nature and for its psychic cognate in the "immortal sea" of imaginary totalization. But the poetic (or, rather, psycholinguistic) counterideology — of a subjectivity neither preceding nor exceeding the letter of the text, and thus dispersed and imperiled by the text's every lapse — this must wait, long and impatiently, with an impatience warping the surface of many a text in the meantime, for the theoretical enterprise of another century.

Tennysonorities

In its Keatsian debts, the phonotext works overtime almost everywhere in Tennyson. A reader may come upon the most fleeting of transegmental effects, as in the image from "Mariana" of a "sluice" that "with blackened waterss lept," where le(a)pt emerges from the signified stagnancy and signifying sibilance as an impossible but relevant anti-pun, the pertinent antonym of the water's portrayed state. It is no accident, however, that the phonic texture of Tennysonian verse, the rhythm of voice itself as an adjunct of script, is at its

most dense and crafted in the dramatic monologues. The heroic speaking subject of "Ulysses," in the stanza beginning "This is my son, mine own Telemachus" (l. 33), concludes with a dismissal of the son's "common duties" and "slow prudence" — and this in implicit celebration by contrast of his own martial exploits: "He works his work, I mine" (l. 43). The drudgery of mere "work" has already been contrasted to the image of a community of achievement among "Souls that have toil'd, and wrought , and thought with me" (l. 46), where working and thinking, objective labor and subjective purpose, are made in every sense to rhyme with each other. This is not the prudent, mundane toil of Telemachus, and so the quotidian form of the verb, in a cognate repetition, has been used only of the son — "He works his work" — whereas Ulysses has spoken more compactly of his — "I mine." Beyond the semantic pun on the verb form of "mine" as a dredging passionately in the depths of experience, this phrasing is also syntactically ambiguous even when "mine" is taken as adjectival, involving not only the grammar of ellipsis but also the phonemics of ligature. For over against the routinized and unvaried "works his work" stands the radically unalienated labor — indeed, the equative predication of being itself — in "I'm mine." The verb is not just left out; the object is lent, overlapping, to the subject, in a transfusion of self into its effects. Any potential psychic divisions would thus seem healed across the lexical breach. We might say that in this text about a defied discontinuity between youth and decline, the nostalgic speaking subject also seems to suppress, by momentarily mastering, the very consciousness of linguistic discontinuity and rupture that contributes to defining modernism and the theories of its textuality.

If this is so, then one would also have to say that the ironic counterpart to this dramatic monologue, "Tithonus," can be seen to exploit the same lexical ambiguities and cleavages for what looks, what sounds , much more like the dissociated sensibility of a modern identity crisis. The verbal fissures are there in both cases but seamed over in differing degrees of lexical precariousness. The fading Tithonus, lover of the dawn, is an antihero withering endlessly in the grief of his granted wish to be made immortal. He begins a stanza of excruciated retrospect with the double pun on his own identity, as ambiguously subject or object of this bleak nostalgic vision:

Ay me! ay me!  with what another heart
In days far-off, and with what other eyes
I used to watch — if I be he that watched —
(ll. 50–52; my emphasis)

The specular gap, opened by pun, between the present bemoaning "I" and the "other eyes " that used to perceive the world leads us to the transegmental irony

of "If I be he that watched." By an elision at the very turning point of predication, this textual effect subordinates even present as well as past identity to the pathos of the subjunctive: "If I be(h)e [at all anymore] that [formerly] watched." The very idea of being, once put in question, swallows the pronouns that would identify it — or at least threatens to against the sway of metrical stress. Even though usually subserving the meter, Miltonic synaloepha boasts no more strategic examples. Then, too, this transegmental meld reminds us that exactly what Tithonus is not saying in a Ulyssean vein, with that "Ay me!" two lines before, is that "I'm me" — or even "I'm (h)e that." If such anti-puns show their face on the obverse of the more apparent morphemic play, they remain merely antiphonal hints whose sense is banished by the semantic default of confident self-predication in the rest of the passage.

By contrast, Robert Browning — one's reading of Browning — has a different "sound" altogether, but not a stabilized one.^[18] His transegmental play between syllables is certainly grittier, less melodious, than anything in Tennyson. When Browning's Childe Roland moves toward the Dark Tower over "Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth" ("'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,'" l. 150), our mind is so fixed on the desiccated topography that we are likely to hear a disyllabic "black'd earth" rather than its scripted equivalent, "black dearth." The more likely alternative, indeed, seems left to the paraphonic variant. Then there is this from "Fra Lippo Lippi": "And nip each softling of a wee white mouse, / Weke, weke , that's crept to keep him company!" (ll. 10–11). Around the turn of the enjambment slips the very sibilant necessary to convert this eccentric encoding of mouse noises (alliterative with wee ) into a closer approximation of the familiar "s -weke-weke. " Later, asking why a painter cannot "Make his flesh liker and his soul more like" (l. 207), Lippo's comparative adjective "liker" has already anticipated the likeness to which he turns in the next line: "Take the prettiest face, / The Prior's niece." Since the touchstone of his realism will indeed be the achievement of an image more and more "like (h)er," it is as if, though metrically suppressing it, he had that sensuous beauty on his mind all the while.

In a dialogue with his dead wife in "The Householder," Browning's speaker, recognizing the revenant, answers her rhetorical question — "What else did you expect?" (l. 8) — with "Never mind, hie away from this old house" (l. 9). The transegmental phonemic structure itself calls out for the only departure possible, another dying away. Elsewhere, Browning is a poet of such marked consonantal imbrications that he gives us at two different points in "Love Among the Ruins" a syllabic or phonemic irony timed to enjambment. There is the hint, momentarily confirmed, of the metaphoric vehicle "pyres" hidden in the tenor of "spires," an overtone prepared for by one elision and transegmentally released by another: "Where the domed and d aring palace shot its

s pires / Up like fires" (ll. 19–20). In addition, the poem's very first line passes over to its second as if the metaphoric verb were constituted somehow by the expanse of its application: "Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles / Miles and miles." To the ear, the figurative verb seems twice repeated by liaison — "smiles/(s)miles" — before it cedes to an overlapping reduplication of the adverbial noun. The given alphabetic format, overlain with its phonemic other, thus generates, as if from an unwritten matrix, the overdetermined image of sunset as a pervasively insistent "beaming" across the land.

Words Listing

If, as Auden thought, Tennyson had quite possibly the "greatest ear" of all the English poets, Hopkins may well have had the most brilliantly nervous. In order to prepare the groundwork in Chapter 2 for a consideration of Hopkins's tandem rhymes, I have already taken account of the phenomenon of vocalic "gradience" in his verse, attempting to extend this principle of incremental phonemics into a transegmental phonotexture. We shall pursue this extension even farther here, since the concept of verbal "inscape" can now be seen as a late nineteenth-century English equivalent to the early modernist ontology of language in French literature described by Foucault. Survey the inscape of one word and you will find another, and another, and, in conjunction with a second scripted word, yet another — one that scoops out and instantaneously refurbishes the hollow between, the downslope of one lexeme overead as merely the upswing of its successor. The obsessive, mock-etymological word lists of Hopkins's early diaries testify in this sense to a sounding of inscape. This, for example: "slip, slipper, slop, slabby (muddy), slide , perhaps slope , but if slope is thus connected what are we to say of slant ?"^[19] Displayed here is an instinct for minimal phonic discriminations in the lexicon that Hopkins shares with Coleridge, whose notations on language can coax out a punning homophonic series from a conjunction like thing/think, here from the Notebooks : "'Thing': id est, thinking or think'd. Think, Thank, Tank — Reservoir of what has been thinged — Denken, Danken — I forget the German for Tank/The, Them, This, These, Thence, Thick, Think, Thong, Thou."^[20] This goes farther, faster, than anything in Hopkins, but the parallel is manifest: in each case a linguistically oriented poet preoccupied more with the ontology than with the strict etymology of language, more with its materiality, its thingness in the work of thinking and writing. When this interest in subterranean bonds between words begins to contour the inscape of a given textual phrase, it is likely to result in the partial telescoping of the list across a lexical break, a listing of one word into its neighbor.

We have already noted in Chapter 2 the paronomasia of "diamond

delves!"/"the elves' eyes," where the transegmental ligature makes this seem like one of Hopkins's word chains rendered metrical. A simple conjunction may grammatically separate the echoing phrases a bit more, as in the next example from "Inversnaid," while at the same time transegmentally participating in their phonemic reprocessing. The iterative predicate here conspires in the evocation as well as designation of a whirlpool: "It rounds and rounds / Despair to drowning." The doubled verb thus anticipates a root finite form of the line's closing participle by way of the transegmental homophone "and =rounds " (including, in an ever-broader phonemic swath, the dental ligature of "It =rounds "). It is as if both were portmanteau clusters combining the cause and effect of rounding to the point of drowning. Further, the kind of transegmental rhyming discussed in Chapter 2, even while absorbing lexemes into fuller, nonsemantic echoes, may still imply a referential kinship between the separated phrasings. In "God's Grandeur," for instance, since all "the world is charged with the grandeur of God," the link between the rhyming words of the next two lines — "shook foil "/"ooze of oil " — works to suggest, in an effect enhanced by the transegmental spreading of the echo, the commonality of foil and oil in the inventory of divine attestations, of transcendental witness. Origin of the world, God is also the authoring cause of its divergent tongues and terms, the poet-priest his mystic etymologist.

Such transegmental accords, collected within a single line as oblique internal rhymes, may, again, resemble the word lists of Hopkins's diaries. The sonnet "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves" spells out seriatim the phrasing "earliest stars, earlstars," as well as the phonemic prolongation of "Our tale, O our oracle!" At another point in this same sonnet, there is an enjambed disclosure of a quasi-etymological bond between "off" and the transegmentally activated "doff": "ah let life wind / Off her once skeined stained veined variety." This same preternatural attunement to the inscape of the lexical declivity, earlier in this sonnet, has brought to the textual surface an echo of the swelling cause behind the overwhelming effect of "our night whelms, whel ms, and will end us." It might be noted here that the logically implausible drift "l=end" that follows in this line is phonemically just as likely, lexically more complete, and yet semantically canceled by context: another instance of the accidental and arbitrary contained in reading by the cumulative, by the developing sense rather than just sensory potential of an utterance. Context is necessary to activate the latent. The octave of "The Windhover" ends with an image of the speaker's sympathetic awe before the windhover's flight, recounting a heart that is first said echoically to have "Stirred for a bird." Such paronomasia, spread across separate lexemes, is next condensed in the appositional phrase for the bird on the wing, "the achieve of, the mastery of the thing." Phonemic reading tends to inflect the "heave off" in "achieve of," as if "heave" and

"achieve" (like "foil" and "oil") were filed away in some cryptic listing, their common denominators to be revealed only in the inscapes of poetic epiphany.

This is, of course, merely a special case of the general transegmental play in Hopkins's verse, which does not always recall the lexical autonomy of his speculative philological chains. In the sestet of "The Windhover," a related effect appears within a single syllable, a mere inflection of tense, without dislodging an independent lexeme. In noting devices in Hopkins that are "kinaesthetic in nature, determined by the sense of stress or muscle," Geoffrey Hartman includes among them the phrase in question: "Plough down sillion." The effect in this case is said to derive from the evocation of "neither the shining plow nor the new earth but the kinaesthetic effect of plow-breaking-through-earth."^[21] What this assessment leaves unsaid, however, in its link between vocal and agricultural musculature, is the additional transegmental pressure exerted on the line by the unscripted weight of the past participle "ploughed ," operating under erasure at the junctural break complicated by "plough(e d)down."

Alongside Hopkins's diary passages explicitly devoted to the topography and archaeology of the English lexicon are those that concern, in another sense, the "inscape" of the phenomenal universe, prose evocations that attempt to take the mold and contour of the world in words. Both need to be understood, separately and together, in light of the term "inscape" in its full range of designation. James Milroy, arguing that too few critics have realized the bearing of the term upon the language as well as the natural subjects of Hopkins's poetry, calls his chapter on Hopkins's diction "Wordscape."^[22] Hopkins himself attempted to make clear the verbal application of his famous term in the essay "Poetry and Verse," when insisting that "Poetry is in fact speech only employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape's sake — and therefore the inscape must be dwelt on."^[23] Stepping back to an example of poetry that is not verse, we may turn briefly for clarification to the prose poetry of natural observations in Hopkins's journals. The passage in question is the inscape of a seascape, of the sea escaping over shelves of rock in a channel. Two sentences from this 1872 paragraph divide up the two chief effects of Hopkins's phrasal inscape: the multiplication of phonic patterns across intermittent items of diction, on the one hand, and, on the other, the fusion of phonemes at contiguous borders. As we have seen, it is when the two appear together, in tandem, in tension — as they do not in this more straightforward prose excerpt — that his poetry achieves its most daring and characteristic effects. The first of these sentences from the journal passage goes like this: "The sea was breaking on all the stack and striking out all the ledges and edges at each breaker like snow does a building" (255). Water overflows and erases first the surface of the ledge, then the very edge that distinguishes it

from the others in the shingled terrace of flat rocks. The second sentence at issue in this description generates two adjacent transegmental liaisons that seem arranged to evoke a fluid overlap without forming a separate lexical item: "In the channel I saw (as everywhere in surfy water) how the laps of f oam m outhed upon one another" (255). Mouthed as vocables, with their own kinaesthetic inscape as well as their explicit referents, the word "of" encroaches upon "foam" as "foam" does upon "mouthed": an aural emblem of overlap.^[24]

To combine the separate effects of these two illustrative prose sentences, so that, for instance, a word ending in l might overlap with "ledges" and thus unpack the implied sequential world listing compressed to a single malleable lexeme: this would be to create the Hopkins verse text as we know it. It is a text incorporating as fully as any in English that aural tropology which Hopkins, well before Jackobson, called the "figure of sound." For Hopkins as well as Jakobson, the term refers to a mapping of phonic recurrence upon syntactic contiguity — and for Hopkins, every bit as much as for Jakobson, it provides the very definition of poetry, as "speech which afters and oftens its inscape" (289). The use of the preposition "after" as verb suggests the kinetic trace, the aftermath, of one word left reverberant in its successors. Narrow the gap of succession so that it becomes overlap, and you have a special transegmental case of that "oftening, over-and-overing, aftering of the inscape" on which poetic effects depend. Understand these adverbial predications in a spatial as much as temporal sense within the dynamics of reading, and "over-and-overing" becomes something very much like that overeading with which we are concerned. In his "Lecture Notes" on "Rhetoric," Hopkins follows comments on what "may be called the lettering of syllables" — by which he means all the recurrences we normally identify as alliterative, assonant, and so forth, whether at the beginning, middle, or end of words — with a category of verse effect little discussed in the criticism of his poetry, perhaps because so sketchily characterized in Hopkins's own passing mention of it: "Holding, to which belong break and circumflexion, slurs, glides, slides, etc."^[25] In this category we might include the transegmental drift: that holding (over) of phonemes, that gliding or skidding, that slippage and blurring of a suddenly delettered lexeme which refashions adjacent diction on the sly, the slide.

A lexical inscape rebuilt along the instep of a metrical foot, this holding over of phonic matter — produced as text through overeading — can be seen powerfully at play, at work, in Hopkins's greatest litany of ontological inscapes, "As Kingfishers Catch Fire." The poem's central premise is that "Each mortal thing does one thing and the same" (a transform by tmesis of the matrix "one and the same") or, in other words, "selves" (a verb form in context), "Crying What I do is me ." This is a poem that repeatedly asserts how being

(rather like the condition of textuality itself) is defined in its own actualization, produced in process. The sestet arrives to cap and theologize the point:

I say more: the just man justices;
     Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
     Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places

We find here a phonemic play (Empson's "engineering" sense: a slack) in the paronomastic echo of "plays" against "plac/es." Preceding that is the Miltonic synaloepha of "In God's eye he is," with the phonological glide of /ay/ all the more likely to precipitate a gliding or "holding" that will elide out the pronoun. Since this is a poem in which every nomination is only at base a predication, a name for that being which is ultimately declared only as enacted, it is entirely appropriate that this syncopation of a whole word makes no semantic difference in the line. The just man is hereby understood to act in the sight of God what in God's eye is , the only thing in God's eye when justice is under scrutiny — namely, the omniscient Christ immanent in "ten thousand" worthy places. Such is the inscape — or, as Hopkins elsewhere calls it, the "instress" — of identity as a presence to . Which brings us back to "the just man justices," where the cognate verb, though found in the dictionary, is nevertheless estranging enough to seem generated by another "holding," an "over-and-overing," of an antiphrasal variant, "the just man just is, is." This oddity is all the more destined for reception because the scripted "justices," unless otherwise heard, makes a weak rhyme with the verb of "in God's eye (he) is."

Returning now to the opening of the sonnet, we encounter through phonemic reading a curious bidirectional "holding" at the first enjambment, an "aftering" and retrospective elision. More explicitly sonic (at the level of the signified itself) than the effects of the sestet, this phonemic meld captures the inscape of the poem's essentialist predications:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
     As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
     Stones ring

The enjambed lines may recall the Tennysonian ear for verse sounds — in particular, that previously treated rhyme from the openings of In Memoriam on "divers tones "/"Stepping stones " (st. 1). The comparable diction in Hopkins's run-on line, when submitted to overeading, elides the second sibilant across the very mimetic drop from line to line which the hissing ligature serves at the same time to defer — thus bringing out, bringing forward, the tones of the falling stones. It is as if the natural inscape has been weirdly plumbed, metalinguistically sounded, disclosing that "one thing and the

same" which asserts itself as the auditory essence (or inevitable effect) of such natural gravitational motion.

Though nowhere to the degree we find it in Hopkins, post-Romantic American poetry of the period also experiments with that phonemic play which puts the vocable at lexical risk. Emily Dickinson's sustained system of marked hiatuses, of dashes, of rests and arrests, does perhaps tend to militate against certain elaborate ligatures in her verse. There is nevertheless a fricative "holding" to be heard, for example, in "After great pain a formal feeling comes" (J 341), an aural contouring of sequence itself. A velar prolongation appears first in the emergence of "c omes" from the participial g in the first line, then, more dramatically, in the gemination of the poem's last line, "First chill, then stupor, then the lettingg o." We might call this the inscape or instress of pain, the hold it has on both sentience and its expression. It is registered in a phonemic grip that must be loosened before bringing to utterance the final "o(h)" of relief and release.

Modernist "Symphonetics"

Before glancing briefly at a very few representative instances of the modernist wordplay that continues the line of phonemic density from Shakespeare through Milton to the Romantics and their direct Victorian heirs, I should say a word again on the methodology of these passive auditions. They are in the double sense phonological , recuperating the sensory for the sensible, the phonemic for the semantic. Why so? To trace out the transegmental effect in context and in force, this chapter, as those before it, has repeatedly moved from merely reading such latent aural features to tentatively interpreting their effect, binding them over to certain thematic imperatives, giving them only enough play to justify themselves as restructured diction. If this is false to their function — or dysfunction — in the field of verbal contingency, false to their sheer inevitability in syntactical buildup, it is no less true to their role in literary text production. As soon as we read , we tend to process; we incorporate into larger and larger aggregates; we install the phonotext within a widening hermeneutic. As with Hartman's "wounds" of wording, including the extreme lacerations audited by Lucette Finas, even the most severe morphological hemorrhaging is soon staunched by the suturing force of simply reading on. Hence the tendency for this chapter's readings, these registrations of phonemic layering, to be found in close conjunction with more familiar strategies of stylistics, with reader-response theory, with analyses of conceptual and phonic figures, of ambiguities in diction and syntax, of punning, double grammar, and the shifting emphases of enjambment, with examinations of self-revising syntax and self-referential metaphors, and so on. Already embedded within a context, and certainly within an overarching

grammar, the transegmental effect is likely to fall into line ; is likely, that is — in its very flux and flexion — to fit, to make one kind of sense as fast as it undoes another. It is in the nature of reading to naturalize input through interpretation. This is the way texts are always generated in process. Phonemic reading just takes us deeper into the works, beneath and between the apparent minims of semantic sequencing.

As reading rather than writing, words have no status until produced in reception: this is a fact upon which some texts openly capitalize, and none more implausibly than a 1914 poem by Thomas Hardy that takes its title from its interrogative first line, "Ah, are you digging on my grave?" The power of this phonemically tortuous gambit consists in an utterance from beyond life that can be enunciated by the reader only like some reverse death gasp. The text seems struggling up to articulation through one prolonged inaugural phoneme that finally closes off its transegmental dilation in a recognizable word. Lending voice to the gothically exaggerated nonpresence not simply of a poetic persona but of a dead one, our evocalization of the spectral question cannot help but bestow a more formal lexical shape — the groaning "Ah are" slurred to the monosyllabic "A(h)re" — upon a posthumous cry summoned up from the grave of language itself.

With a more mellifluous case in point, the verging of contingency upon design in the transegmental generation of texts is addressed directly by John Unterecker's comments on the opening line from the second stanza of Yeats's "The Sorrow of Love," from The Rose volume. "A girl arose that had red mournful lips" strikes Unterecker as part of the "great craftsmanship" of the poem, though he admits that some of its "effects" may be "accidental."^[26] The following comments are set off in a lengthy parenthetical aside: "That repeated 'arose' which pleased Louis MacNeice because of its abruptness delights me because it puns so accurately on the title of the section." It does so, for Unterecker, because of the lexical breakdown from verb into article and substantive. His "eyes, seeing double, enjoy the simultaneous vision of 'A girl arose' and 'A girl, a rose, that had red mournful lips . . .'; such second sight might even have entertained Yeats" (81–82). The last clause confirms Unterecker's understanding of this effect in particular as probably "accidental." Be this as it may, it is crucial to realize how no so-called double vision could operate here on its own. The lexical gap, an opening for ambiguity, would never have yawned as a possibility between the syllables a and rose if it were not for the double audition as well. Yeats may be overead elsewhere, as well, according to this same homophonic scansion, as when the heard music of nature at "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" is internally synchronized, in high Romantic fashion, with the orchestrated motions of the mind: "I hear it in the

deep heart's core ." Or when, in the thundering paratactic redundancy of "The Second Coming":

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed  upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,  and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned

With the emphatic repetition of the participle "loosed" attracting the preceding sibilant — to form on its trace the passive transform of the transitive verb sluice , for "to drench" or "to flood" — we audit a decentering of the enunciatory regime of script itself.

The foregrounding of aurality, in close conjunction with printed textuality, can be yet more explicit in Yeats. An early text, "When You Are Old," a lyric address structured around the intertwined acts of reading and enunciation, commands in the first quatrain a perusal of the very book that contains it. The former beloved is told to "take down this book" in old age "And slowly read, and dream of the soft look / Your eyes had once" (ll. 2–4). Hardened by time, these once pliant eyes are now confined (by the deadlocked rhyme of "book" with the activating "look" it requires) to the only effectual seeing left to them: a rueful backcast spurred by verse across the anagrammatic ligature of "read, and drea m." So, lexically and mentally, would the addressee now naturally drift off; but human voices wake her — her own in particular — for she is next urged (across the same conjunctive grammar) to evoke the vanished past in a whispered lament that can only coincide with the lines she is still reading. The poem that begins in the eyeing of a text, that is, now summons its own muted voicing:

And . . .
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
(ll. 9–11)

Here is where the act of reading and the theme of acknowledged loss are, one might say, somatically confronted — in as piercingly ironic an antiphone as verse can achieve. The saddening climax of a personified "Love fled," precisely when evocalized as a murmur by the aged voice of lyric reception, elegizes the woman's faded yearning to be drawn forth by Love to erotic heights ("the mountains overhead") — and so registers, in other words, the decline of a once "pilgrim soul" (l. 8) whom in the dimming years it could no longer be said that "Love led." In reviewing the first Oxford installment of the Yeats letters, Helen Vendler closes with the volume's "earliest anecdote,"

which "shows us Yeats at the age of four: introduced to Edwin Ellis, he asks whether Ellis is related to Cinder Ellis. Truly, poets are born and not made."^[27] Those poets, at least, of the lexical drift.

Ezra Pound is at times such a poet, though in a more disjunctive modernist vein. When he speaks famously of the poetic endeavor as "the dance of the intellect among words," he implicitly catches the right balance between the spatial and the audible in the processing of texts.^[28] Poetry is the choreography of conceptual signification performed upon the phonemically based gestures of wording. It is a dance among, and therefore between, lexemes. We can attend such a poetic "dance," a virtual pirouette at line's end, in the first of Pound's cantos, his recast image of the Ulyssean (partly Tennysonian) quester pressing ever beyond the "margin" of experience — as well as of textual limits:

Then we sat amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's end.
Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water
(1.8–11)

Three times in these lines Pound deconstructs an idiomatic phrase, once by the echo of "midshipmen" in the adverbial invention "amidships," twice by the opening up of a compound, "windjammer" and "overseas" transformed to "windjamming" and "over sea." In the context of these experiments in lexical resegmentation, there appears a remarkable flaunting of linear segmentation as well: that enjambment (despite punctuated end-stopping) across "till day's end. / Sun to his slumber." The absolute (or nominative absolute) grammar opened by the new line is never completed by a verb form (as in "Sun gone to his slumber"), which frees it all the more for a ligature with the line before. In this realignment we may now read Pound's complex slide of bidirectional liaisons as "we went over sea till day ('s)end(s) sun to his slumber," a momentarily continuous (because enjambed) syntax that defies the given punctuation as well as shifts into the present tense for a kind of generalized definition of sunset. Compared to this "dance of the intellect among words," this radical reprocessing of the graphic text according to phonic cues, the transegmental effect that later closes Canto 20 can seem only rather traditional. After the description of "gilded barocco" (a Joycean portmanteau) in a hall of "columns coiled and fluted," Pound's text pictures "Vanoka, leaning half naked, waste hall there behind her." Given that odd collocation of noun modifier and noun in "waste hall," what inevitably strikes the inner ear is "waste all there behind her."

Whether (in Vendler's terms) born or made, Wilfred Owen is certainly — and self-consciously — a poet of the transegmental tendency. As with Joyce's

texts in prose, Owen's poems marshal as often as possible the "symphonetic" effect. That last is a portmanteau coinage (from symphonic plus phonetic ) in an unfinished draft entitled "All Sounds have been as Music."^[29] In it, we find the elliptical clause "Bridges, s onorous under carriage wheels," as if the sibilant unfolds a near pun on "burden" for the musical and the "onerous" at once. It is a poem whose next stanza is also likely to hint of "lutes" in the "drawl of f lutes and shepherds' reeds." In alliterative parallelism with the phrase "G urgle of sl uicing," this same stanza is also likely to register the harsher "slap" in the "g luttonous l apping of the waves on weeds." The well-known experiments with "slant rhymes" in Owen's verse have their equivalence in oblique internal rhymes, these often aided by a transegmental regrouping, as in "To the world's towers or stars " ("The Roads Also"). At other times the internal slant rhyme can warp the verse with an anti-pun, inoperable in context, the ghost of a vanished or suppressed possibility. The poem "Training" begins "Not this week nor this month dare I lie down / In languor under lime trees or smooth smile." Reminiscent of Browning, this denied smile then haunts as anti-pun the next stanza's "My lips, parting, shall drink space, mile by mile."

T. S. Eliot is scarcely this sort of poet as a rule. The stark vernacular of his mature verse normally eschews the kind of thickening effects that are carefully cordoned off in the (almost parodistically full) transegmental chimes of the few rhyming stanzas from "Little Gidding." In that poem's "Ash on an old man's sleeve / Is all the ash that burnt roses leave " (ll. 56–57), the first line's sibilant is no sooner elided to anticipate the rhyme than the ending of "roses" drifts over a line later to fill out the echo. Or there is the fuller tandem rhyme of "incandescent terror " with "sin and error " (ll. 203, 205). In bringing The Waste Land to a close, "What the Thunder Said" is perhaps the best-known phonemic rumbling in modern English literature, first "DA" on one line, "Datta " on the next (ll. 401–2), then twice more, at narrowing intervals, "DA/Dayadhvam " (ll. 411–12) and "DA/Damyata " (ll. 418–19). Eliot's note, of course, identifies his source (in the Upanishads) for the repeated syllables issued by the Hindu divinity when speaking in tongues, as it were, through the accidental phonemic overtones of the thunder. Three pregnant DA s are followed by three responses generated from within the semiotic impulse of the listening interpreter. Like Saussurean anagrams, two of the responses, "Datta " and "Damyata " (to give alms; to practice self-control), may be said to be generated from the sacred syllable "DA" according to a bracketing "mannequin," while the common denominator of all three consists simply in the fact that the single, capitalized, presyllabic transcription "DA" yields up the first two letters of the next word, the primal noise incurring the human phoneme. But this is not all. In the original manuscript of The Waste Land , the first

reverberation as well as the response appear in the same typographical format, all caps: "DA/DATTA ."^[30] This makes all the clearer the way in which the tripled boom of the thunder sings out its riddling three syllables even in the sheer phonetics—quite apart from morphemics—of the very first enunciation and hymned return: DA, DA, TTA . The revision thus secures the sense of the thunder's threefold DA being pieced out across this whole climactic passage, its appearances never directly collapsing into the meaningless repetitions they would produce without the intervention of lexical processing. Never directly—and yet even across the highlighted shift in typographical format, one may also hear three times repeated, by transegmental enjambment, the name of that contemporaneous offshoot of modernism whose aesthetic role, just the year before, Eliot had minimized and dismissed, no doubt for its tendency to belittle all the revelatory fervor of art's hieratic aspiration.^[31] In Eliot's modernist script(ure), that is, the defiant voice of DA/da is evoked only to be drowned out by a more resonant phonemic fiat.

A poet as different from Eliot as is Robert Frost cannot help but be overead this way in his most lexically overrun moment, the pun on a fence in "Mending Wall": "Before I built a wall I'd ask . . . / . . . to whom I was like to give offense." So too, if less flamboyantly, in "The Aim Was Song," about the telos of natural music passing through meter into melody, even through phonation into lyric. In its play between theme and thematized medium, this could be Frost's version of Coleridge's Eolian emblem for breathed poetic meaning. "Before man came to blow it right," the poem opens, "The wind once blew itself untaught." That last participle then recurs as a lingering instructive aftertone across a segmental break in the second stanza: "it blew too hard—the aim was song. / And listen—how it ought to go!" As we know from one of Geoffrey Hartman's examples of "junctural zero values" in the Prologue ("le monocle de mon oncle"), we can find such "symphonetics" in Stevens as well as Frost, and in English as well. In "Anecdote of the Jar," a passing transegmental shift accompanies a clear case of Empsonian double grammar in the opening stanza. A jar is set down in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

From the clausal format of "And round it was," we are led to expect, at least until or despite the comma, some delayed subject. It turns out, rather, that "round" is adjectival rather than adverbial ("around"), the grammar entirely self-contained in its inversion ("round it was," it was round). Its roundness, like everything else about the jar, is focal, centering. Enhanced by sibilant enjambment, the second sentence of the stanza next inscribes an almost

perfect homophonic alternative for the unwritten "made the slovenly wilderness / around that hill"—with "made the landscape" understood in the vernacular sense of giving it form and focus.

Dylan Thomas is a poet whose ear runs to such crisscross lexical effects as those in "Poem in October," where the enjambed unpunctuated series "With apples / Pears and red currants" finds its first two items reversed two lines later for a homophonic anagram in "the parables / Of sun light." Words in his verse can also be fused in their given order, as when the famous lines "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age" manage with their last strained metonymic figure (transferred epithet plus noun) also to suggest the single vocable "greenage" (as implicitly contrasted at the level of an antonymical matrix to a formation like "dotage"). Besides such transformations of separate lexemes into the new syllabic units of a larger term, there are transegmental phantoms in Thomas that shear off a single phoneme at a subliminal level. "It's Not in Misery but in Oblivion," for example, covertly anticipates (and afterward explicitly reiterates) the noun "sin" by the fluid (lubricious?) phonic drift of "By us in sin or us in gaiety." The opening of "I Know This Vicious Minute's Hour" involves the phonemic imbrication of a transegmental bond in "minute's hour; / It is a sour motion in the blood." Internal rather than end rhyme, though inaugurated in terminal position, thus enforces an adjective that seems endemic to the moment. But as soon as such possibilities for liaison are allowed by the ear, the reverse momentum is also permissible. The second line thus seems able to insinuate the inevitable equivalence between "a sour motion" and one that, by definition, "is as our motion." In "Now the Thirst Parches Lip and Tongue," a stinging acid "pours away . . . / Into the places and the crevices / Most fit for lover to make harmony." In the accompanying clause, "the acid (d)rips," such virulence is further conveyed in a lexical crevassing whose effect—by gemination and elision—is to split open one verb to reveal a more rending one. In connection with such verbal rifts and clefts, there is a transegmental rhyme in the first quatrain of "Clown in the Moon" that one could read as an oblique thematizing of the lexicalized d/rift itself. "My tears are like the quiet d rift / Of petals," Thomas writes, and "my grief flows from the rift / Of unremembered skies and snows."

Graphonology

From Anglo-American modernism on, then, to what? Any closure brought to bear on this cursory survey of transegmental activity in the English poetic tradition since Shakespeare will be to some extent as arbitrary as its starting point. There is no reason, however, to let our modernist examples trail off without a glance forward to their theoretically oriented succession in

poststructuralist poetry. In her chapter on these recent experiments, "The Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties," Marjorie Perloff includes among her epigraphs, without comment, a typifying parapraxis of phonemic sensuality: "But this is a false tart, the trap door insecurely latched, a tear in the velvet curtain."^[32] This run of appositives, excerpted from Ron Silliman's radical linguistic primer, ABC , kicks off with the transegmental absurdity of "false tart" (Shakespeare's "Trojan strumpet" by any other name) as a monosyllabic false gambit, the second lexeme getting underway a sibilant too late. This self-instancing initial solecism is indeed the lexical promiscuity as trap, an unlatching, a tear in the eroticized veil of language. If we take this instance of the phonotext rectifying the graphic slip as in some sense a quintessential instance of graphonic relativity in such experimental verse, then in the very exposure of this materiality and biplay can be felt a vestigial link to Romanticism. For this is the legacy within which verbal art increasingly aspires to provide yet more self-conscious stagings of "literature" in the very condition of its possibility. In the high modernist period, despite an ontology of the word as sign, this still meant the enactment of literature as ideality rather than of language as sheer substance—of literature, in other words, as an "ideology" of language. In this as in many respects, modernism is a phase, not a phasing out, of Romanticism.

But Romanticism relies on a more foundational myth yet: its glorification of the personalized and prophetic voice of lyric utterance. This is the reason why this chapter, though providing a desultory survey of the whole tradition of English phonemic play, has repeatedly taken focus as a theorizing of Romanticism per se. In Romantic verse, the heady privileging of the signifier is not regularly indulged at the intended expense of the referent but, rather, in purposeful homage to—and in a willed mirage of—the very density and mutability of the natural world, the thick but permeable life of things. Yet sound play is not thereby restricted, as acoustic evocation, to one delimited zone of mimesis, licensed only as the phonemic mirror of natural harmonies. Instead, Romantic textual vocalization operates at the very core of the lyric motive itself: a text's impulse to represent the voice of its own representations. Such is the myth of presence—in warrant of reference—that of course co-opts the reader as well. And in particular, the reader's passive vocal organs. This is indeed the way in which aural presence is borrowed, rather than earned, by Romantic texts. One recalls here the embattled confrontation of phonography and premodern textuality speculated upon by Friedrich Kittler in Chapter 3. Yet the fullness simulated by Romantic texts, the repletion they would impart, can only be brought to, not sought in, the surface of their inscription. For it is Romanticism's dream as well as its perpetual default to engage the very pulse

of the reading body, whose palpable equivalent it would at the same time pretend to incarnate in the organic vitality of its own verses.

Let us return in closing, then, to a locus classicus of high visionary Romanticism—in order to read its reflexive fantasy of creative fabrication from within the materiality of its own production. Coleridge's exemplary fable of divination and manifestation in "Kubla Khan" becomes, instead, the admission, indeed the site itself, of an aurality ingeniously veiled and inverted. It is masked by an "ideology" of epiphanic vision within the complementary mode of lyric in its descent from the lyre. When Wordsworth, late in his career, casts into imperative grammar his invocation of the reading agency as sole oral source—"Give voice to what my hand shall trace" ("Inscribed Upon a Rock," 1. 5)—the notion of engraving in solitude for some future visitor ("Pause, Traveller!") localizes the moment so that it stops far short of a general theory of Romantic text production. The indirections of aurality in "Kubla Khan" are more typical. Kubla had a dome; Coleridge a dream; posterity a poem. There was once a perfect shape decreed, decreed by the fiat of a potentate. There was also a damsel with a dulcimer once, more recently, in the living memory of the persona, the memory of his own dream. If he were to remember again here and now the full splendor of her "symphony and song," her voice and its accompaniment, then

  To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there
("Kubla Khan," ll. 44–48)

The buried matrix of the speaker's—the lyricist's—empowerment lurks on the obverse side of a single preposition: "in air" as in "out of (thin) air." The rondure of a dome would thus emerge from melody, for which in one sense "air" is only another word. In this fashion a spatial presence would be generated out of the temporal continuum—and alliterative dilation—of a "music loud and long." A poem, in short—once more, a textual "symphonetics." But when texts are shaped out of air, out of breath, out of "inspiration" in its material agency, and then written down in ink, the tensed breath that remains to sustain them is nowhere to be summoned but from the phonic imagination of the reader—alone from our bodying forth of silence  as latent vocalization. When the text suggests that all who hear the music would see the created object, would find the dome in air , the Romantic "ideology" is working overtime, and specifically on its linguistic front. It is using one myth

of poetic articulation to cover another. An important brilliance of Coleridge's poem is how close this ruse brushes the truth, the terms simply manifested in reverse. The real dream of Romanticism is not first and foremost that, in "listening to" its transcribed oracles, we will see their visions but, more fundamentally, that, in seeing marks on the page, we will seem to hear the music of (their) words.

A music ambiguous and unstable. For at the turning point of the poem is yet another transegmental drift that captures—any way you take it—the dubiety of juncture and the paradoxes of visionary manifestation. "To such a deep delight 'twould win me." Out of the metrical telescoping of "it would" comes the decontracted multiplicity of the phrase. "To such a deep [that is, depth] my delight ('t) would win me," we may well read by way of evocalization, with the second t unprocessed and with "deep" therefore functioning as noun rather than adjective. In this role the word "deep" would indeed be somewhat less dead a metaphor, recalling the "chasm" and the "caves" earlier in the text: that mysteriously empowering and threatening underside of the pleasure dome. Concerning the damsel singing of Mount Abora, that ad hoc Muse chanting the highest reaches of human habitation, this production of "deep" as noun might even draw out the profundity, the unplumbable otherness, latent in her designation as an "Abyssinian maid." Into and out of the visionary "abyss" flows the power of art, coded here as the displaced vernacular matrix of inspirational "depth," the Orphic prototype of the poet's heroic trials. All this would be tacitly mobilized in that tiny secondary elision, within contraction, syncopating out that extra t from "'twould" and reconceiving "deep" as a noun. Short of this, however, even if we don't evocalize such a phonotextual double grammar turning on a single elided letter, we certainly do hear within the given inverted syntax the smooth overlap of cause and effect: the reverse linkage between "'t" ("it"), with "her symphony and song" its antecedent, and the creative "delight" it precipitates. It is this that enunciates the very dream it at the same time begins to fulfill—fulfill, though, only within the twofold illusion of Romanticism—the text as heard in the service of a vision seen.

In and along the untractable drift of the signifying flux, we thus confront in textual reception the relative f/utility of all reference; in Coleridge's words from "Dejection" (for natural rather than textual interanimation), we receive from language but what we give, giving only what we cannot get along without. The dismantling, in turn, of the vocal subject of such truant utterance is therefore something that the major Romantic texts already do for—and against—themselves. When Romanticism draws on the phonic register to confer aural presence, but does so with a luxuriance and manipulation that turns exuberance into excess, excess into surplus, surplus into undecidability,

the overflow of full utterance into dispersed textual biplay, it has thus begun to deconstruct in its own right the logic of all that it posits in the name of prophetic voice, let alone of adumbrated visions. It is such an uneasy and beleaguered logic that nevertheless remains the deepest mythology of expressive style itself. It is this that phonemic reading works to account for from the (morphophonemic) ground up, even while taking it to pieces.

This chapter's concern with the microparticulars of the poetic word has meant in part to register the potential shivering of the Romantic mystification from within its grandest linguistic designs, to record the infinitesimal cracks in its monuments, in its whole cultural edifice, well before major fault lines become evident—and to do so while noting that it is upon the reader's body that the least shocks are registered. The hard gemlike flame of the literary word, let alone of aesthetic response, is not formed to be so internally obdurate after all, its intrinsic friction felt in the reading. This is especially true at the level of junctural pressure upon lexical structure, upon literality itself. Exposed by a transegmental sequencing at odds with syntactic coherence, the decentered word is schismatic at its most prismatic. Such an induced d/rift entails a shaving off of phonemic matter that makes of what is left a refractive and oblique register, an angled surface in which other lexemes glint, other phonemic clusters, alight in the unheard melodies of a sound but half their own. In prose too, as we are next to see, such are the aural facetings that overeading retrieves from the steady suppression necessitated by grammar itself.

5—
^{[Evocalizing Prose:]}
Sterne to Dickens to Lawrence

A transegmental prose too? Can a sentence or paragraph from a novel, in any degree like a line or quatrain from a sonnet, be found to invite phonemic reading? Prose doesn't work this way, one is told. In the language of prose fiction, by contrast with poetry, less seems to go on than to go forward, less texture than direction—in Jakobson's phonological terms, less arranged equivalence than simple combination. Wouldn't, in fact, the overeading of literary prose, as against verse—given the former's very different tempo and specific gravity—amount to a willful over-reading after all? The answer, in the negative, rests with an understanding of the transegmental effect as a function, in considerable part, of chance, to which prose is as open as verse. Not ordinarily a phonological nuance consciously tuned to a hairbreadth band of registration, the transegmental phenomenon involves instead as much contingency as craft, as much equivocal slippage as exquisite precision. The graphonic in poetry—and, by extension, in prose—is rhetoric crossed with risk, a hazard of syllables and subsidiary phonemes. It is thus wordplay in a very particular sense, a gaming both with and against the odds. Prose, at least before Joyce, is often thought to be more "transparent" than poetry, assumed to give the close application of a deconstructive analysis, as before it of a New Critical reading, more trouble, less action: less scriptive thickness on the way to the described. But this assumption is no more shielded from local surprise than from theoretical disproof. Vagrant, refractory, the stray phoneme in prose can—to use a scriptive dead metaphor—still make its mark in the syntactic shuffle. Put thereby into silent play in prose fiction, though usually more at ease than in verse, are, once again, the reader's passive vocal muscles: the solicited body in the poise of its constantly shifting activity of withheld enunciation, labile and always just a little precarious.

"Undercraft" As Subtext

In that book of play, that game of a book, Tristram Shandy , Sterne writes that "'tis an undercraft of authors to keep up a good understanding amongst words, as politicians do amongst men—not knowing how near they may be under a necessity of placing them to each other" (7.19.502), itself a strained phrase with its own nine-word inverted displacement of "near" from its grammatical completion "to each other." In some very different cases, however, the tang of verbal propinquity can become explosive. An unguarded collocation may accidentally suffer a strange textual fate well beyond the ken of a given character, even one who may articulate part of its words. At the opening of Slawkenbergius's Tale, that story of the man burdened with an enormous length of (euphemistically designated) nose, the protagonist so endowed overhears the trumpeter's wife planning to touch the notorious organ when he sleeps. His fury is immediate:

No! said he, dropping his reins upon his mule's neck, and laying both his hands upon his breast, the one over the other in a saint-like position (his mule going on easily all the time)—No! said he, looking up,—I am not such a debtor to the world—slandered and disappointed as I have been—as to give it that conviction—no! said he, my nose shall never be touched while heaven gives me strength.
(4.247–48)

In the adamancy of his refusal, conveyed by an inverted grammar ("said he") bringing the s sounds into adjacency, the speaker has three times accidentally named the cause célèbre—that salient member whose mere designation will not be denied—across the recurrent transegmental slip of "No s aid." Even the word will out, let alone the body part. Given the regular demarcations of a fictional text, what is particularly unusual about this slippage is that it effects a transgression across the boundary of quoted dialogue and narrative discourse. It brings up into direct quotation, up from what we might loosely call the "unconscious" of the subtending text, an acoustic irony—an "undercraft"—that contaminates the uttered thoughts of a character. The protagonist speaks only his refusal; through us as silent readers, the text subverts that defiance by blurting out—right under his own nose—the noun in question, a return of the repressed under the ban of negation.

Sterne can be even more explicit about the intrigues of orthography. At one point he deliberately foregrounds the sound of the shapes of words, the phonetic articulation of written characters—before, or at the very moment of, their passing into phonemic relation with the lexeme they inaugurate. In

Tristram's alphabet of love, there is a partial list of love's attributes, each categorized by the first letter of its designation, "A gitating, B ewitching, C onfounded" (8.13.551), and so forth. It is the middle term there that is of particular interest in its teasing out the possibility of a phonetic rebus, activated only when B (pronounced "be") provides by elision a phonemic continuity with the word it opens. This is the bewitchment of the phonotext itself in a nervous commuting between letters as signs and letters as names. Exactly a century later, such play with letters—as not just the constituent thingness of words but as words in their own right—inflects a well-known passage in Dickens's Great Expectations , related in turn to Cockney humor and based on the phonetic rebus as a transitional stage on the way to literacy. The young Pip, just learning to write, scribbles a note to Joe on his chalk slate:

mI deEr JO i opE U r krWitE wEll i opE i shAl soN B haBelL 
4 2 teeDge U JO aN theN wE shOrl b sO glOdd aN wEn i M 
preNgtD 2 u JO woT larX an blEvE ME inF xn PiP.
(7.75)

Beyond the Cockney "hable" for "able," Pip traces, instead of words, both numerals ("four" and "two" as prepositions) and letters ("i M" for "I em," that is "I am"; only accidentally for the contraction "I'm"). When the novice writer gives in valediction "inF XN Pip," the letters stand for "in-eff-ection" but also, if the phonemic readout starts a split second too late, for "in f-ection," that sickness so often lurking on the underside of love in this novel.

This play with the sound of letters, related to the detachments of syllables as separate words, can make its (phonic) mark in less expected fictional contexts. Charlotte Brontë's way with words, her "undercraft," is given over to one of Jane Eyre's own central protestations in the novel. Rochester, insistently anticipating their marriage, has addressed her prematurely as the second Mrs. Rochester. In response, Jane immediately blushes, discomfited because "you gave me a new name—Jane Rochester; and it seems so strange" (24.227). The conversation that ensues, in which she refuses his offer of jewels and finery, may be read as an attempt to recover the lost integrity and singleness of an original name. It may indeed be heard to climax precisely with a disintegrating play upon both her unmarried names. Bedecked as he wishes, Jane would be unrecognizable: "And then you won't know me, sir; and I shall not be your Jane Eyre any longer, but an ape in a harlequin's jacket" (228). To which she adds in an afterthought (and after a dash), as if reflecting further on the suddenly no more than nominal self she is in danger of abdicating: "—a jay in borrowed plumes." To pronounce (upon) the name he would have her surrender is to enter upon a homophonic irony in which "Ja/ne" must resist being spoken-for (disyllabically) as a "jay/in" plumage.

Her answer—in a word—in a name—is Never. To hold to her full name as Jane Eyre, the Jane she has always been "'ere" now—the name of a woman whose continuity of spirit cannot be squandered—would after all, in an extension of the subtextual rebus inflecting this passage about the giving and taking of names, amount to being a "Jay Ne'er." As an ironic internal echo, "Jane" is therefore thrust into spiritual dissonance with "jay in"; as a phonemic allegory, we might say, the echo constitutes a syllabic degeneration of the name, recuperated only by the transegmental nudge—outside of an immediate and functioning syntax—of "Jane Eyre" toward "Jay Ne'er." If one needs a context for such rebuslike biplay beyond the multiple (and activated) puns on Jane's last name ("'ere," "air," "ire," "eyrie," "heir," including her dream of "a fairer era of life" [11.86]), one need only remember Rochester's own overt internal echo in advising her to "Dread . . . remorse" whenever inclined "to err, Miss Eyre" (14.120): in other words, to fear those recriminations that engulf the self is "miser/y."

In Villette , Brontë's verve for euphony and internal echo is developed considerably beyond even the lush, studied texturings of Jane Eyre . An unmistakable transegmental effect can be heard, for instance, in the passing description of a cultivated park landscape, "a well-planted round" no more symmetrically trimmed than Brontë's own prose in rendering "the green swell of ground surrounding this well " (33.471). Sometimes, too, the phonemic swell and overflow can be simply comic, as in the polyglot humor by which the French-speaking professor of literature pronounces "Williams Shack-spire" (28.416, 417), a phonetic "fusion" through "doubling"—here the doubling back of the surname's first sibilant to a meaningless pluralization of the first name. In the famous phantasmagoric chapter "Cloud," in which Lucy wanders alone at night in an opium-induced fog through the hallucinatory doings of a city festival, the prose is even more heightened, more convoluted: "The effect was as a sea breaking into song with all its waves ," the next sentence then picking out, picking up on, the initially unbonded sibilant and w for the cross-lexical paronomasia of "The sway ing tide swept this way ." Prose of this order seems to feed on the dream logic that permeates this first-person rendering of a half-conscious, drugged cognition.

The most ingenious—or fortuitous—effect of all, perhaps, appears in the next chapter's prolongation of this opium haze, when Lucy looks on unseen at an exercise in social power on the part of her eventual fiancé, who she at this point thinks is amorously inclined toward his ward, Justine Marie. Lucy's eavesdropping finds him brushing off the petulant jealousies of a suitor with a most concise gesture of body language; in Lucy's account, however, each tiny rivalrous parry in this miniature comedy of manners takes on the proportions of an epic joust. At his most decisive moment of high-handed self-confidence,

Lucy's hero, albeit on behalf of another heroine, appears invincible, as "with the ruthless triumph of the assured conqueror, he drew his ward nearer to him" (39.565). Given the martial imagery of this phrasing, the very proximity of the desired object emerges as itself a weapon—indeed, as transegmentally suggested, a weapon as good as any sword (s = ward ). Whether accidental or "stylistic," such displacements and condensations in the articulated responses of Lucy's waking dream serve to enunciate the released fantasies of the heroine in this episode of half-delusional projection. Prose itself, submitted to phonemic reading, thus psychoanalyzes the language of the unconscious—Lucy's or, if you will, Brontë's—beneath the neo-Petrarchan rhetoric of combative eroticism.

Sounds Switched

Before either Brontë or Dickens, Thackeray had more systematically entered the field of phonemic breakdown, through Cockney travesty, with The Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush , a "Sometime Footman in Many Genteel Families," who affects hard words in a relentless barrage of phonetic misspellings. The first installment, "Fashnable Fax and Polite Annygoats," was published in Fraser's Magazine in November of 1837. With much of the humor revolving around just such garblings of received English as represented by the title, the persona's frequent orthographical malapropisms—"metafizzix," for example, in the first sentence—sometimes include an unwitting punlike overtone at the syllabic level, in this case on the short-lived heady effervescence (or "fizz") of such speculation.^[1] Though well past the advent of classical discourse theory in Foucault's sense, where the full arbitrariness of signifying practice was institutionalized, still colloquial comedy like Thackeray's recalls an earlier objectification of the word as malleable object, inviting subdivision into other units and combines of meaning. Malapropism of this sort indeed frequently parodies the notion behind the preclassical interdict described by a scholar of homonymics in the French language as a "prudish mania . . . in the seventeenth century, which threatened to impoverish the language by avoiding at all costs any word with an evil-sounding syllable. We can be sure that the gaulois punster had his share in that."^[2] In Thackeray's Yellowplush Papers , the loss of one subsidiary syllabic cluster ("stances") in "circumstances," for instance, is compensated for by the vaguely risqué transcription "suckmstansies" (292), accompanied by "sins" for "since" in the same sentence. So, too, with the hint of a Cockney happiness in "appetites" contorted to "appytights" (303). This last example is drawn from "Mr. Yellowplush's Ajew," an installment which concludes with an apology for the writer's "violetting the rules of authography" (300). The title's own cross-lexical biplay at "—'s Ajew" certainly harbors a provocative second syllable in its

phonetic transcription of the French noun of valediction. This is a syllable released by the tempting displacement from possessive to contractive grammar across the functional shift of the apostrophe. Such a promotion of syllable to seme, with the wrench it causes to internal segmentation and its consequent demotion of the lexeme, all but inevitably entails the adjacent risk of syntactic homophony, in other words, of junctural—or dyslocutionary—punning. It may well be this same ear for ironies of enunciation that later leads Thackeray, in Vanity Fair , to house the spendthrift, debt-ridden Sir Pitt (serpent, surfeit) Crawley at "201" on Curzon Street, Mayfair—the satiric "to owe one" getting him exactly where, as we now say, he "lives."

Three years after Thackeray's Yellowplush , the Victorian comic magazine Punch began its long publishing history, including on the second page of its first number some "lessons in Punmanship" by "Mr. T. Hood, Professor of Punmanship." The question "Why is a fresh-picked carnation like a certain cold with which children are affected?" invites the daft transegmental answer: "Because it's a new pink off (an hooping-cough)." As it happens, this junctural conundrum is a particularly clear illustration of Punch 's tendency toward a lower-class London norm of pronunciation. After considering such traits as elisions, glides, and the general slurring of syllables, one linguistic study of substandard Cockney dialect instances under the heading "Grammar" the very lexical mutation by which the n of "an" gets attached to the succeeding syllables, as in "at a nend"/"a nold man."^[3] This, in turn, serves to instance in a synchronic dimension such diachronic transformations as "a nadder" into "an adder" mentioned in Chapter 3. In literary send-ups, as in Thackeray's lexical farces, these consonantal displacements tend to operate in the same spirit as the extrusion of perverse semantic fragments from within polysyllabic words. A case in point from a narrative epistle by a Cockney maid in that first number of Punch, "super-silly-ous" (17), demonstrates its signified, in effect, mocked by the travesty of its own signifier. For an even more brutal murdering of the language, there is this later conundrum from the same first issue: "Why is a defunct mother like a dog?—Because she's a ma-stiff" (21).

The unspoken logic by which in Jane Eyre the heroine's name, already textualized by title, is then in a particular context decontracted into "jay in" (or even the unwritten "Jane Ne'er") can now be seen as the inconspicuous literary equivalent of a riddling alphabetic joke like "Q. When is a word like a bird's nest? A. When it has a J. in it." Or some such journalistic conundrum as "Q. Why won't Jane ever say yes? A. Because she thinks she's Jane Ne'er." A comparable micropoetic drift of wide ramifications for a novel's plot occurs in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights , to which Charlotte's preface offers a rhetorical clue. Charlotte writes that her sister's story is a tale of "perverted passion and passionate perversity." This very pattern of symmetrical inver-

sion, of rhetorical chiasmus, may well have captured, in a single hinge of phrasing, some deep structural logic of the novel's plot. From a different perspective, Frank Kermode has suggested that the inscribed names discovered by the narrator Lockwood at the institution of the retrospective plot—Earnshaw, Heathcliff, Linton—become, in fact, a narrative rather than alphabetic "rebus."^[4] They write in reversible sequence the passage of the first Catherine Earnshaw through her love for Heathcliff to her Linton marriage, while at the same time, read from right to left, they inscribe the return progress of her daughter, the second Catherine (Linton ), back through a marriage with Linton Heathcliff to a restorative union with Hareton Earnshaw . This inverted parallelism is, Kermode might have noted, a form of structural chiasm, a crossing over and return, a switch. If the encompassing plot dynamic of Wuthering Heights follows the pattern of reversal and return, the crisscross of the chiasm, then a reader might expect to find this pattern evidenced even in the microstructures of the text, its subsyntactic negotiations.

This expectation is borne out, for instance, in a piece of Yorkshire invective from the dialogue of the servant Joseph. When Linton Heathcliff, Edgar's son, is first presented at the Heights, Joseph is so contemptuous of the frail thing that he suspects the creature is in fact a girl child who has been substituted: "'Sure-ly,' said Joseph after a grave inspection, 'he's swopped wi' ye, maister, an' yon's his lass!'" (20.169). Even nurse Nelly Dean calls the child a "changeling" (27.217), recalling Heathcliff himself in his original role as a kind of changeling figure, a gypsylike creature introduced into the Earnshaw family to bear "the name of a son who had died in childhood" (4.39). Given Heathcliff's role as a wild and unlegitimated surrogate for the dead heir, the idea of the "swopped" identity has immediate resonance. Though Hareton is the new heir apparent, the "'heritin'" one, as it were (like Jane Eyre, in fact, finally come into her name as Heir to a family fortune), it is precisely from the furious disrule of the Earnshaw blood that Hareton is being weaned by Cathy's softening—but to Joseph, demonic—influence. This is the influence that Joseph in his diatribe rejects with an unwitting transegmental pun, twice activated. "Poor lad . . . he's witched " (32.243), moans Joseph, and later, "It's yon flaysome, graceless quean, ut's witched ahr lad" (33.251). Across the lexical chasm passes the stray sibilant that turns the accusation of witchcraft back again to the theme of the changeling "swop" as structural chiasm—a double crossing of blood ties, a switching of emotional as well as genetic allegiance. Erotic magnetism mediating between demonism and familial alliance offers up the theme of the novel in the hissed drift of a single phoneme: the microgrammar of narrative.

Taken Letterally

As any cursory overview of Victorian fiction would suggest, it is Dickens, follower of Sterne and precursor of Joyce, who is the great microgrammarian of the premodern novel. His effects can be passing snags in the syntax of narration or, at times, ironic miniaturizations of an entire fictional or thematic structure. In his first novel, the Pickwick Club, philologically if not phonologically inclined, debates the supposedly mysterious runic inscription, "+ / BILST / UM / PSHI / S.M. / ARK" (11.217), adjudged finally to be "neither more no less than the simple construction of—'BILL STUMPS, HIS MARK'" (11.228), accompanying the illiterate graffitist's "+" for X. Beyond the curious reflexive nature of this inscription about inscription, part of the puzzle for the Pickwickians in decoding this cryptogram has implicitly to do with grammatical ambiguity. Yet honoring the comma and thus reading the four monosyllables not as a transitive clause but as a possessive phrase, we encounter a transegmental slide that opens back onto the entire history of sibilance within the genitive construction. This comic example has such a classic status, indeed, that it provides, unidentified, the heading for the appendix in Otto Jespersen's Progress in Language on the "his-genitive, " as in Chaucer's "Here endith the man of law his tale," a phenomenon that often becomes "practically indistinguishable" from the old flexional "s-genitive ."^[5] Though Jespersen notes that the "similarity is of a purely phonetic nature" (324), he does not go on to distinguish the effect of such a weak-stressed "his" pronunciation (in its closeness to "'s") in regard to the various nouns it might follow. In the case of his own unexplored Dickensian example, "BILL STUMPS, HIS MARK" abuts the s of the surname with the elided enunciation of "HIS." This also seems the case, for instance, with a transitional example Jespersen does not give—transitional between Chaucerian and Cockney English—namely, Dryden's "the latter part of Lisideius his discourse" in the Essay of Dramatic Poetry , a phrase that appears to invite, as silently pronounced, a more complete conflation between types of genitive, both pronominal and inflectional.

In view of evidence yet to come, it may not seem too much to claim that Dickens thus enters the history of the novel as the tacit and intuitive historian of language, dialect, and their convergence in the private idiolect of any reading, silent or out loud, private or communal. In a transegmental appellation that just precedes "Jay Ne'er" in literary history, from the genealogical chronicle that opens Martin Chuzzlewit , Dickensian comedy reads like the punch line of a conundrum out of Punch . Asked to pronounce with his last gasp the name of his grandfather, Toby Chuzzlewit answers—in words that

"were taken down at the time and signed by six witnesses"—with the following confession: "The Lord No Zoo." The joke turns expressly upon the difference between script and enunciation, upon the ambiguities that ensue from a tension between graphic and phonic signifiers, between textuality itself and voice. We are told that searches through the titles of England subsequently produce "none at all resembling this, in sound even." This is because the sound is taken to be the garbled homophone of a proper name rather than a common idiomatic clause—to be, in other words, syntactically homologous with the expected class of answer. The zealousness of the six mortal scribes only exaggerates this farce of transcription, one which plays, as we know, on what linguistics would now term the disambiguation of segmental boundaries through stress, pitch, and juncture. Once the verb knows gives up a sibilant to the pronoun who, the nonsensical proper name "No Zoo" is precipitated from this auditory collapse. Genealogy is deconstructed by parodistic phonology; as with any fictive character in Dickens, only more openly here, origin and lineage are entirely linguistic. Since lexical conflations and displacements of this sort involve an unsettled progress across the grammatical sequence, they come to represent the lower limit of syntactic manipulation. Not wordplay exactly, nor even syllable play, they engage language at a shifting point where morphophonemic and grammatical structures intersect: the vexed juncture between words, syntax in debate with itself. What happens everywhere by accident may thus at times be admitted—made unmissable—as a scripted pun.

Or not. Dickens's phonic gestures in this vein are by no means restricted to the overt comic mode of lexical farce. In his picturesque, Romantically tinged descriptive passages, we may also find such an easing of lexical boundaries, usually in conjunction with a fuller battery of phonological effects than deployed in his comic writing. As often before in these pages, Dickens's textual mechanics seem to invite an analytic coalition of Jakobson and Riffaterre. In The Old Curiosity Shop , an exemplary syntactic mobilization, heavily embedded and dramatically built, sets the stage for a transegmental drift. The narrator is remembering in his troubled half-sleep the earlier sight of Nell amid the clutter, curios, and decay of her grandfather's shop:

I had ever before me the old dark murky rooms—the gaunt suits of mail with their ghostly silent air—the faces all awry, grinning from wood and stone—the dust and rust, and worm that lives in wood —and alone in the midst of all this lumber and decay, and ugly age, the beautiful child in her gentle slumber, smiling through her light and sunny dreams.
(1.56)

Typical of Dickens, there is the impacted adjectival clotting of "old dark murky rooms." In Jakobsonian terms, its combinatory axis finds projected upon it not only the alliterating k 's but the abutting, potentially elided d 's, along with the lengthening chiastic reversal of "mur" into "room." Sub-alliterating with the k 's, the guttural g 's of "gaunt," "ghostly," and "grinning" prolong the alliteration and so bind the passage across its syntactic expansion, as does the more dramatic chiming (or Sterne-like "undercraft" again) of "dust" and "rust" or "worm" and "wood."

This last pairing, however, introduces a curious semiotic possibility of the sort that Riffaterre's terminology is uniquely adept at drawing out. The "agrammaticality" here is the unsettling echo not between "worm" and "wood" but of another collocation altogether, a variant intertext from the proverbial. In the iambic tread of this phrasing, Dickens has separated, and by alliteration set off, a verbal "paragram"—I will here be rehearsing again the whole range of Riffaterre's terminology—a paragram generated from an unsaid "matrix." This is a "variant" that "actualizes" only by "displacing" its idiomatic alternative through "conversion" and "expansion." The poetic variant performs, in other words, by evoking even while avoiding a buried "seed phrase" whose detection by the reader is the very "production" of this text, the materialized "semiosis" of its "poetry." With the openly courted Freudian implications of his method, then, Riffaterre's terms would help to explain how the redistributed cliché "wormwood," covertly naming here the bitterness of discrepancy between youthful bloom and environing waste (the compound word actually turning up in the text, in the idiomatic doublet "gall and wormwood," eight chapters further on [9.116]), is dispersed across the early syntagmatic sequence, made clausal rather than phrasal. It is a semiotic return of the repressed, a return masked but still activated. Amid such acoustic company we arrive at that last complex, suspensive phrase, "and alone in the midst of all this lumber and decay, and ugly age, the beautiful child in her gentle slumber , smiling through her light and sunny dreams." It is one thing to add the wholesale recurrence of the phonemic nexus lumber to the list of paronomastic bonds in the passage. It is quite another to notice the dreamlike displacement and condensation which transmute the sibilant at the juncture of "this lumber "—thus discovering, at the heart of its portrayed decay, that sleep of the just which will be spelled out a phrase later in the gentle slide of the narrator's own half-waking remembrance.

By the time such reverie succeeds to the child's living nightmare, the ferocious, stunted Daniel Quilp has been introduced as her alter ego, a figure mysteriously associated with his "wharf-side" activities, marginal, precarious, until he goes to his death by falling from that wharf. The reader is repeatedly teased by the echoic interplay of the "dwarf" (as he is incessantly

called) and his "wharf" ("'The fence between this wharf and the next is easily climbed,' said the dwarf" [67.618])—two mutually implicated lexemes whose teleologies seem destined to converge in such an inevitable (though never actually scripted) nexus as the "fated wharf." Instead, we get only the flashing memory of his last scene in the closing chapter's mention of his widow leading "a merry life upon the dead d w(h)arf's money" ("Chapter the Last," 666). Just as Quilp drowns, however, Nell's virtually simultaneous death—in another part of the country and of the story—does involve a more directly insinuated cross-lexical ambiguity, one that epitomizes the double valence of her fate: not only a willing assumption of and to glory but also a willed escape. In the context of a thickening iambic alliteration—"f or ev ery f ragile f orm f rom which [Death] lets the panting spirit f ree, a hundred v irtues rise"—this paragraph of meditative omniscient generalization closes with an orthodox truism whose transegmental pressures bear more directly upon the specific case of Nell: "In the Destroyer's steps there spring up bright creations that defy his power, and his dark path becomes a way of light to Heaven" (72.659). Paradoxically lighting the way to heaven, the track of death is transformed to a route of divine access: that is the figurative sense of the conceit. More "grammatically" than rhetorically taken, however, and with more reference to the special case of Nell's release, the "dark path" becomes a "way," in the sense of means, "of light "—to but also from.

How often, and to what effect, does the Dickensian text break in this way from its graphic layout to audit its own interstices? There is a quasi-anagrammatic instance—surreptitious to the point almost of a cryptogram—in Hard Times , where the circumlocution of indirect discourse masks, even while implicating, the circus destination of the rendezvous with Tom. In passive, euphemistic phrasing ("caution being necessary") we read how "it was consented that Sissy and Louisa should repair to the place in question, by a circuitous course; and that the unhappy father, setting forth in an opposite direction, should get round to the same bourne by another and wider route" (3.7.211). Diversionary tactics characterize even the prose itself that hides the unsaid "circus"—in what phonology calls a "circumsyllabic bracket"—at the far edges of "cir cuitous ." Such eccentric orthographic puzzles aside, I am more interested now in effects which are heard—in one sense or another—across the normal contiguities of the syntagmatic axis. In the more calculatedly evocative prose of this same novel, we may encounter such a rugged terrain of consonants as in a phrase like "the brink of a black ragged chasm hidden by thick grass" (3.6.202), where the underground deeps disgorge their own inverted steepness across the phonemic grade "black (c)rag ged." In a more markedly dramatic moment, at the climactic confrontation between the heroine, Louisa, and her intolerant father, Mr. Gradgrind "saw a wild dilating

fire in the eyes steadfastly regarding him" (2.12.166). What the reader hears rather than sees, well before we find the noun "eyes" written out, is the clichéd phonemic matrix "wild-eye(d)" glinting into audition on the way to its own phrasal dilation or circumlocution.

In the lampooned mumbling of lawyer Tangle in Bleak House , a deferential, drawling, grammatically effaced elision creates, among other effects, his notorious portmanteau conflation of "My Lord" (otherwise "Lud") into "Mlud" (1.4). This vocative not only names the human equivalent of the elemental muck outside but offers a phonetic anagram for the psychological as well as the legal "mud(d)l(e)" into which Chancery precipitates its victims. From the language of debased literacy and power to the underworld of untaught mumbling is, as the novel's ear for dialogue inscribes, not so great a distance. The illiterate crossing sweeper, Jo, in summing up his "mental condition" by saying repeatedly that he "don't know nothink" (16.274), speaks in a double negative that produces by its final thickened phoneme a segmental collapse of the two words "no think" into the tautological "nothing" that occupies his mind. The logic of such conflations as "Mlud," of course, requires what we might call silently hearing them aloud. Since in prose fiction they are usually found in dialogue, they may thus appear to introduce no active textual tension between phonic and graphic expression. On the page preceding the muddied diction of the courtroom drawl in Bleak House , however, the narrative prose itself makes such a (lateral) move. Occulted there within the normal order of third-person syntactic accumulation from word to word falls a conflationary disruption that might well be felt to utter more than is written.

Amid the sedimenting sentence fragments from the opening panorama of November mud and fog, we read of "Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle." Preceding the images of fog as drooping, creeping, and "cruelly pinching," this nonmetaphoric phrasing may offer one of the earliest hints of such full-scale personification allegory, set up even earlier by the first description of the weather as "implacable" (1.1) — an elemental force incapable, like an angry deity (or juridical behemoth) of being appeased, even by human sacrifice. Pronounced by way of assonance with two long o 's, the participle of "smoke lowering" could only render the adjacent "down" redundant, except as a stylistic device of pleonastic overkill. More likely is the alternate pronunciation equally common in Dickens's day, even in this spelling: indicating the intransitive participial form "louring." Probabilities aside, this is a radical ambiguity at the scriptive — and, so far, entirely lexical — level. Once the second and more cogent alternative ("smoke louring" rather than "smoke lowering") is admitted, however, both in the common figurative sense of "louring weather" and in its own faint personification of the smoke as "frowning," a second, more dismantling ambiguity is introduced. It

performs not only a semantic substitution but a momentary destabilization. For in the immediate vicinity of "lower" (pronounced "lour"), the closing velar phoneme /k/ of the noun in "smoke lowering" readily clings to the next word. It thus forms the synonymous slip "glowering," rephrasing the alternative verb "lower" in a more unequivocal personification yet. The two alternative phrases inhabit virtually the same lexical space, foggily deliquescing into each other. Yet the second alternative, "glower" rather than "lower," violates juncture and instantaneously reweaves the elapsed phonemic sequence upon which the syntactic chain is mounted. It is thus less scriptive, more phonemically cryptic. As such, moreover, it simultaneously confirms and extends that demolition of reference in a certain line of deconstructive reading, engaging as it does the specifically phonemic rather than generally grammic trace. The obscuring fog of this London weather emerges of course primarily as symbol, or extended metaphor, for the misty obscurantism of the court, especially its stale oratorical smoke screens. In just this sense it is appropriate (again I am returning to de Man's terms and, again, with a linguistic rather than merely textual stress) that the faint prosopopoeia which sketches the billowing pall as a personified genius loci, frowning down from the chimney tops, should be the function of a strictly verbal density turning to ambiguity — if not to downright referential murkiness. Even before the tenor of legal discourse is attached to this prolonged vehicle of atmospheric pollution, there is no glowering here, no louring, or even lowering, no "expression" at all except in the linguistic sense of mere slippery words: a sustained giving-face to blankness, satiric in this case, demystifying, corrective, but no more able to secure its referents than is the vacuous rhetoric of the court.

On the comic front again, allegorical tag names in Great Expectations are repeatedly the source of a morphophonemic contortion — as with "Jane Eyre" or "Hareton" in the Brontës — that plays between eye and ear in the manner of the Cockney punning in Punch .^[6] When Pip is harangued at Christmas dinner by his so-called uncle, one Pumblechook, the next sentence describes the reaction of another guest with the words: "Mrs. Hubble shook her head" (4.57). Dickens is a master of the homophonic near-miss. Later, instead of this scene's inferred phonetic kinship between "chook" and "shook," what surfaces in Pip's revenge fantasy is the physical violence lying latent in the first two syllables of the enemy's name: "I used to want — quite painfully — to burst into spiteful tears, fly at Mr. Pumblechook and pummel him all over" (12.125). Words are again pummeled — or, in Foucault's favored term, "pulverized" — into the disclosure of their hidden subsidiaries. The loutish (and similarly named) Bentley Drummle in London is a later avatar of this pummeling violence, in its physical rather than verbal form, while his friend Startop seems named (by the narrator, of course) in a virtual phonetic

anagram of "Upstart." This is a novel in which eccentric naming also provides onomastic clues to secret lines of influence or filiation. The convict Magwitch is aurally linked to his own long-lost daughter, Estella, by a flustered solecism on Joe's part, in a scene where he affects "an air of legal formality" in reporting Miss Havisham's wishes secondhand to Pip. Which-ing and that -ing in every direction, Joe transliterates the gist of Miss Havisham's message as follows: "'Would you tell him, then,' said she, 'that which Estella has come home and would be glad to see him'" (27.246). In this overreaching slip of the tongue, as in a Freudian parapraxis, the nonce value of the relative pronoun "which" (extraneous as syntactical marker) turns out momentarily to revise, in a kind of double grammar, the preceding relative pronoun "that" into a demonstrative adjective. Heard as such, it takes as its subject a homophonic pun on "witch," thus characterizing the preternatural temptress of Pip's destiny and hinting at her genealogical descent from "Magwitch ." It is she whom Pip has already named to Joe, by a nervous act of syllabic conflation upon which the latter is quick to pounce, as "Miss Est-Havisham" (15.139). In both cases, through a semiotic irony beneath the momentary syntagmatic collapse, illiteracy turns agrammaticality into satire. At the same time, the elision of an h even within the telescoped coinage "Estavisham," in recalling Joe's pronunciation of her name as "Avisham," further invokes the general Cockney latitude with aspirates.

A more distant echo of this slang, if not the farce often associated with it, may even be heard in a very different passage of evocative solemnity in Little Dorrit . In the famous description of a radiant and rayed sunset spreading over London like a "crown of thorns" transmuted to an aureole, or "glory," Mrs. Clennam is pictured leading Amy Dorrit through streets suddenly calmed from the day's traffic, streets where "the worry of the day had almost worried itself out, and few but themselves were hurried" (2.31.862). As everywhere in Dickensian description, and in this case through a homophonic ambivalence, the outer is the sign of the inner, here evening quiescence of mental relaxation, hurry of spiritual vexation. To evoke this, the tempo of reading seems itself thematized. As the collocation "were hurried" collapses toward — if not quite into — the rushed or slurred disyllable "w(h)urried," the anxious pace of the protagonists seems obliquely reinscribed into the phonemically activated subtext of internal rhyme ("worry"/"hurry"). Where another writer might have written simply "few but themselves hurried," Dickens has by transegmental maneuvering (or good fortune) verged upon the lax enunciation of a Cockney dropped h at the syncopated matrix of an anything but humorous moment in a heightened melodramatic panorama. This is not comedy, and in no way would it directly measure an incursion of Cockney slang — or the satire thereof — into Dickensian rhetorical practice in his own narrative voice. Yet

both Dickens's parodic slurrings and his melodramatic elisions together share a common intertextual backdrop. This is that popular journalistic mode of sound play that may well have heightened the awareness of his Victorian audience to phonological aberrations — or the chance of such — falling well this side of overt puns.

Alphabedding

We have, so far, ranged between that potential breakdown in lexical segmentation under syntactic pressure which is always latent in the narrative "voice" (whether Pip's or his author's) and those less textually unsettling effects which, though based on the same tension between lexicon and sequential enunciation, are still readily naturalized as the mere transcription in dialogue of a given character's slips and eccentricities. In Our Mutual Friend such phonogrammatic slippages, between words as well as within a single lexical boundary, again gather particular weight and force around the illiteracy of a single character, Mr. Boffin, and the farcical expertise of his tutelary minion, Mr. Silas Wegg. Coming into a fortune, Mr. Boffin has decided to compensate himself for the deficiencies of his education by purchasing at once the two functions of literacy: both a secretary for writing and a "literary man" for reading. In Boffin's attempt to explain to Wegg where his new money comes from, a mild contretemps ensues from his malapropism about the "will of a diseased governor," a phonetic stab at "deceased." Naturally enough, this prompts a question from Wegg about the sick man's fate — "Gentleman dead, sir?" — which triggers, in turn, an inappropriate expletive in Boffin's rejoinder: "Man alive, don't I tell you? A diseased governor?" (1.5.94). The intense design of such slips raises an issue more generic than simply linguistic. When Bakhtin charges that "Stylistics has been . . . completely deaf to dialogue," he means that it has not traditionally been able to absorb the mixed nature of reported speech, its play of private idiolects and dialects, within the overarching "voice" of the novel when conceived as a monolithic inscription, "a hermetic and self-sufficient whole, one whose elements constitute a closed system presuming nothing beyond themselves, no other utterances."^[7] Two things need to be said in this regard about the Dickensian comic prose under scrutiny here. Not only does a sense of Dickensian stylistic ingenuity invade dialogue from the precincts of so-called omniscience, generating what we might call a "dialogism" between a character's slip and the textual (the authorial) motivation behind every malapropism; even within quoted speech, a single word may be seen divided against itself in a metalinguistic oscillation of alternatives. One could further argue, following Bakhtin's terms, that an unconscious pun quoted from a character models the double-voiced nature of

the novel at its encompassing structural level, the word in dialogue with its own double take.

Dickens, and he is not alone among novelists in this, goes farther. In a knotty anticipation of modern linguistics, Dickens often renders morphology itself dialogic through his homophonic echoes and lexical slippages. In that last passage from Our Mutual Friend , for instance, he does so through a foregrounded irony of miscognition, the word "diseased" jostling both phonic and semantic paradigms at once with its unvoiced but intended double, "deceased." It is not that the alternatives are explicitly bandied about in an overt dialogue format. It is not even that Wegg mishears Boffin's word. It is rather that the word itself emerges into voice, into parole , by an accidental dialogic slide within the imperfect langue of the speaker. The slip from c to s does not take place transegmentally but, rather, within the same morpheme, the same syllable; it is nevertheless as illustrative here as Jane Eyre dialogizing her own first name with "jay in." Read as a reductio ad absurdum of the entire notion of dialogism, Boffin's intended utterance is outered as its own other to begin with. This point has a methodological corollary: as against familiar stylistics, the graphonic reading of dialogue — just as of other prose and poetry — is dialogic by definition. In such reading the phonotext is found generating its own evocalized feedback.

In that same scene from Our Mutual Friend , Boffin, impatient, moves on to explain how it is impossible for him to master reading at this late stage in his life. He does so in a passage carefully worked over by Dickens at the manuscript stage: "'Now, it's too late for me to begin shovelling and sifting at alphabeds and grammar-books. . . . But I want some reading — some fine bold reading, some splendid book in a gorging Lord-Mayor's Show of wollumes' (probably meaning gorgeous, but misled by association of ideas)" (1.5.94).^[8] Rarely does a manuscript variant lay open so completely the laboratory of Dickens's compositional processes. Even that earlier and more purely homophonic malapropism, the horticultural rather than morphological "alphabeds" for "alphabets," seems (if I make out the changes correctly) to have been revised at the draft stage. The latter appears crossed out in favor of the former as if by "association of ideas" from the no longer dead metaphors of "shovelling and sifting." Then, too, these very metaphors are elsewhere associated with the activity of raking through the novel's symbolic dust mounds, those piles of litter, debris, and excrement that command a considerable price on the scavenger's market. In any case, Boffin's is a homophonic slip on the dentalized phonemic closeness, despite alphabetical distance, of /d/ from /t/. In literary-historical terms, Boffin's malapropism anticipates Joyce's twofold punning in Finnegans Wake on the collective noun of English lettering, first

"allaphbed" (18.18) and then, a few lines later, "allforabit" (19.2). That last version puns, Boffin-like, on the ill-sorted bits and pieces that make up the alphabetic system, while also, with an added twist of Joycean etymological irony, capturing the synecdochic naming of the whole ("all for") by the mere "alpha" and "beta" that lead it off.

Another example from Our Mutual Friend moves as close as the novelist gets to the cross-lexical punning of Punch . Lawyer Lightwood means to be correcting Mr. Boffin about a London locale, whereas Boffin assumes him to be filling in the name of Lightwood's companion, taking "Doctors' Commons" as "Doctor Scommons" (1.8.136). The designated place is heard as a proper name in this multiple impropriety, violating the complete range of graphic signifiers at once: punctuation, capitalization, and lexical segmentation. It is the rupture of literacy by a lingual energy not unrelated, again, to Dickens's own style, for ex nihilo it generates a potential fictional character on the spot, risen from the blank crevices of the said. At the same time, this parthenogenesis from the baffled head of Boffin is a metalinguistic joke on the elevation of a "Common(s)" to a proper noun. In the comic genealogies of Dickensian wordplay, Doctor Scommons's — true ancestor is the Lord No Zoo. He or it, Scommons the name as lapsus, is also directly akin to the brand of conundrum punning in Punch which happens to increase in frequency and lexical ingenuity in the early 1860s, just as Dickens was composing Our Mutual Friend (published serially, 1864–65). If George du Maurier's contributions to Punch, beginning in 1860 and given greatest fanfare with his collected parodies of Cockney French in "L'Onglay a Parry" (14 January 1865), converge suggestively with Dickens's staging of the confrontation of Podsnap and the "French gentleman" in Our Mutual Friend (1.11), then it is just as likely that other linguistic ironies in Punch may help to account for the increased incidence of transegmental illiteracies in this novel. One does indeed find numerous indirect precedents for Doctor S. scattered through the 1863 Punch Almanack , a volume appearing at the start of each publication year. In the "Answers to Conundrums" segment ("Questions, by some accident, have not yet occurred to us"), we find not only the onomastic play on "Victor You-Go," himself a master of the holorhyme, but also "A weeping Will (oh!)" (3). Farther along in this number, we may well think of the mudling Jo from Bleak House in connection with the "Con by a Poor Crossing Sweeper. — Why is a birch-broom like a weeping willow? Because it's a thing as (s)weeps" (10; with the elision typographically marked). Evidence of Franglais punning, also depending on elision, appears two pages later, when the French drama critic is accosted by the English civil engineer who propounds that "the railway locomotive was the greatest 'succes de steam ' that he had ever known" (12). The subsequent number for 3 January 1863 offers the following

example of junctural ambiguity, turning on the highbrow habit of accentuated t 's: "The Effect of Dining Out. — SMITH hearing JONES remark that their host BROWN talked 'like a book,' exclaimed, 'Why yes, of course he does, isn't he a tome?'" (9). Equally far from lowlife Cockney punning, there is the "Easy French Translation" of 21 February 1863: "'MON PETIT CHOU.' A Term of Endearment first addressed by Cinderella to her glass slipper" (73). More in the Dickensian spirit of such a one-word-into-two homophonic malapropism as Ham's "drowndead" in David Copperfield (3.83) is "the gentleman" in the 17 January 1863 issue of Punch suddenly understanding the literary cliché "the moaning of the tide" when, once arrived at Brighton, he realizes (breathily) how the "sea sighed" (29). In the Punch Almanack for the very year in which Our Mutual Friend began serialization, in fact, one of the recent series of conundrum answers that go begging for questions is a Cockney pun on "novel" itself: "The difference is merely that the one is an-ut, while the other is an-ovel" (12).

Back, then, to the textual environs of Doctor Scommons. He is misbegotten in the same chapter that begins with Mr. Boffin approaching the lone and underemployed clerk ensconced in the "dusty eyrie" of Lightwood's office. That dehumanizing noun "eyrie," for nest, lends itself to a homophonic collapse into its own preceding modifier — producing the suddenly four-syllabled portmanteau term "dustiary." This coinage not only renames the clerk's confine or keep of dust, but further — through etymological associations with the ary of breviary or bestiary , for instance — faintly evokes the product as well as the labor of transcription in the context of this very book of dust. We shall shortly return to Our Mutual Friend as the ironic "dustiary" of London life, concentrating finally on the lexical pulverizations that compose the unspoken matrix of the entire novel: the liturgical formula "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" as a principle of linguistics as well as of biology and economics, a principle of radical disarticulation. We shall do so, however, only after a desultory audition of related transegmental effects in those Victorian and early modern novelists who hold the place — at the literary level of what we might call "applied linguistic history" — between Dickens and Joyce.

Before this, another earlier — and prototypical — example from Dickens. Perhaps no episode in his novels, or in any novel before Joyce, mobilizes the transegmental possibilities of prose discourse more notably than does a proleptic moment in Great Expectations . Mobilizes them in connection not just with textual traverse but with the slippages and misshapings of the unconscious-structured-like-a-language. In a novel whose very pattern of characterization seems to play out the possibilities of dream projection, with figures like Orlick and Drummle the dark avatars of Pip's desire, the narrative discourse itself undergoes a displacement and condensation that provides a

paraphonic matrix of one entire plot line. It does so in a way that not only derives as directly from Punch humor as anything else in Dickens but that in the process restructures such verbal farce within a context even more explicitly concerned with that difference between read and enunciated language which in its own way redoubles the textual condition itself that conveys the joke. The sequence of effects in question begins with a sight-reading of the said. There are words Pip doesn't know; but in the company of his harsh and carping wife, Joe is afraid to instruct the child too openly. Instead, he silently mouths the answers to Pip's also shaped but unspoken first question: "What's a convict?" The result is that "Joe put his mouth into the forms of returning such a highly elaborate answer, that I could make out nothing of it but the single word 'Pip'" (2.45).^[9] In the dream logic of the novel's displaced and subterranean guilt (phonemically activated as much as is that opiated, dreamlike first-person report of Lucy Snowe in Brontë's Villette ), this is course one good answer in and of itself. In a manner cognate with the process of receiving the text as a whole, any text — the process, that is, of registering the visible signs of a "suppressed" articulation — Pip tries again to read the shape of Joe's lips. The question this time is about the source of the guns being fired, and the answer attempted, we later find out, is "the Hulks" — or prison ships. "At this point," however, all we are told is that "Joe greatly augmented my curiosity by taking the utmost pains to open his mouth very wide, and to put it into the form of a word that looked to me like 'sulk.'" Since this gets Pip nowhere, he finally asks Mrs. Joe, who answers gruffly "From the Hulks!" — at which point, like a Cockney riddler, Pip queries "And please what's Hulks?" — reiterating his previous misapprehension in the form of a homophonic (transegmental) pun on "What sulks?"

This isn't any longer what he means to ask, merely what is said at the level of the phonotext — and answered four times over in the course of the novel in the described person of Bentley Drummle, agent of Pip's unconscious retaliation against Estella. Described explicitly as "sulky" in all of his early appearances (25.225; 26.234, 237; 38.327), Drummle is the "answer" to Pip's earliest questions about criminal violence, the reification of the boy's unconscious slip of the tongue — indeed, a character described as boasting in his own right "a large awkward tongue" (25.225). On the way to Drummle's later appearance in the text, this early transegmental irony about "what-s = (h)ulks" is mediated in transit at the appearance of Pip's other brutal (and tongue-associated) counterpart, Orlick , after the first act of violence committed against one of Pip's enemies. Orlick has just returned to town from his bludgeoning of Mrs. Joe with the criminal's leg-iron linked by association to the guns originally fired from "the Hulks." We don't know this yet — but it is spelled out by the text, one might say, even before it is disclosed. This verbal

inference takes place when — by narrative accident, as it were, but discursive stratagem — we are reminded of those earlier guns by the "mere" atmospheric fact that the "signal cannon broke upon us again, and again rolled sulkily along the course of the river" (15.146). By such echoes is the discourse of the unconscious kept up in this novel: the return of the transegmental repressed. Kept up — and brought up, uncannily, into the haunted present of the narrator's retrospective vantage. For "rolled sulkily" and "rolls hulkily" are separated at the phonotextual level only by the least distinction in the junctural force of a dentalized sibilant. Carried phonemically, the auditory memory does indeed break "upon us again, and again," time out of mind, mind out of time.

"The Other Side of Silence"

From Adam Bede forward, there is a general — and generally disregarded — sound texture in George Eliot's most expository style, let alone her dialogue. Whether "intended" by Eliot in the jovial spirit of the dramatic moment or not, certainly the context of the harvest supper in Adam Bede prompts a thick-tongued pun at the conclusion of a rowdy communal drinking song: "Then drink, boys, drink! / And see ye do not spill . . . For 'tis our master's will " (53.564), the last a contemporary term for liquor good or bad. At the earlier inception of the book's seduction plot, textured by a more muted internal echo, there is the fateful kiss between Hetty and Arthur that recalls "Eros himself, sipping the lips of Psyche" (13.182); or there is Hetty described "like a child hugging its toys in the beginning of a long toi ls ome journey" (15.203), a phonemic disassemblage of the lexeme itself within an image that anticipates the later "Journey in Despair" chapter. Even at the book's tragic turn we recognize Eliot's analytic ear for the "dileck" (2.60) in Adam's bitterness against Hetty's seducer, who has "been false to me, and 'ticed [an assimilative fusion for "and (end/t)ticed"] her away" (39.453). In the subsequent confrontation between Dinah and Hetty, the latter's heart is opened with a prayer that begins by invoking the deity who has seen to "the depths of all sorrow" (45.496). Well before this climactic moment, however, another, more preternatural fusion of reduplicating phonemes may eerily be heard to augment the denotative, connotative, and etymological associations of the sufferer's last name, Sorrel (the "sour" or bitter herb); I refer to the predic(a)tive undertone of a grief fated from the start of the narrative to descend upon her in her selfishness, the anticipated sound of "all sorrow" chiastically reversed, as it were, to the ominous and open-ended "sorrow 'll." In this way do words "sinnify" (18.234) in Eliot's moralized textual weave. Thus is foretold the destined grief that, by every imperative of story, will come, that must in one form or another have its will of her — whatever sorrow 'll also do in the long run, within Eliot's punitive economy, by way of redemption.

In The Mill on the Floss , George Eliot's penchant for internal echo and muted paronomasia remains very much in evidence. It is especially apparent in those moments of representational duplication when the play of signifiers is aligned with the signified of an explicitly auditory experience. Philip Wakem can deploy his own vocal harmonics, for instance, in saying that "Certain strains of music affect me so stran gely" (5.1.266). Similarly, narrative voice has earlier harmonized both vowels and consonants to evoke the heroine's response to the mill's "resolute din, the unresting motion of the great stones, giving her a dim delicious awe at the presence of an uncontrollable force" (1.4.26). The verbal shape of "resolute" echoes against its approximate synonym in "unresting," while the adjective "great," modifying the rumbling of the stones, reverberates by a kind of anti-pun with the grating which it transmutes into solemnity, a transformation framed by the consonantal gentling of "din" into "dim." The climactic phrase "dim delicious awe," beyond its frontal alliteration, may also borrow some of its quiet force from the phantom transegmental gemination of an unwritten d in the aural ambivalence of "dim(med ) d elicious awe."

Middlemarch continues Eliot's experiments with internal echo and its thematizations. At one point the narrator quotes Shakespeare's "to hear with eyes" sonnet (27.183) as a prototype for the divinization of another's unsaid longing. This paradoxical image provides the kind of auditory metaphor for intuition established earlier with the famous account of that unworkable hypersensitivity which would cause us to "die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence" (20.135). Once alerted to the proliferated sound play of Eliot's prose, one may come to suspect that the complex paronomasia, reversing and overrunning itself, of such a line as "di(e) . . . li(e)s . . . sid(e) . . . sil(e ——)," in its crossing of chiasmus with alliteration, may not simply be stationed to instance a kind of textual hearing-with-eyes. It may further be designed, at a metanarrative level, to model the whole discursive logic of internal echo, recurrence, and repetition-within-variation: as the linguistic equivalent of those filamented layerings of felt correspondence in the represented world of the novel, those hidden patterns and detonating convergences too intense for direct apprehension. Echoism and phonemic mutation in Middlemarch can be particularly striking in passages of negative characterization or satire, as in the paragraph summarizing Dorothea's marital entrapment after the honeymoon in Rome, where a transegmental drift serves momentarily to echo, at the semantic level as well this time, the metaphoric trap of the heroine's entire marital life. Dorothea finds herself submitting to "a moral imprisonment which made itself one with" — was, in other words, repeated in — "the chill, colorless , nar rowed landscape" (28.189). Only for a

moment, and only in (phonemic) passing, Eliot has named that insidious ensnarement which is the result of all psychic narrowness in this novel.

A later passage, more satiric than melancholy, orchestrates just as fully what we might call the "aural subtext" — the phonotext — of Eliot's patterned discourse, its auditing of the phonemic rumble on the underside of silent script. Its transegmental effect offers, in fact, the perfect occasion for recasting its phonotextual dynamic in terms familiar from the most influential of earlier stylistic commentaries on this novel in the general context of prose fiction and its poetics. In "Fiction and the 'Analogical Matrix,'" Mark Schorer discusses the tendency for subdued or dead metaphors in Eliot, as in both Jane Austen and Emily Brontë before her, to draw strength from an underlying figurative network that highlights them by alignment with others of their kind. Among the many such figural filiations in Middlemarch , Schorer suggests, are those that accumulate to the proposition "Consciousness is a stream."^[10] Metaphors of current, depth, flow, channeling, muddying, and so forth, cohere within this pattern, under an analytic scrutiny that is a clear Anglo-American forerunner to the operation of the "matrix" in Riffaterre's semiotics. The ordinarily neutralized or buried metaphor in Schorer's treatment, animated by a larger figural context, may in Riffaterre's later vocabulary be read as the "paragram" of such an unsaid cliché: in the particular instance at hand, of "life is like a river." Anticipating a modernist insistence on the "stream" of consciousness — even a poststructuralist inscription of such process in the metonymical cascade of syntax — such figuration operates, in the following description of Rosamond Vincy, within the recast transegmental semiotics of a matrix/"paraphone" structure: "Shallow natures dream of an easy sway over the emotions of others, trusting implicitly in their own petty magic to turn the deepest streams " (76.536). The internal echo is so close that it renders the first phrase proleptic, at least in retrospect. This late in the novel, no sooner does the dead metaphor "shallow" surface from its "analogical matrix" than its associations wash across the plural inflection of "natures " to generate, however subliminally or subvocally, the suddenly metaphoric "stream" out of the sibilant ligature with "dream." The metaphor thus precipitated is semantically outlawed as anything but the paradigmatic alternative and accusatory other to the vanity of Rosamond's stagnant dreaming — a term, in other words, inoperable except as anti-pun, or antiphonal variant. Yet such a metaphor nonetheless raises the daunting specter of those "deepest streams " that get phonically deepened in the subsequent phrase — in all their implied dominion over Rosamond's desire to reroute them. Such transegmental irony, as it cuts up and across words, can thus cut both ways. Whereas in Dorothea's case her conjugal immurement may be as pitiably snaring as it is narrowing, a

daydreaming nature as "shallow" as Rosamond's is only mocked rather than commiserated in being momentarily misread as powerfully "streaming."

With Eliot's style working, in such undercurrents, with and against the apparent contour of script — its surface rippled with euphonic emphases above and beyond the manifest expository flow, its phonotext given to drifts as well as echoes of sound — her novels provide a sustained test case for a graphonic reading of prose fiction. As we have seen by now, however, this contrapuntal reading is aural rather than oral and is thrown into relief by such a very different stance toward literacy in action as that demonstrated by her early hero Adam Bede. In direct proportion to his identification with the characters in the Bible about whom he reads, to his phenomenological engagement with the "world" of the text, his own silent enunciation is lifted through lip movement toward voice. When he is caught up by that sacred text which provides him at once with "history, biography, and poetry," there are passages, we are told, where "his lips moved in semi-articulation — it was when he came to a speech that he could fancy himself uttering, such as Samuel's dying speech to the people" (51.542). As if his marginal literacy returns him to that state — and stage — of cultural transition from oral to silent reading discussed in the Prologue, Adam reverts to an epoch when all narrative was theatricalized, declamatory. The drama of Eliot's narrative texture, of course, is of a different order, its articulations repressed rather than partial, sub- rather than semi-vocalized.

At the same time, the whole question of articulation can be threaded back into the thematic of Eliot's fiction as part of the dramatic irony of characterization. This is made plain, for instance, amid the continuing phonic experiments of Eliot's prose, by the treatment of Grandcourt's speech defects in Daniel Deronda , the "broken discourse" and "toneless drawl" of his emotionally impaired mutter, with its "languid inarticulate sound" (29.362). Grandcourt's not even clenched, merely desiccated, inner speech surfaces in measured pauses and blanks, an effete depreciation of all converse that persists at one point until he "ceased his slow delivery of sentences" (30.393). Within a page we hear again of the resumption of "his low voice" (30.394). Between these two phrasings, taken as "languid articulations" in the slack spirit of the man himself, emerges the transegmental irony that renders the very specification of his utterance redundant, "his slow delivery" inevitably characterized by "his (s)low" speech. (In the self-exampling nature of this flaccid articulation, Grandcourt is the reverse counterpart of the forthright Dorothea in Middlemarch , who attempted to speak up to her husband in "hard distinct syllables" [20.139], as hard as those required by the enunciation of that first dental juncture.) Grandcourt's penmanship, too, is of a piece with his aristocratic "drawling," for when he deigned to write, he "scrawled with ease"

(25.332) in an "indistinct handwriting" as uninvigorated as his monotone. According to a subsequent description, the "little pauses and refined drawlings" (27.347) of that monotonous talk are described, as with the clipped phrasing from Middlemarch just above, so that an extreme articulation—this time contrary to the enunciation described—is necessary on the reader's part to mark the juncture between those last two words. If we submit to this textual impedance and its attendant labors, we have in other words momentarily redeemed ourselves from the charge of slackness leveled against the villain in the phrasing at issue. In this way, his utterance and inscription are not simply rendered as the antithesis of the narrative's flow; they set up a contrapuntal drama in our own processing of the phonotext. At the same time, it is just as likely that the quick pace of our own reading will generate elsewhere an opposite, if related, irony against the grain of script. In Grandcourt's tired sketch for Gwendolen of his previous life, we hear his tedium and torpor indicated (and transegmentally indicted) across the terrain of his phrases—if, that is, we respond to his manner in satiric kind this time, with anything less than a hyper-articulation in our own silent voicing: "His answers to her lively questions about what he had seen and done in his life, bore d rawling very well" (29.371).

Polarized by Grandcourt, Gwendolen's neurotic inwardness is charted in part by similar microlinguistic registrations, description burdened by the unsaid: "Hers was one of the natures in which exultation inevitably carries an infusion of dread ready to c urdl e and d ecl ar e itself" (31.404). Not only do the compound verbs "curdle" and "declare" seem to implicate each other by an almost anagrammatic logic of consonants, but the "infusion of dread" that precipitates this reaction presses upon the phrase of latency, "ready to"; by an overlapping internal echo, it thus generates a shudder of redundancy bursting the seams of sequence—"infusion of dread read y." Coming even closer to a fully activated lexical mutation through transegmental drift is a clause like "Gwendolen's will had seemed imperious in its small girlish sway" (35.477). The expected idiom "in its small (girlish) way"—or, alternately, "in its (small) girlish ways"—almost manages to assert itself by an (imperfect) elision between sh and s in "girlish s way," a tongue-twist of phrase that does not quite come off. It is just this sway that is balked by Grandcourt's willful negations of desire; at which point consciousness turns further inward, perverse, and this novel concerned with "the language in which we think" (19.247) begins to read like its streaming transliteration.

Climaxing in this very manner the fateful story of Gwendolen and Grandcourt, there is a distracting lexical collapse in Gwendolen's trembling account of his drowning, a narrative elicited from her by Deronda's sympathetic hearing of her plight. Recalling the virtually mortal panic that led to her

failure to save Grandcourt, Gwendolen says hauntedly, in an accent and cadence not her own: "I had stept into a boat, and my life was a sailing and sailing away—gliding on and no help—always into solitude with him , away from deliverance" (56.760). Judith Wilt has argued persuasively that the italicized male pronoun refers not to Grandcourt alone, the obvious antecedent, but to memories of the abusive stepfather whose entrapping presence Gwendolen had just a moment before been comparing, in effect, to Grandcourt's.^[11] This is not the only odd double inflection in the passage. Unless its predicate is taken to include a compound and redundant substantive, the strange wording of "my life was a sailing and sailing away" encourages the unsettling shift from gerund to participle—from the noun phrase "a sailing" to the adjectival form "a(-)sailing." This probable phrasing, though, is neither colloquially convincing in Gwendolen's dialogue nor grammatically stable even as an intrusive rhetorical heightening. It makes sense, it reads , only as a dislocated verbal symptom of a traumatic disturbance. It is thus a phrasing in two ways retrogressive: temporally (as a returning memory) and segmentally (as a junctural reflex, one word turned back upon its predecessor). My life, Gwendolen means to say in at least every sense but the lexical, was "assailing and sailing away," at once punishing and vanishing, both an assault upon and a desertion of desire. The death of the violating male was her only way out, her only way back.

In a very different fashion, in Jude the Obscure , an idiomatic compound of article plus verbal form inscribes—writes, that is, though at the level of the phonotext alone—an equally devastating irony in the last conversation, before his suicide, between Sue Bridehead and her prematurely morbid teenage "stepson," nicknamed "Father Time." Though she has just explained to him that they will soon have yet another mouth to feed, she remains, in a typifying irony, too prudish to explain further that this has not come about entirely by free choice. The narrator having recently mentioned that the boy "had learned to use the Wessex tongue quite naturally by now" (5.7.246), we are doubly alert to such densities and accidents in his speech as noted with Joseph's extreme Yorkshire dialect in Wuthering Heights . Thinking that it is a deliberate cruelty on Sue's part to increase the family misery with another hungry being, the boy groans out, "O God, mother, you've never a-sent for another" (6.2.264), meaning, of course, that she "should never have" voluntarily "sent for" a new child. At the subtextual level of ironic malapropism, however, his objection to her "assent" scores against her entire life with Jude, with whom she has grudgingly succumbed to sexual intimacy in order to keep him from returning to his first wife, the boy's own mother.

"The Vulgarization of Our Tongue"

Farther from Dickens than Hardy or even George Eliot in the spectrum of Victorian novelists, at the opposite pole from a popular and fluent narrative style, falls the mannerist prose of George Meredith. From the dialect of minor lower-class characters to the most orotund reaches of the narrative voice, transegmental thickenings inflect his text and complicate its phonemic reading. The titular hero of his first novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel , anxious about detection after a rick-burning episode, casts his adolescent fears into paronomasia: "I wish you hadn't given them the scent , though. I like to look innocent " (4.37)—and this in a chapter whose title, "Arson," seems to pun on his own status, Our Son, as scion of an ancestral line. Even his former nurse, Mrs. Berry, speaks with overlapping internal rhyme in bemoaning women's lot: "The best of women's too soft . . . more's our sor row" (37.413), where the lament sets in even before the plural pronoun has been traversed. At the very center of the novel, the parodistic evocation of love on the wing gathers to a head in the image of Richard on his wedding day bursting in his pride like "a cock-robin in the dress of a gentleman, big joy swelling out his chest" (29.289; my emphasis). A sentence later, in a deliberate twist of idiom, the transegmental capper: "All is s well"—redolent of the Cockney joke from Punch "All's swell that ends swell" (see note 6). Meredith's high-toned verbosities often draw strength from a secret affiliation with the "undercraft" of the underclasses, his humor sociolectic as well as lexical. In The Egoist , the learned avocational linguist, Dr. Middleton, brings this to a quirky focus in his split verbal personality, delighting in Cockney puns while fortifying the bastions of "correct" enunciation. Making fun of his daughter's stumbling effort to warn him of a rift between herself and her intended, Dr. Middleton takes only pedantic verbal heed of Clara's cryptic "We have differences" when followed by her elliptical "He and I—I accuse myself," a truncated phrasing in which the second "I" has at last, and at least, managed to assert itself free of the unwanted coupling. But Dr. Middleton hears only sloppy speech: "And let me direct you, for the next occasion when you shall bring the vowels I and A, in verbally detached letters, into collision, that you do not fill the hiatus with so pronounced a Y. It is the vulgarization of our tongue," he concludes in a metalinguistic travesty, "of which I y-accuse you" (19.149). As Robert Martin Adams glosses this moment in his edition of the novel, "Where she speaks her heart, he hears only phonemes" (149). Elsewhere, however, Dr. Middleton shows himself a master of that transegmental punning designed to tamper with hiatus and coerce new junctures. Alluding to the comic sayings of "Joe Miller's jest book," an earlier Victorian compendium of low wit, Sir

Willoughby's phrase "Joe Millerisms" is revised by Dr. Middleton, in a homophonic jostle reminiscent of Dickens's "Doctor Scommons," to the more Irish sounding "O 'Millerisms" (29.247; Meredith's emphasis). Hierarchy, patriarchy, can contain the "vulgate" only when it is voluntarily deployed, an ironic intertext rather than an accidental lapse induced, for instance, by female anxiety in the face, and grip, of male privilege. But while Dr. Middleton is hoist on his own petard of preciosity, Meredith has it both ways.

The convolution of Meredith's prose, with its simultaneous tendency toward the dense and the rarefied, is never more unremittingly worked in its wit than in the late novel Diana of the Crossways (1885). This is, in fact, the story of a female novelist of extraordinary stylistic dexterity and finesse, whose style often sounds indistinguishable from Meredith's own. It is a style unabashedly given to the ironic possibilities of internal echo, as with the long u sound in the first description of the heroine's regrettable husband, Warwick, portrayed with "eyes of that half cloud and blue , which make the kind of hue less grey, and are chiefly striking in an authoritative stare" (6.60). The h of "hueless" is certainly weak enough to be folded into what amounts to a chiastic pattern of assonance and alliteration, even as the transegmental adhesion from the consonant in "of " creates a homophonic alternative in "v iewless grey," thus anticipating the blank stare of his irresponsive authority. The husband of the other heroine in the novel, Diana's friend Emma, also comes in for a satire turning on the play of a single phoneme, in a passage augmented by Meredith in revision. In a long speech of remorse over his infidelity, Sir Lukin's "All I can do is to pray" is preceded by three sentences of expletive added at the manuscript stage, the last and nearest being the self-accusatory "A Common donkey compared to her!" (26.247).^[12] In the immediate vicinity of "donkey," the term "pray" is contaminated by that all but onomatopoetic sound called "braying," an antiphone of subliminal derision. Of the heroine, Diana, upon her reentry into society, we hear that she "gathered its current topics and scattered her arrowy phrases" (39.369). Beyond the partial rhyme of "gathered" and its antithetical "scattered," there is the cross-lexical (and entirely pertinent) hint of rare in "her arr owy phrases." We shall find one such phrase alluded to shortly in a comment on her suitor, Redwood, a reticent man warmed in his matrimonial hopes by recalling how Diana "had once in his hearing derided the unpleasant hiss of the ungainly English matron's title of Mrs." (41.386)—as if indeed it were spelled "Miss-hiss." The heroine's own maiden name comes under fire as well when attempts are made to patronize her with it. Rousing her strength for a political struggle in the midst of personal hardship, Diana rejects the sympathetic and conciliatory nickname "Tony," based on her middle name, Antonia. In reaction, she forges an obscure pun on the noun "atony," for languor, want of tone, enervation—presumably in

this context for a sense of being out of sympathy, out of patience, finally out of tune with those who would curtail her passion: "Tony me no Tonies; I am atony to such whimpering business now we are in the van of the struggle" (29.290); Meredith's emphasis). With its play on lexical if not vowel "hiatus," such rebarbative punning is worthy of Dr. Middleton in The Egoist , especially since her "arrowy" jest comes to an even sharper point if and when one knows that "atony" is not only pronounced with a short o , rather than the long o of the unsaid antiphrase "a Tony," but that it has a specifically linguistic denotation as well. Referring as it does to a lack of syllabic stress, the term "atony" thus becomes a self-illustrative near-homophone of the article plus proper noun. A similar lexical maneuver operates against the textual grain—but very much in keeping with the metaphoric gist—of a climactic phrase from Meredith's "Ode on the Comic Spirit": "the music of the meaning of Accord." Where harmonized meaning is figured as music, the resulting "accord" gets figured at the same time in lexical terms as "a chord," a dyadic phrase in its own right that picks up the earlier, twice-reiterated (anapestic) beat of article plus noun. This is the "music of the meaning" of any prose, too, that is attuned to textuality in its phonic as well as graphic—its graphonic—overtones.

"Shadow and Adamant"

We are concerned here with the bedrock of syntax under alleviation by the shadow play of the lexicon. But not all style invites phonemic reading in this way. There are only rare moments in Henry James, for instance, when the sound shape of words is recruited for something like an overt rhetorical effect. The explicit mention of a "droll" sound in The Ambassadors seems to give special point to a phonemic biplay verging on the anagrammatic as well as chiastic form, when "with a sound half-dolor ous, half-droll and all v ag ue and eq uiv ocal, Chad buried his face" (11.1.288). The Janus-like pattern by which "dolor" and "drollery" mutually reconstitute each other at the level of the signifier adds verbal texture to the tragicomic dimensions of the scene. For the most part, however, James is not likely to roll words around on his tongue so much as thoughts—or, at least, not phonemic clusters so much as diction. His shadows and adumbrations are largely semantic, his primary means syntactic. Even a Jamesian variant of the transegmental syllabic effect is likely to be more directly cerebral—or metaphysical—than those in George Eliot, for example. When Brydon in The Jolly Corner is brought face-to-face with the ghost of his former self, his recoil, his instinctual disavowal, is phonotextually mediated. The ghost moves his hands away from his face to reveal a "bared identity . . . too hideous as his " (476; James's emphasis). With the aspirate itself a ghostly function, phantasmal but no less accusatory, the idiomatic "as is" is thereby cross-lexically asserted as the surfacing of a repressed matrix,

through an elision that actually posits and predicates the protagonist's spectral existence in the Other.

On the subject of the actual death moment, rather than its supernal afterimages, the drifting phoneme may often mark a mortal transgression as well. Death scenes in the Victorian and modern novel, with their complex recruitment of fictive tropology, their sheer style on the verge of the unevidenced, are quite likely to exert a peculiar torsion on the combinatory logic of word sequence.^[13] Jude the Obscure's penultimate despairing utterance, "And I here" (6.11.320), is a declaration of presence that turns to a self-willed imperative of absence, of death, across the transegmental slide of "And die here." Without such a manifest lexical regrouping of sound clusters, there is still a peculiar densening and interplay of syllabic matter in certain renderings by Conrad of the death moment. When the helmsman in Heart of Darkness is fatally speared through the chest, "the luster of inquiring glance faded swiftly into vacant glassiness" (47). Conrad's phrasing produces a paronomastic gradience that suggests fatal blankness as merely a hairbreadth away from the stare of life, and this even at the textual surface—as if death were the transition precipitated by the "lance" hiding in the elided noun of "inquiring g lance." After the murder of Verloc in The Secret Agent , when one of the knife thrusts administered by his wife at last finds its lethal opening in the rib cage, the narrator stands back for a generalization about such a fate that is also a roulette spin of contingent syllabification: "Hazard has such accuracies" (11.212). In Conrad's most famous death scene, again from Heart of Darkness , the last half-dozen syllables of Kurtz's death gasp are "The horror! The horror!" (71). With all the narrator's emphasis on Kurtz's voice, the incarnate presence of the man in his portentous enunciations, their mystery and unaccountable force, and indeed given the narrator's later lie to Kurtz's unnamed Intended that "the last word he pronounced was—your name" (79), we may well hear Kurtz's last utterance phonemically displaced into a continuous thought: "The whore or the horror!" In the now-indistinguishable alternatives of desire and depletion, and with all seductive idealism prostituted for power, this hearing would also figure the doubling of Kurtz's jungle consort with the deluded mourner back home. Such is the potential "accuracy" of a phonic "hazard."

Ford Madox Ford is certainly not what one would call a syllabic or phonemic stylist, and yet the inevitable elisions of the English language can occasionally play into his hands. In The Good Soldier , the bloodless narrator, Dowell, describes his own role in relation to his ailing wife as that of a "sedulous, strained nurse" (8), where the very notion of professional qualification in the more familiar adjective, "trained," is an anti-pun written off by the prolonged tedious fact of his makeshift responsibilities. By contrast,

E. M. Forster is frequently inclined to a euphonic, though often ironic, chiming of syllables, even in his nonfictional prose. He writes in Aspects of the Novel , for instance, about those "divings into and dividings of personality" (112) that characterize "fantasy." Divided from within, the first participle is wedged open into the name of the very operation that produces it. This is the poetic in Forster's prose, his plastic way with diction. He, in fact, defines the poetic impulse in this broad sense in his 1907 novel, The Longest Journey , where in a self-exampling fusion of syllabic matter he writes of "the union of shad ow and ad amant that men call poetry" (15.154). The bond of the ferrous and the ephemeral is held there in the blended emphasis that makes the second noun a kind of phonemic portmanteau, telescoping material from both the preceding noun and the conjunction that yokes them. A similar syllabic realignment of the conjunction "and" appears in Howards End as the passing shadow of a not quite so adamant transegmental meld. Margaret Schlegel is coming to recognize the gap between classes; though culture has "worked" for her, "during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophical man" (14.115; my emphasis). A syntactic increment seems calibrated there to evoke a signified increase. In a transegmental drift, that is, the disyllabic sequence "wide an d" offers the first partial enunciation of the participle "widen ing" to follow. If we borrow the phrase "the union of shadow and adamant" to characterize such phonological blendings—with the scripted words holding the place of the adamant, the inalterable, while spectral phonemes seem to play across their surface and blur their boundaries—then the union of the inscribed vocable and its aural equivocation, of text and silent enunciation, lends Forster's definition of poetry a morphophonemic as well as a metaphysical cast. Or to borrow from Conrad again, it might be said that in the poetry of prose "hazard has such accuracies."

Forster as prose poet is of course outstripped, among his great contemporaries, by Lawrence as well as by Joyce and Woolf. In a passage explicitly devoted to the "so wide and so widening" play of concentric rings on the surface of water, Lawrence's own prose achieves a rippling overlap of phonemes in the transegmental mode. In the famous "Mooney" chapter of Women in Love , the reflection of the moon on the water, imaged as a "ragged rose," is repeatedly shattered. As its image reintegrates itself at the center, "the rays were hastening in in thin lines" (19.239), where the threefold repetition of "in" as or within a syllable is matched by the transegmental blur of "were has tening." Telescoped there by an elision of the h (recalling the Jamesian "as [h]is") is the phantom aftertone, the phonic wake, of the verb "race" as well as an auditory radiation of "rays." Similarly, amid the massive (and arguably visible as well as audible) alliteration in the immediately

preceding image of the scattered moon, we note the fl alliteration transforming itself into something more like the anagrammatic diphone of Saussure:

fl ying asunder in fl akes of white and dangerous f ire. Rapidly, like 
white birds, the f ires all broken rose across the pond,  fl eeing in
clamorous conf usion, battling with the fl ock of dark wav es that were
 f orcing their way in. The f urtherest waves of l ight, fl eeing out,
 seemed clamouring against the shore for escape.
(19.239; my emphasis)

The recurrently successive but suddenly noncontiguous pair of letters actually bridges a lexical gap in the penultimate italicized instance: to form—by liaison rather than elision this time, and in anticipation of "fleeing"—the phrase "of light ." At this level of phonotextual pressure, there lies between The Old Curiosity Shop and Women in Love no wider a gap than the lexical one their own phonemes are able to overleap.

For all the sporadic modernist activity in the way of transegmental drifts, it may still be that no single text before Joyce's Ulysses brings lexical dispersion into such direct thematic consideration as does Dickens's Our Mutual Friend , as we had begun to see. There is, though, a curiously Dickensian moment early in the first act of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest that should—with its harking back to the Punch -style alphabetic humor of Thackeray as well—serve to route us round again for a final look at the "shovelling and sifting at alphabeds" in Dickens's last completed novel. When Ernest Worthing attempts to reveal that his name is really "Jack," his friend Algernon six times objects, in as many sentences, that "Ernest" is his incontrovertible essence. "It's on your cards," he adds, in a definitive last stroke. "Here is one of them . . . Mr. Ernest Worthing, B. 4, The Albany." As part of a theatrical phonotext, the "B. 4" can well be heard by an audience as a phonetic rebus for that time "before" the present reversal, that time when Jack's pseudonym was still in service. In this way, Wilde's designation of the Room of One's Other reminds us by homophonic irony that the past efficacy of a ruse never survives the moment of its exposure.

Dickens's Dustiary Revisited

The New Yorker cartoonist who pictured a wide-eyed Dickens in profile on a publike barstool, under hanging beer tankards and over the caption "Dickens' First Encounter with a Martini," looking bemused at the bartender's question "Olive or twist?" (27 September 1987) may well have thought he was making his own kind of joke, not Dickens's. In the context of this chapter, however, Boz's double take of authorial recognition would be itself twofold, on grounds not only of storytelling but of punning, of naming and wording together. We

left off our initial investigation of Our Mutual Friend with the slurring of "dusty eyrie" into "dustiary." With this symbolically freighted collapse in mind, a word more is in order about Victorian wordplay outside the precincts of major fiction, especially about the contemporaneous ambience of Cockney humor. In 1865, during the second and final year of the serialization of Our Mutual Friend , the 28 January number of Punch ran "A Cockney's Epitaph," a perfect epitome of the thematized accidents to which transegmental malapropism can lead. Facilitated by both the dropped h phenomenon and the junctural slippage of n before vowels, a single sliding consonant guides the irony along a syntactic arc representing life's temporal duration: "Think! 'From the cradle to the grave!' my brother, / A nurse take you from one, an 'earse to the t'other." This exceeds the linguistic bounds of the Punch epitaph for the Cockney cook, "Peace to his hashes," for instance, which is simply a pun on a single butchered lexeme. In the rhyming epitaph above, the segmental ambiguity between an nurse and an hearse —almost a textbook example, beyond Cockneyism per se, of what linguists debate as the proper disambiguation of juncture, as in "a name" versus "an aim"—involves a syntactic conundrum at the smallest compass, a question of when exactly one word cedes to its successor.

Nearer yet to the thematic material of Our Mutual Friend , and far enough back in time to be a conceivable influence on Dickens's comic style, is a Cockney music hall song of the sort we know the young Dickens to have won approval from his father by performing.^[14] Singer Robert Glindon (1799–1866) included among the ditties that made his reputation a song called (no less) "The Literary Dustman," published for the first time in 1832.^[15] Boffin's eagerness to become not only the "Golden Dustman" (in the titles to chapters 4 and 5 of book 3) but a literary one as well (if not literate, and if only by proxy) lend special prophetic point to this earlier composition, where the speaker boasts a "liberal hedication " (his emphasis on the Cockney pun), learning "all my letters" from a "turnpike man," and finds it odd—"a co-in-side-ance queer"—that the name of Adam, who "vos the fust man," is also his own, "the fust of Dustmen!" Here is Wegg's semiliterate braggadocio, as Dickens will separate it off from Boffin in their symbiosis of ambition. Here, too, is even the sense of a given name whose "coincidence" invites speculation (though Wegg-of-the-wooden-leg will later refuse to speculate on his). In addition, by that associative logic of syllabically apt malapropism which characterizes much of the humor in early Thackeray or Punch , as well as that of Wegg later, the songtext's italicized "hedication, " along with the typographically inflected "co-in-side-ance" in the chorus, may be said to put, respectively, the head ("hed") back in learning and the adjacency ("side" by "side") back in fortuitous convergence. Dickens's "drowndead" is only one of many later counterparts.

In returning to similar lexical disintegrations in the "dustiary" of Our Mutual Friend , then, we can examine them further as part of a deliberate congeries of social fragmentation and splintered utterance, the shavings and leavings of a rendered empire in decline. As a matter of fact, the ironies of "dust" and debris in the novel are closely concentrated around the linguistic comedy between Boffin and Wegg in the precincts of the dust mounds themselves. Such effects are associated there, in part, with Wegg's bodily dismemberment, his own limb cast off into a circuit of waste and reclamation. In the chapter wryly titled "Mr. Wegg Looks After Himself" (1.7)—meaning both the idiomatic "looks out for himself" and, more literally, "goes in search of his lost limb"—a manuscript addition clarifies a similar pun: "I shouldn't like to be what I may call dispersed, a part of me here, a part of me there, but should wish to collect myself like a genteel person" (1.7.127). Dickens had originally stopped the joke at collect myself but pressed it further into affectation with "like a genteel person" above the line.^[16] This works to underscore the idiomatic connotation of "collectedness" as an air of composure, while highlighting all the more by contrast the starkly literal sense of attempted recomposition of Wegg's very body through the recovery of the disarticulated member.

Mr. Wegg, of the amputated leg, sells it to Venus, the "articulator of human bones" (1.7.128), and when he is later able to arrange the sale of his own verbal articulation to the inheritor of dust, Mr. Boffin, he wants to use the money he gets in return for his words to rearticulate his body with the missing leg. This is money symbolically unburied, in turn, from the same partly fecal heaps that are passed on to Boffin in the Harmon will and in which another version of that will is rumored to be buried. Remarkably interknit in their symbolic complicity, these details can be seen to triangulate with one another as follows: partly organic debris linked with money (filthy lucre) along one axis, money with language (ill-gotten literary gain) along another, and language with organicism and anatomy ("articulation") and its breakdown along the third.^[17] Formed here is in fact a grid isomorphic, as we will further see, with that triumvirate in the so-called human sciences—biology, economics, and linguistics—that is so crucial for Foucault's sense of the nineteenth-century "Sciences of Man."

Elaborating the axis of filth and money in Our Mutual Friend is a set piece that performs its satire not only by invoking shredded paper as legal tender but by involving as well the additional disintegration of words inscribed upon another kind of paper currency known as text. In a passage augmented by several manuscript insertions (as italicized), Dickens is describing the air of London streets thick with litter:

That mysterious paper currency which circulates in London when the wind blows, gyrated here and there and everywhere. Whence can it

come, whither can it go? It hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree, is caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure, drinks at every pump, cowers at every grating, shudders upon every plot of grass, seeks rest in vain behind the legions of iron rails.
(1.12.191)

The second two additions contribute to the personification of this flying detritus, and together the three inserted verb phrases, along with the five others in series, accumulate with the inevitability of the collected and distributed debris they portray. The metaphor that transforms this whirling matter into "paper currency," into the circulating currents of an economic model of free exchange, is the most explicit mention in the novel of that waste which is money, rather than just of the scene of heaped incidental wealth (the mounds). Framing this paragraph is a refrain that links the "paper currency" more explicitly yet with the euphemistically named "dust" mounds. "The grating wind sawed rather than blew; and as it sawed, the sawdust whirled about the sawpit. Every street was a sawpit," and so on. Then, right after this paragraph about "currency" as the dusty leavings of a violent wind, we read again: "The wind sawed, and the sawdust whirled." Thus routinely repeated, the internal echo of the monosyllabic "sawed" against its homophonic extension into "sawdust" works to suggest the latter as building upon an elided, sawed-off, shaved-down, or otherwise disintegrated version of the former—"sawdust" thereby emerging as the transegmental double of "sawed dust." Anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued that the cultural concept of "dirt" should be taken to cover not just residue but the residuum of all categorization, less refuse or leftover than that which is conceptually refused by a given society.^[18] In this sense, Dickens's symbolic dirt, his mounded and mounting dust, figures ultimately the residualization of the human organism itself—in the liturgically familiar ashes and dust that survive the vacated life of the body. When, in turn, language falls to pieces into an association with dirt and money, not only is its material basis pulverized but its communal function is excluded, escaping that categorization known as normative linguistics. The stretch of narrative prose we have been reading is far tamer in its verbal demolition than more drastic collapses elsewhere, of course. Yet the phonemic splintering of a lexeme here—the frictional erosion at the mutual border of the implied matrix phrase "sawed dust"—does give evidence of morphology, of structure itself, caught on the trace of its own disintegration, however much domesticated in this case by the social consensus of an idiomatic contraction.

This same degenerative logic continues to pursue and traverse the linked symbols of Dickens's novel. If dirt is extraneous, if language reverts to dust

and dirt, or at least to molecular leavings, and if other, more familiar kinds of dust are designated as refuse even while being returned to circulation for their exchange value as currency, and, further, if anatomical debris (such as a superfluous limb) is the stuff of rearticulation for profit—then the question arises whether articulation in the other sense, as language, is also part of that monetary nexus analyzed by economics. Wegg would be the first to hope so, as he designs to sell his words. And Boffin would seem to think so as well, given his eccentric financial metaphor on the subject of his marginal familiarity with the English alphabet: "I don't mean to say but what if you showed me a B, I could so far give you change for it, as to answer Boffin" (1.5.94). Words beginning with b are for Boffin a paradigm that can be shaken down, separated, made to pay. Like economics, linguistics concerns a system of exchange, as indeed do the life cycles of biology. The body, money, and language—in Foucault's terms, biology, value theory, and philology (organic science, economics, linguistics)—thus converge upon Wegg the reader-for-pay in his association with Mr. Venus, the corporeal articulator. It is in the latter's shop, too, that the disarticulated limbs and organs of his inventory are called the "human warious" (1.7.126), a Cockneyism that itself brings together mortal anxiety ("wary") in a portmanteau articulation with "various." The reciprocal logic is complete: if dust, figured as money, can be personified as wayward windblown agencies in the London streets, then people, itinerant or otherwise, can be reduced to the flux of exchange value.

The denouement of humanist investigation in the conjoint epistemological crises of (1) biological, (2) economic, and (3) linguistic discourses in the late nineteenth century, as Foucault argues, may thus be satirically witnessed in Our Mutual Friend by the fact of (1) a body part being (2) sold off to (3) the (figurative) articulator. The commodification of the biological or anatomical structure of the living organism, the microeconomics of the body itself, is here carried to parodic lengths in the marketing of skeletons for schools of art—to be used, in ironic turn, as models for representation. This travestied economy by which pieces of organic life pass as commodities into the realm of aesthetic reproduction is also matched at the level of metafictional irony by the manner in which the "literary man," Wegg, retails his linguistic powers, such as they are, through an economy of verbal dissemination in which words, whether or not one can be given "change" for them, do have their price. Then, too, in their unwitting play, such words can be made to pay out more than expected. Like the syllabic malapropism of Thackeray's Yellowplush three and a half decades before, Wegg's misplaced "authographic" stabs can strike gold, as when his version of Gibbon, "Decline-and-Fall-Off," hits upon a homophonic pun in the preposition. By discovering the word within the word,

he thus brings to light all that (shortly restated) "declining and falling off" that lays empires low (1.5.96).

In the masterly comic scene that sends Wegg on his way to strike his devil's bargain with Boffin, the vocal production he is about to market is, in fact, momentarily shattered. His words are broken down into other words, disintegrated into subsidiary—and subversive—fragments of lexical sense. The dismembered antihero becomes once and for all the disarticulated voice, a shambles of syllabification that ends up speaking in tongues the darkly coherent truth. Central here to the satiric agenda of the novel, its attack on the money ethic of Victorian society, is a play-by-play displacement of words—a lexical splintering into phonemic shards—that anticipates by over a decade the journalistic ingenuity of rhymes like these from the Cockney poem, "Echo's Answers," in the Punch number of 18 August 1877:

INQUIRER: What's the first requisite for taking pleasure?

ECHO: Leisure .

INQUIRER: The second (for a slave to matrimony)?

ECHO: Money .

The Dickensian setting for a related lexical farce has Wegg taking a convulsive coach journey to visit Mr. Boffin near the former residence of the miserly John Harmon, a residence called disparagingly in the neighborhood "Harmony Jail." Wegg struggles valiantly to get out his questions about this odd name:

Mr. Wegg's conversation was jolted out of him in a most dislocated state.

"Was-it-Ev-verajail?" asked Mr. Wegg, holding on.

"Not a proper jail, wot you and me would get committed to," returned his escort; "they giv' it the name on accounts of Old Harmon living solitary there."

"And-why-did-they-callitharm-Ony?" asked Wegg.

On accounts of his never agreeing with nobody. Like a speeches of chaff. Harmon's Jail; Harmony Jail. Working it round like.

"Doyouknow-Mist-Erboff-in?" asked Wegg.
(1.5.98)

And so forth. Even the twice repeated nonidiom "on accounts" suggests the obsessive ledger keeping of the miser in question. The phrase "dislocated state" was added in the manuscript to introduce the hyphenated dyslocutions to follow, even as the hyphens suggest a slurred continuity within the cantering

resyllabifications. Nowhere does Dickens more intriguingly mark the phonically bridged gap that always joins phonemes, no matter how clearly they are segmented into lexemes. In this and other such lexical emergencies, the accentual discriminations of pitch, stress, and juncture are reduced to the accidents of physical discomfiture. Out of such violence in this case, finally, breaks the satiric truth.

Syllabically divided against itself, through false gemination of the /v/, the phrasing "Ev-verajail" releases perhaps a faint trace of the "veritable," answered at once by the explanation that the term was only figurative, a "species" of nonsensical wordplay, or "chaff." But, of course, Dickens's own chaff, his linguistic spoof, has "worked round" the word "species" to the (in context self-referential) "speeches." It is at just this point—with "callitharm-Ony"—that we come upon a quintessential moment of disarticulation in this novel symbolically preoccupied (notably through Mr. Venus, the boneman) with literalized articulations. Like a Cockney echoist, Wegg brings out the "harm" (rather than the money, but then the one is the other) in "Harmony." It is a species of revelation chafing at the phonemic overlap of two unsaid non-etymological components. Cued by the mercantile pun behind the mangled idiom "on accounts," the matrix of the whole passage—in Riffaterre's terms, the unsaid moralistic cliché behind the irony of "Harmony"—is the harm rather than peace, the imprisoning fixation rather than freedom, that money brings. The semiosis of this comic poetry is thus glimpsed in the interstices of the narrowest agrammaticality, the violated succession of the syntactic nexus itself. "Harm" and "money," imbricated within a single phonemic span, encode the paired sins that at one and the same time cannot speak their names, cannot be simultaneously verbalized. They are there in the text not as a written but as a silently overheard interdependence, a reciprocal satiric indictment plumbed beneath or between inscriptions, in both senses sounded without being said. As with Boffin before, though here to Wegg's own active annoyance, dialogism assaults his utterance from within, divides and conquers intent, rends the blurted question to render its own answer double-voiced despite itself. Once again in Dickens the syntagmatic axis snaps at its lower limit, speaking in tongues from the lucky breaks of lexical segmentation.

If this suggests a more radical reading practice entailed by Dickensian fiction than criticism ordinarily supposes, guided by less complacent assumptions about a textual system by no means entirely exhausted by graphic signification, even though positing no grounding authorial voice behind its phonic play, if in fact this destabilizing play appears born of a syntax at odds with the very words that constitute it on the skid, and if all this, despite the debts to Victorian humor, sounds more like Joyce than like Trollope, then we are ready for a further contextualizing of its verbal farce. It is time to locate

more precisely this late but typifying achievement of Dickens, this symbolic text of articulation and its discontents, within Foucault's "archaeology" of literary history in relation to linguistic science. In the section of The Order of Things on "Articulation," there is an unspoken anticipation of that linguistic principle eventually formalized as "double articulation," the twofold system of relational differences between sounds as well as words. Such are the categorical or paradigmatic distinctions whose emergence in the nineteenth century serves to explode a classical philosophy of discourse into the first stirrings of modern philology. Foucault traces to this point what we might call the representational imperative seen to govern classical attitudes toward language. The axiomatic assumptions of this attitude are found to carry an unquestioned confidence about language's signifying power into the smallest fractional units of the word, whether fragmented or regrouped. In this representational episteme, syllables, even single letters, were read as referential, in order that "all analysis of verbal sings . . . be retained within discourse itself."^[19] As mentioned in the Prologue, this amounts to "a search for the obscure nominal function that was thought to be invested and concealed in those words, in those syllables, in those inflections, in those letters that the over-generalized analysis of the proposition was allowing to pass through its net" (101). Every word, no matter how utterly—or unutterably—splintered into its constituent elements, still concealed "dormant names" (102). These subsidiary agents in discourse's "immense rustling of denominations" would, according to Foucault, once silenced by the philological revolution, reemerge again only as counterrevolutionary agents in a modernist poetics. They appear there with a renewed sense of the given word inflected by its hidden verbal undersong, its singing of cryptic names in counterpoint, its thinging of language. The glory of articulation, though called now its "enigma," is seen again as an invincible "pulverization" in which every disintegrated structure produces a new integer, every rupture the nub of another utterance.

In briefly following out Foucault's periodization of linguistic "science" across the last three centuries—by way of those British literary landmarks (or "archaeological" strata) considered so far in this chapter on the accidents and "undercraft" of prose—we can indeed conveniently begin with Sterne. An entire verbal episteme is on display in Tristram's alphabetical list of love's attributes (including the transegmental glimmer of "B ewitching"). To read such a textually reflexive moment as Sterne's self-conscious nod at an eighteenth-century discoursing on (and of) the letter, however, would in no way oblige us to find in Dickens's verbal disintegrations—thematized as disarticulation—some nostalgic or regressive gambit at the metalinguistic level. If Dickens follows in the tradition of Sterne, he is also forging the tradition of Joyce. On the evidence of Dickens's sublexical punning, Victorian

language theory (in comic practice), having moved beyond a philosophy of pervasive discourse into the realms of philology—and having been virtually allegorized as an "anatomy" of utterance in Dickens's last novel—appears there to press at the very threshold of modernism. Which is a way of saying that the sketch of the nineteenth-century linguistic episteme that Foucault has drawn, when transposed to Victorian experiments in comic prose, provides not just the archaeology of a philological epoch but a far more circumscribed theory of what that era came to know as the "portmanteau." It is a concept mastered by Dickens, named by Lewis Carroll, and passed spectacularly to Joyce. Smash one word and you emancipate another, pulverize and you eventuate, dismantle and then manifest anew. In Wegg's case, when his self-serving questions are disarticulated under pressure, the text reticulates in response a cryptic truth: "And-why-did-they callitharm-Ony?" This voluble amputee, trafficker in an impaired verbal facility, becomes more obviously than ever—and precisely on this symbolic quest to "collect himself"—the prophetic decentered voice of that prose-poetic dismembering that defines "modern" writing not as discourse but as sheer text. The imperium whose decline and falling off he most notably chronicles, therefore, is an empire of signs, and he does so as the "literary man" whose explosive powers have always resided silent in writing's assault on literacy.

The interests of Dickens the intuitive philologist here converge with those of Dickens the empiricist of talk, of oral expressiveness. Language as voice is the meeting ground of both these signal late-Romantic preoccupations. And Wegg's coach ride is their allegory: a miniature picaresque of vocalizing. We are all of us Weggs in motion, readers for "profit" if not for monetary gain, jostled by the fits and starts of language in our attempted engagement with plot. The vehicle that transports us in the service of a motivated reading, a reading whose locus in another sense we already inhabit and define from the start, is a complex engine of verbal sequencing that now and then exposes the jog trot of evocalized textuality, of graphonic processing. Taking fractured dictation from the virtual unconscious of the text, Wegg's disarticulated stammering turns the enunciating body from single source into conflictual site. It is a site whose delegated occupation by us as readers requires in turn the substitution of our own voicing bodies, querying through Wegg's proxy the name assigned to the very space of secondary reading—his reading out loud, and haltingly, to Boffin in the environs of "Harmony Jail." It is toward such a designated scene of reading—yet one at the same time already in process, already reflexively staged—that both the signifying as well as the signified activity of this very "passage" ushers us by our own silent "delivery." To attempt an extreme localization of Bakhtinian terminology, one might say that the "chronotopicity"^[20] of Wegg's ride—the space-time relationship of his race

across the urban cobblestones of mid-Victorian London—is redoubled by our own reading pace across the lines of print. It is our textual chronotope, in other words, that dialogizes his language—double-voices it, voices its doubles—in sync with his own segmental syncopations. Novel by novel—or, more accurately, text by text—Joyce will turn such a farcical picaresque of articulation into the linguistic epic of a speaking tribe.

6—
^{["An Earsighted View":]}
Joyce's "Modality of the Audible"

What has Joyce to do with the novel, and what is the novel to him? If Dickens is not indisputably the greatest novelist of the nineteenth century in English, he is surely the greatest writer of the novel in the period, preeminent stylist of prose fiction, the ultimate writer of prose as itself a dynamic system with a plot and momentum all its own. Dickens in his late prose made Joyce inevitable. And Joyce made the novel expendable. After over two centuries of experimentation in the language of fiction, Joyce reinvents the fiction of language, the book of words. It is, finally, not a novel at all that he writes, that is so remorselessly written, under—and over—his name but, rather, beyond genre, a verbal text in extremis. Joyce authored two recognizable novels before this, however, and some stories, as well as poems and a play. In the earlier prose works, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, as in Our Mutual Friend before and behind them, the agenda of Finnegans Wake is adumbrated. Words are at times mobilized by textuality to enwrap or unfurl only other words, to splinter into syllables and reconstitute themselves, to vibrate, snap, and shatter even while they bond and reverberate anew, gather and regroup. As never so evidently before, the textual work seems to generate its own stylistics along with the production of its style. At the microlevel, the smallest impulse of linguistic articulation becomes the real shape-changing protagonistic urge of the Wake, whose dreamplay encodes the encyclopedia of experience in a polyglot storm of alphabetic "characters."

The Joycean Wake of words, novelistic or not, is the subject to which Chapter 5, on prose fiction, has inescapably led, as well as one unmistakable point of convergence for any broad-ranging speculations on the "phonotexture" of literary writing. Like Shakespeare, Joyce is the name not so much for an author as for a textual field, a field of effect. Joyce is the place where words won't stay put, don't put stays on each other, can't settle down to expression:

where what is written is never the last word. Joyce's the place where language abrades writing, upbraids it, operates its unraveling. His is the semiosis that never gives itself over wholly to code, that leaks, drains, recoagulates. His the drift that no typography can integrate, only grapple with. Under the lens of Derridean deconstruction, Joyce thus names that associational signifying practice that lays the ghost of authorial voice forever. Yet Joycean writing takes place in the space of its own undoing, its refusal of an exclusive or even predominantly graphic function. The Joycean text exceeds the writing that marks it out as much as it exceeds the speech whose univocality it mocks. Joyce's signifying process thereby solicits its own disintegration in the act of reception, sets the traps that any reading will spring.

This is the greatest comedy of discrepancy in his great comic work: that the writing and the text do not fit flush to each other. Reading won't have it. In text production, in the operation of the phonotext as we have been exploring it, there is always with later Joyce, in the Wake especially, that subvocal phonemic throb whose risk is that, at any turn, it may in all mirth rob writing of its given words, substitute its own, sewn into the gaps, sowing semantic dissension. Writing is there to enchain the system of wording. But reading breaks links—or relinks breaks with detached phonemes, melding new hallucinated possibilities. In reading Joyce we see through writing to its very origins. By an inversion of logical sequence, it would seem that reading Joyce serves to derive not writing from language at large but originary language once more from writing, wording again from words. Wording polyglot and incorrigible: a continuous contra-diction. Accompanying this process is a corrosion of grammar as well, for grammar is the process of leading on from one word, settled upon, to its next in line. By the time of the Wake, the Joycean phonotext prods and complicates this process to the point of lexical and syntactic delirium. If, for instance, the first words of Joyce's last text can be taken (inverting, as they do, the formulaic word order "Adam and Eve") to leave behind the protagonist of the two earlier novels—with the transegmental overtone of "Stephen" in "riverrun, past Eve an d Adam's"—then the prominence of a newly elusive and suspicious alphabetic "character" is at the same time enshrined. The Stephen Dedalus books, both his Portrait and the story that includes him in Ulysses, have each in their own way heard this coming.

There is a perplexing moment at the Christmas dinner scene early in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a moment of strangely self-conscious dialogue from Mrs. Dedalus: "For pity's sake and for pity sake let us have no political discussion on this day of all days in the year" (31). What? Why the redundancy, or whatever it is? Out of the mouth of this modest woman, it would seem, comes a vernacular instance of an entire principle of Joycean lexical erosion, a principle not to find comparable expression anywhere else in

this early novel. Representative of the folk voice, the mother tongue, Mrs. Dedalus seems to display a vernacular instinct for phonic ambiguity. From her comic tautology, we infer her intuition that, because of the elision of sibilants in "pity's sake," the phrase commonly falls on the ear as "pity sake." To cover the bases, she gives it emphatically, both ways. She gives it, that is, phonetically rather than conversationally, as a play not of exclusive alternatives (either/or) but of still active variants (whichever). Each term of this auditory differential takes on a status comparable to that of referential autonomy, and therefore each needs to be appealed to separately.

Not until the phantasmagoric transformations of dialogue in the "Circe" episode of Ulysses will Joyce return to a comparable segmental ambiguity by way of a third route, an adjacent lexical rut or groove that was not directly exploited by Mrs. Dedalus. Says Bloom: "For old sake'sake" (444). At first glance, the apostrophe works like a hyphen, separating identicals. In fact, this is one of the few Joycean compounds that, in telescoping the lexical break, does so at a possessive juncture. What can be reconstructed from the junctural breakdown in this case is either an elision of one s and its spacing ("sake's sake") or a homophonic pun ("sake's ache"), the latter a possibility implicit in the drift of Mrs. Dedalus's redundancy as well: for "pity's sake" and for "pity's ache." And this transegmental slippage has its own literary precedent, its own orthographic and typographic history. In Jude the Obscure, for instance, the singular possessive form before a word beginning with a sibilant is suppressed in the phrase "old acquaintance' sake" (1.1.10). That the phrase is given in dialogue suggests an attempt to render the inevitable dropping away of the first s in spoken English. In Joyce's own vernacular delegation of possessive wordplay to the dialogue of a character within plot, namely to Stephen's parent as maternal forebear of the young artist's own later ingenuity, the novelist is there listening in on her joke as the implicit historian as well as custodian of English linguistic culture.

"Nonce Ends":
Words Kidding Around

When Joyce in the Wake writes transegmentally of oneiric "nonsense" as the "nonce ends" (149.22) of things, he has indirectly given us a phrase for the fraying ends or borders, the canceled closural certainty, of diction itself in its dream dislocations. It is the noncing of juncture in "nonce" as enunciated that precipitates its skid, by liaison, into "(s)en-" and a comparable homophonic negation of the written that unravels the end of "ends" into the dentalized "ence." Along with such another transegmental effect as "for pity('s) sake," this junctural play with sibilance is related to those punning jokes for which Dickens shared a taste with the Cockney rhymesters and riddlers of Punch . Indeed, long before the Wake, the first specifically signaled homophonic

riddles in both Portrait and Ulysses draw on this kind of lexical disintegration. Half a dozen pages before his mother's vernacular ambiguity, Stephen encounters the first outright joke in the novel, inculcating principles of orthographic and phonemic wordplay that will only have grown programmatic in Joyce by the time of Ulysses . Stephen is asked a riddle, "Why is the county Kildare like the leg of a fellow's breeches?" The solution: "Because there's a thigh in it. . . . Athy is the town in the county Kildare and a thigh is the other thigh" (25). The doubly localized site of this joke is the topographical play on "in it," the space both verbal and geographic. A comparable moment early in Ulysses is capped by the interjection "See the wheeze?"—like "See the joke?" in Portrait (25)—after Lenehan's riddling in the newspaper office: "What opera is like a railway line?" The answer: "The Rose of Castille . See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee!" (134). The homophonic pun is, of course, based on a lexical breakdown of the mispronounced Spanish place-name and the elision of one or the other st clusters in "cast steel." Part of the joke in both texts may involve the fact that this is just the sort of "wheeze" or "joke" one could in fact never "see," for it is based entirely upon a phonic rather than a scriptive coincidence.

Yet as a textual activation, this aural punning has to be produced in print by precisely the "rows of cast steel" (or of iron, with lead letters) responsible for the book's own typographic generation, thereby rendering graphic the difference upon which the surprise of sameness is based. This linotype process, patented in 1885—"at the center of the decade, " Hugh Kenner reminds us, "when the instigators of High Modernism were born"—lent textual spacing in print both a predictability and a palpability; such spacing was now identified with the precise width of a rubber increment, a standardization that "bypassed all the skill with hairline spaces for which master compositors had earned respect."^[1] With lexical demarcations thus routinized by machine, it may be possible to understand Joyce's defiance of expectation in their regard as a reaction against the wholesale instrumentation of textual norms in the boundaries and respites of printed diction. In this sense the "cast steel / Castille" pun is just the sort of play with spacing (among other things) that might appeal to a worker in a newspaper office, minion of the linotype. Kenner's approach to literary modernism through such industrial implementations of voice and script as the telephone, the typewriter, the linotype machine, and the calculator might lead us to read Joyce's play with juncture as a self-consciously erratic "technologizing" of the lexical break against the move toward uniformity. In the new methodology that eclipsed typesetting by hand, "matrices would slide down from magazines onto a moving belt for delivery to the line's incrementing array; and between the words wedge-shaped spacers would be pressed, which in squeezing everything out toward the boundaries would

make all the spaces in any line identical" (8). Though Kenner makes no suggestion of this sort, it would seem as if Joyce's segmental hairsplitting (rather than "hairline" precision) in a phrase like "For old sake'sake" might well be a modernist countermove against the updated workings of textual dissemination itself. In this sense, too, it might hark back to those still shifting typographic conventions of possessive grammar manifest in the late nineteenth-century example from Hardy. In any case, Joyce's phrasing was certainly an assault on the patience of his printers and proofreaders. And they too, as we shall see, had their revenge on Joyce.

A junctural ambiguity like "cast steel" is a low drollery in many ways central to the high modernist dislocations of the Joycean text. Margot Norris's professed "structuralist analysis" in The Decentered Universe of "Finnegans Wake" discusses such slippages in terms very close, at one point, to those of the present study. In her chapter "Technique," Norris is attempting to account for the "substitutions and freeplay" that "deconstruct the language itself," and she mentions in passing the typical case whereby Joyce "disrupts linguistic structure by ignoring internal junctures." Such "junctures," she continues, understood as "the meaningful pauses between words," are "treated as suprasegmental phonemes in modern linguistics because they function to distinguish the meanings of otherwise identical units"; beyond Joycean examples, she offers a joke from W. C. Fields's The Dentist, where there is prolonged confusion over his daughter's dating either "an ice man" or "a nice man."^[2] The Dickensian legacy is again glimpsed through a journalistic intertext—in this, for instance, from the 1864 Punch Almanack: "Song for a lazy winter lie-a-bed—vs. his friends who'd have him get up:—"They say 'tis an ice day" (23). Norris's own example from the Wake itself—"an earsighted view" (143.9)—not only provides the Joycean equivalent of this phonemic ambiguity but offers (though Norris does not consider this) the most strikingly condensed comment in his work on the very reception of such produced textual bucklings. They become reading effects, in this case actually naming the ear's scanning that alone can unfold such a transegmental alternative.

Polysyllabax

Joyce may have given us another term for such effects as well. Based on "parallax" in astronomy, the phenomenon whereby the distant movement of an object is determined by triangulation with two points of vantage, the Ulysses text coins in passing, by direct echo with "parallax" a line before, the cryptic "polysyllabax" (512). The Oxford English Dictionary defines "parallax" as the "apparent displacement, or difference in the apparent position, of an object, caused by actual change (or difference) of position of the point of observation." The relativism of difference and displacement invites linguistic analogy.

In the domain of transegmental reading, "polysyllabax" suggests, in particular, the zone of shifting evocalized bonds: the apparent spread of functional sound units across the space between words. Like parallax, this phonemic drift is in fact a difference at the point of perception, of reception—only a relational phenomenon, only a fix, a take, a reading effect. The differential phrasings, for instance, of "an earsighted view" and "a nearsighted view" are each the acoustical, rather than optical, illusion of the other when listened to aslant from different textual positions. Or, if another optical metaphor is allowed, they constitute a phonemic anamorphosis, where difference would not manifest itself unless the listening ear, the earsighted view of the phrase, were to evoke—to evocalize—the alternative spelling.

Such difference, such polysyllabax, can be great enough in Joyce to defy the probabilities of print itself. In the edition of Ulysses that I, like so many of us, went to school with, Molly Bloom, about halfway through her closing soliloquy, is worrying about a possible fart that might wake her husband, even as she is imagining the emission of controlled breath in her singing act. Infiltrating her rumination is the distant rumble of a passing train. The more than four-page paragraph ends with "Piano quietly sweeeee theres that train far away pianissimo eeeeeeee one more song" (763). Since she has already been thinking about the familiar ballad "Loves old sweet sonnnng" (754), we read in the t later in the "sweeeee," mending the apocope (or dropped last letter). At one point in the bedeviled printing history of the novel, this word-note was actually typeset to close off with the t . In one of the seemingly less debatable restorations advanced by the newly "corrected" edition, it appears that Joyce had in fact written "sweeeee theres that train far away pianissimo eeeee one more tsong " (my emphasis).^[3] Stretched out pianissimo along the train of syntax is the full spelling, the full voicing, of sweetsong, as if it were a Joycean compound disbanded for a singer's emphasis across a long legato line, ending in the ligature or tie of tsong . That thickened monosyllable is almost in its own right an exaggerated phonetic transcription of an arch vocalistic enunciation, even while the t is the grammatical trace of an adjective for which the deferred substantive has been oddly long in coming. A polysyllabax whose displacements are almost beyond detection, such is the Joycean textual tsong in a quintessential instance, perhaps inadvertently normalized in previous versions of the imperfect text.

This is, of course, Joyce the textualist more than Joyce the novelist, exactly the obsessively impersonal writer with whose breaks from the rules we are here concerned. The phonic and graphic shapes of language, superimposed upon each other in the letter, are not in Joyce subordinated to the word but pass into the textualized stream of consciousness as functions thereof. The syntagmatic sequence is no longer assigned the strict management of the lexicon. It

is charged instead—both senses—with the channeling of phonetic and graphic matter along a circuit where neither is entirely discharged in word formation, sending off instead stray sparks, rays, cross-lexical arcs. No computer "spelling check" could control misprints in the sprints and vaults of the Joycean text, for the contradictory principles that govern the eccentric alphabetic are sometimes phonic, sometimes pictographic. The letter is no longer an alphabetic character solely but a double agent even in the text, a freer agent, a free reagent—phonic aftereffect at times to its own graphic cause. In the permutations of Joyce's textual system, the phonetic sensorium displaces the regimen of phonemic sense, and this within the government of a typography as much as an alphabet, the law of the loose letter as well as of the lexical increment. His is a typography that concerns the blank and the capital, concerns mark, space, and boundary, all as functional equivalents of the letter, as part of that perpetually breached continuum which the word itself does not exclusively occupy and exhaust. It is the exact, however various, relation of the phonic to the graphic trace, or the phonic resonance (rather than residuum) within the graphic, that this chapter seeks to explore. One purpose in doing so, finally, must be to resist a too hasty and unexamined assimilation of the Joycean text to a narrowly conceived grammatological model.

Compbounding

We can begin our inquiry into Joycean segmentations with the most innocuous and least disruptive of all space marks, the silent stitch of the hyphen. Joyce's early experiments with the dropped hyphen, the blanking out of the blank in enforced lexical compounds, should direct us toward a fuller account of the elastic gap in both phonic as well as typographic aspects of his style. The Joycean compound elides the hyphen while foregrounding its very status in absentia. Whenever a hyphen appears (even its disappearance reminds us), it is the mark of difference itself under partial erasure, of juncture and disjunction at once, a linkage that retains distinction. It is the horizontal sign of a lateral process of break and pause, what Joyce himself in the Wake calls the "blotch and void" (229.27) of script. The hyphen is thus a sign that also binds over such a break, in the process fusing a semantic amalgam that stops short of lexical collapse. Merely remove the punctuating link, leaving the lexical segmentation intact, and you lose sight of the hyphen's double service. On the other hand, collapse the adjacent lexemes into one and you throw the (canceled) hyphenating function into relief as the lexical ligature it always half is: a sign of cleaving in both senses, of and to . Either way, it is a crisis of juncture at the narrowest scope.

The earliest dis-hyphenations in Portrait are virtually negligible—for example, "carriagelamps" (19) or "pierhead" (35). Composite forms of this

sort, however, quickly grow more striking when the deletion of the purely graphic signifier opens the morphophonemic floodgates. They come thus to resemble the later compounds of Ulysses and the Wake where eye and ear seem to play tricks on each other. In "telegrphpoles" (20), for instance, the near proximity of one silent (diphthongized) and one pronounced p is graphically disconcerting, in a way that a hyphen would have forestalled. This is all the more true in a compound like "ironingroom" (19), where an extraneous third term ("groom" rather than "room") lurks insurgently in the coinage, irrelevant but momentarily assertive in the unfamiliar word's claim on the eye.^[4] In the dozen or so compounds in the first half-dozen pages of Ulysses , we find such facile examples as "gunrest" (3) and "guncase" (4), as well as such more notable coinages as "snotgreen," "noserag" (6) and the ingenious "scrotumtightening" (5), the last a mimetic instance of typographic contraction. For more than in Portrait, the Ulysses text indulges in geminated (twinned) consonants as the cement between compounded words, as in the odd-looking "dressinggown" (3) or "lumberroom" (29) and the more suggestive mirroring replication of "lookingglass" (6). In general, double letters highlight the unavoidable phonic elision that the redundancy of their script pretends to deny. In the particular case of "lookingglass," the reciprocally elided but still visibly inscribed g 's suggest that sameness within difference, that otherness on the trace of identity, which is not simply emblemized in a mirror but emblemized ideally in that "symbol of all Irish art" provided by the "cracked lookingglass of a servant." We actually see there, though instantaneously stantaneously smoothed over, one of those cracks in signification that Joyce will raise to a high art in the pantheon of Irish style. Other compounds in Ulysses have a more openly semantic meld, including the yoked segmentation of "strandentwining" (38), indeed of "yokefellow" (43) itself. Not to mention the reflexive play on dirty language, as well as on the phallus, in "naughty nightstalk " (78). "Sweetoned" seems to name its own deepening and rounding of "sweetened" (23), and in this same vein of self-referential coinages there is the almost pictographic enactment of an inward curvative in the rickety lexical composite "knockkneed" (32). All of these odd bondings are in a sense knockkneed conflations that play out at the least disruptive level a sudden malleability of spacing where the hyphen once was. Either this, or, under pressure from the evacuation of the hyphen, the collapse of lexemes into a forced syllabic bond seems momentarily to displace juncture itself, forward or back, along the lettered succession.

In this sense, perhaps the most illustrative of all the compounds born of an elided hyphen in Ulysses is to be found, though also found wanting authority, in the familiar edition of the "Lestrygonians" episode. Bloom is surreptitiously fondling "a slack fold of his belly," and by possibly an equal slackness in the

printer's transmission, we have always read "I know its whiteyellow" (182). Beyond the possessive adjective where we would expect the apostrophe of contraction ("it's"), converting "whiteyellow" to a nominal form, that last shifting coinage has a further Joycean look—but only at the expense of an even more Joycean sound. The "corrected" edition gives it as two words, "whitey yellow" (149), inviting a liaison at exactly the border where one tint attenuates into another. Since "whitey" was too rare an adjectival form to break free from the melded coinage in the typesetter's (reading rather than just seeing) eye—at least so one may speculate, with those medieval scribes from the Prologue in mind—what we have for decades been reading in the bipartite version of the phrase can now be metatextually reread in play with its alternative, there in one sense all along. This is just what, at the level of a phonotextual response, is so fascinating and fertile in the debates about the "authoritative" Ulysses . In connection with lexical eccentricities, the experts attempt, again and again, to adjudicate on the strength of manuscript evidence what remains, by the force of receptual effect, always an open question as we read. Such sustained ambivalence bears witness once again to those phonemic fusions by which the flux of speech inevitably (we shall soon use Joyce's word "ineluctably") proceeds. Such, he might have said, are the earrata of the typograph/vocal slip.

The dis-hyphenated conflation is one of those rudimentary experiments in lexical adhesion that will eventually result in the highly pressurized transfusions of the Wake 's portmanteau terms, one word not just enjambed with but slamming into another, overlapping and interpenetrating it, sometimes superimposed upon it in a way that not only erases but overleaps the gaps between words. Following loosely Joyce's own self-referential coinage for a similar kind of overlay—the imbrication of superb with superpose in "superpbosition" (299.8)—one could dub such a lexical "combine," one that amalgamates words into a single lexical mass, a "compbound" (or of course "combpound"). It is a device that functions therefore as the lower limit of junctural transgression in the general category of the portmanteau conflation. Without such a blatant transposition, such a superposition of switched letters, a nonetheless extreme imbrication in the fifth paragraph of the Wake, for instance, dovetails an unhyphenated multi with multiple, multiply, and applicable in multiplicables" (4.32). Here, again, is a polysyllabax of overlapping internal displacements. Such inventions operate transegmentally, by reversible elision, across a lexical break they have already erased to begin with. Within one of the canonically remarked elements of the Joycean style, the portmanteau syndrome, they seem to compress—by lexical compression itself—an entire phonotextual program that has received too little, or the wrong sort of, attention.

More obviously than the merely disheveled or dis-hyphenated compound,

these "compbounds"—involving binds and bounds, pounding fusions and leapt gaps—insist with instructive clarity on the phonic dimension of writing not within but athwart the graphic. At the very point of overlap, the "multiplicable" is decoded partly by the reconstructive ear—as it fills-in the invisible blank under cover of that very "superpbosition" which defers the fulfillment of one lexeme by the encroachment of the other. What is unseen by definition, telescoped out of the orthographic puzzle, is heard-as-missing. What the eye scans in such cases will always leave unseen, and audible as deleted, the ultimate trace of each constituent element's sudden difference from itself, from its normal lexical autonomy. The peculiar Joycean portmanteau—what I am calling the "compbounded" lexeme—is thus not only a test case for signification as difference but for such difference as manifestly a play between eye and ear. It is this same portmanteau comb-pounding that produces the impacted overlaps in the very title of Joyce's postmorphological carnivalesque, Finnegans Wake . This title contains not only "Finn" but the French word for "end," fin, as well as the prefixes of negation, "ne" and "nega," followed by a disyllabic homophone for "again" in "egan," plus the archaic form gan for go . On top of this is the ambivalent slippage between a plural subject—for the tribe of all Finnegans coming awake—and a possessive form either for the funeral of one by this name or for the trace left by him in life or death, "wake" there rather in the sense of "track." Finally, even within the possibly suppressed sign of the genitive apostrophe, there could reside a further deletion: is (rather than the implicit possessive) not only contracted to 's but followed in turn by an aphaeresis muting /¶ / as first syllable of the adjectivalized verb form (a)wake, thus reading "Finnegan's 'Wake."

In pursuing such microlinguistic details, this chapter has started small in order to develop a model for Joyce's signifying program at large. At its fullest realization, the Joycean text follows a wholesale agenda of estrangement. His prose alienates the normative by its recombination, wreaking havoc with the axes of paradigm and syntagm at once. Word by word, Joyce's writing at its most extreme aspires to continuous neologism; from word to word, it courts a self-sustaining agrammaticality (in every sense, not just Riffaterre's). But these two radical dispensations are more closely interrelated than has been noticed. The interim case (part invented diction, part vestigial syntax) of the hyphenless compound, at least in its roughly vernacular forms, raises the very issue of segmentation as itself the borderline between diction and syntax. It raises it by demonstrating the extent to which segmentation is at the mercy of a play between vocal temptations, on the one hand, and the rules of script, on the other. Moreover, when moving from the simple compound to the overlapping compbound, that minimal portmanteau conflation, we find that the motive of neologism has invaded syllabic integrity itself in a way that furthers

the divergence—within what we read—between what we see and what we hear: see as fractured regrouping, hear as morphophonemic vestige.

The most rudimentary cases, however, remain the most illustrative. The least striking hyphen may remind us not just that language, as Derrida has it, is a function of spacing but that spacing is a function, a variable, of textuality. Once allow for its collapse within the reading effect, and you have thrown open the lexeme not only to collisions but to incursions, to amalgams and transformations under pressure of contiguity, to drift . Because we do not hear the space girded by the hyphen in the first place, the ear is untroubled by its removal. The eye's surprise is thus mitigated by an inner voicing. If, however, the spaces regimented by hyphens are expendable, so too, perhaps, are those other segmental markers, those ordinary gaps between words, that are also more or less ignored by the ear even while honored by the eye. The elided hyphen would then provide the invisible index to an inaudible, and thus fluctuating, semiosis of the blank. In so doing, it would offer a wry defiance of those determinant rubber wedges between lexically bordering letters on the linotype machine. The invisible hyphen, the unwritten but still operable trace of difference-plus-relation, is thus the smallest registrable integer (not inscribed at all, except as absence: a true infinitesimal) in the calculus of Joycean transformation. As in no text production so openly before his, this is a transformation by which the axial, and axiomatic, difference between lexicon and grammar begins to break down.

When the lexicon gives, grammar does not always take. As the logic of compounding and disbanding, of compbounding and disintegration, escalates in Joyce, new models of phrasing are introduced. His textual activity reconceives our notion of voicing and sequencing, of wording in the sense both of diction and its serial articulations. One preeminent model of such phrasing is drawn from the practice of music, of song, but drawn to the breaking point in its tension with the textual precondition of a work as book. In moving from Joyce's conflationary stylistics of the dis-hyphenated polysyllabic bond to the more elaborate blendings and staccato dismemberments of a textual episode explicitly devoted to the musical analogue, the "Sirens" segment of Ulysses, we must monitor the Joycean text all the more closely in its play between the written and the read. For in this play lie the text's enunciatory annotations of script as score. In the "Sirens" episode—which everyone agrees is the earliest sustained departure in Ulysses from the normal referential function of fictional language, the most concerted breakdown in lexical and syntactic coherence (in favor, so the argument usually runs, of melodic continuities)—such neatly packaged homophonic jokes as "base barreltone" (270) are less frequent than a more undulant dilation of syllables. Sometimes it is a musical onomastics, here transmuting a noun and two pronouns, Bloom and him and

whom, into the threefold indirect object of "Winsomely she on Bloohimwhom smiled" (264). It is a case, as the text itself has it elsewhere, of "Bloom looped, unlooped, noded, disnoded" (256). This phonic elongation of the central vowel, a further opening and swelling, leads directly to such homophonic inflations (rather than conflations) in Finnegans Wake as "there are trist sigheds to everysing" (299.1–2). Not only is "thing" sung there as "sing," but "sides" is stretched to the homophonic expiration "sigheds," a vocalic self-exemplification that is also reminiscent of that Cockney pun in Chapter 5 on "the sea sighed." In the "Sirens" episode of the earlier novel—staging in part, as it does, the luring of language toward its own dissolution into pure tonality—we again find the name of "Bloom" precipitating an expanded vocable within a far more standard compound: "Bloom sighed on the silent bluehued flowers" (268). That assonant vowelizing may strike the inner ear as one long, modulated, transmuted u, creating an apocryphal past-participial form of blue itself.

In the "Sirens" segment the quantifiable measures of such music are called its "Musemathematics" (278)—in other words (in the other words thereby compbounded), the inspired musical semantics of a mathematical thematization. "Words? Music? No: it's what's behind" (274). For an example of such a subtext we can return to the ambivalent straying of a single phoneme on the episode's first page: "A sail! A veil awave upon the waves" (256). The ship is "asail" but represented synecdochically only by "a sail," a sail that is a wave of sorts, undulant and rhythmic as it flutters awave upon the rolling of the sea. Juncture is both fused and breached, fluid, wavering, as in the later erotic pulse of "Throb, a throb, a pulsing proud erect" (274), where the ear hears "athrob" against the visible indication of a separate article and repeated noun. To remember Gwendolen Harleth's "a sailing and sailing," with its contextually insinuated pun on emotional assault, is only to recognize the possibilities of literary history as linguistic history upon which the manipulations of the Joycean text open back.

Following "A sail . . . awave" on the first page of "Sirens" is another conflation of aural material in "Ah, lure! Alluring."^[5] The last is not just a phonemic compendium of the preceding two vocables but a new compbound of its own, compressing "all" and "luring" as well. There is an even more symptomatic sound play on this opening page of "Sirens." What might well be heard as the farthest seduction by music away from language occurs in the metrical dismemberment of a hypothetical matrix phrase like "Good God, he never heard in all his life" into the garbled syllabic paragram of "Goodgod henev erheard inall" (256). One certainly does not discount the scriptive dimension of such textual eccentricity; this is, in fact, all that is eccentric about it. Yet such a departure from the norm is precisely an accession to the phonic (if not

exactly the musical) within the linguistic, the metrical within the discursive, the note within the word. Unlike the overt homophonic joke or pun, where visual notation is wed to aural surprise, in these mathematical permutations of quasi-musical voicing, disjunctive rhythms are in every sense spelled out, made marked by the marks of script. The vernacular warping of "Good God" into a single word "Goodgod" (all attributes of the Logos drawn to its primal nomination) is the complementary opposite of the fission that rends the remaining words. In both cases, the rules of the lexicon are subordinated to articulation, whether "natural" or more artificial yet. In this chapter of inveigling orality, concerned with the alluring lilt of textual musicalization, even the deaf Pat is not immune. In a textual clue to the reading effects of the entire episode—and only as they perform a certain kind of distillation of the novel as a whole—this character, once cut off by dysfunction from the music of the world and of the spoken word, must read that world as if it were a text: "He seehears lipspeech." In a novel so thoroughly premised on the programmatic lapse, this is at the same time to "seehear slipspeech." It thereby speaks obliquely of the listening g/lance that slices across the lexicon and reformulates Joycean script for the inner ear of reception.

This textual effect is no less operable in our eavesdropping upon Molly, listening with her own inner ear to the vocalization of that old "sweeeee . . . tsong," than it is when we confront deaf Pat decoding the shifting shapes of speech without sound. They are both reading effects, drawn from melody or silence. Molly is their analyst as well as their purveyor. A dozen pages after her "(t)song," she warmly remembers Simon Dedalus's "delicious glorious voice" as he intoned the familiar lyric: "dearest goodbye sweetheart he always sang it not like Bartell dArcy sweet tart goodbye" (774). This woman of the trained ear thus articulates a vocal preference by a segmental emphasis and a sexual pun. In so doing, she also epitomizes the Joycean method within a few pages of the text's close. In the articulation of a single word, a musical treatment can deconstruct and reinflect sound—and so meaning—in a manner that passes the stray t along the syntactic chain and across the lexical breach, rather than merely reduplicating it at the point of internal juncture. This latter would be the mode of the ordinary homophonic pun, which Bartell's arch musical phrasing serves to generate. A more drastic play with external juncture, with lexical segmentation and syntactic contiguities, is found in Joyce's systematic extension of the process beyond the internal syllabic framework of a single word. As I have suggested before, his textual play in fact de-privileges the word in favor of the letter that potentially demolishes as well as composes it.

Phonemanology

If there is one literary text that urges upon Derridean deconstruction a certain recalcitrant phonological pull, that text is Finnegans Wake . Certainly, for all

its stress on Joyce's letteral manifestation, on the bookishness of his text, Derrida comes as close as anywhere in his work to acknowledging the pressure, however phantasmal, of pronunciation upon script—or at least the play between them. This recognition of a dialectic between eye and ear, sometimes suppressed in deconstructive commentary outside of Derrida's own work, therefore invites close monitoring. First, though, let me clarify the position toward which the preceding textual examples in this chapter have been aimed. The later style of Joyce, the style of the so-called dreambook, is not the style of some subjectivist transcription. Nor is this the case with Ulysses either. Joyce's style is not a record but a construct. Mind is not captured by text, the stream of language in the flow of consciousness, an ultimate record of the inner life in language. Rather, and in every sense, the text is brought to mind—foregrounded and reconstituted there, in the reading. The text, produced, induces. It generates our own waking dreamwork, not that of author or characters. Like its title, Finnegans Wake reverberates—I use the dead metaphor of sonority advisedly—between the encoded and the construed, the impressed and the processed.

This might be too obvious to need saying if it were not both deceptively simple and increasingly denied. An entirely grammatological Wake, for instance, would rule out a reception theory that alone might delve the complications implicit in the text when read as a phonic instrumentation in the mind —or in "the mind's ear," as Joyce himself calls it in a punning passage (on "mare," "marine," and "mer") whose phonemic contours also evoke a wavelike metalanguage very close to that of Woolf's The Waves: "The mar of murmury mermers to the mind's ear" (254.18). Not to the mindseer but to the mind's audition. So too with the mar or scar, the "blotch and void," of script rather than marine rhythms. Neither before nor after all, but rather between the written and the read, falls the phonic provocation. "Derrida would probably object that Joyce achieves his polyglot or palimpsest effects by driving to the limit the privilege accorded to the oral within the written, and proceeding logocentrically, word for word"—thus Geoffrey Hartman in 1981.^[6] So almost everything in grammatology would indeed lead one to suspect, to predict. But this is precisely what Derrida does not argue when he eventually turns to Joyce at some length. In avoiding the angle of attack that would paint Joyce into the corner of logocentrism, however, Derrida is at some pains to find a deprivileging of the oral in the operation of the Joycean text. What is so instructive in his work on the Wake is that the phonological component of this text remains insistent enough to prevent any demotion of the aural register beyond a leveling parity with the graphic or, rather, a virtually instantaneous oscillation between the ascendancies of eye and ear. Derrida's generalizations, though, if not his fullest readings, do tend to elide the dialectic—rather than

theorizing the graphonic elision, for instance—that keeps voice active and at work against the graphic: our voice, not Joyce's, but ours, like Joyce's, never to be heard. In demonstrating the impossibility of a univocal reading of the Wake, Derrida implies that he has extricated the text from all myths of voice whatever. Instead, the processing of Joyce's later style, its production as text, should be read to depend on what we might call a polyphonic cerebration. Though no one, even to oneself, can of course say two sounds at once, even though prompted by a single letter, any of us is able to register, by phonic rather than graphic deferral, what amounts to an aural rather than scriptive palimpsest, an overlapping of phonemes. Indeed, it can't be helped. This is the registration (of a specifically phonemic différance ) that Derrida, confronting the Wake, does for once almost allow—and all but theorize.

Yet again, as in the Prologue and in Chapter 3, I shall be using one Derrida against another, the reader against the theorist, the pragmatist of free association (without peer, or even many imitators, as a surveyor of linguistic materiality) against the deconstructor of metaphysics and its textual manifestations (widely subscribed to and emulated). I do so specifically to rethink, to re theorize, Derrida's liberated critical practice within a fuller apprehension of the literary phonotext: that level of literary manifestation where "writing," as a name for a process rather than a labor or even a product, is finally achieved only in the reading. Derrida concentrates in his essay on the famous passage in the Wake ending with the transformation of the Lord's Prayer, a mutation turning on the metavocalic pun on Lord as "Loud" (259)—as if sprung from the previous homophonic spelling of applaud as "Upploud!" (257.30). Within this passage, he focuses on the innocuous-looking monosyllabic sequence that caps a brief biblical allusion: "And shall not Babel be with Lebab? And he war " (258.11–12; my emphasis).^[7] Derrida would suggest that this sentence—in English—means both (elliptically) that he, namely, He, the Lord, is war (the predicate functioning under erasure) and also (by a solecism of number, the transitive activation of this thought) that He wars . The war would seem enacted for Derrida in the text itself, in the verbal skirmish by which Babel is reversed to its lexical mirror image in Lebab. The latter word is related to the Gaelic for "book" (leabhar ) and hence further serves to encrypt this reversion—this inversion—of tongues to a primal writing. In this, we are moving all the while toward Derrida's sense of the passage as a metatextual parable. A decentering deity, the original grammatologist, wars with and overturns—turns around—the very name for the original site of polyglossia. He thereby discloses the text or inscription that actually founds it, the Babel that is always and already booked. In the beginning, the word as written—enunciated, however, by anagrammes on the (supposed) imperative to listening rather than reading in the words "he war" once undone: "Everything around speaks to the

ear and of the ear: what speaking means but first what listening means: lending one's ear (e ar, he ar ) and obeying the father who raises his voice, the lord who talks loud" (152). This is the fathering impulse whose voice is itself the war, the assault. Nothing could seem farther from the gramme, the scripted differential. Here loudness speaks by and of itself as the enunciation of presence. Read this way, the passage would seem to allegorize the site, or citation, of the founding Logos through a phonocentrism that predates the linguistic diaspora symbolized by Babel. Before the dispersion and dissemination of tongues—whose glossolalia is now preempted by such localized textual punning, both letteral and quasi-homophonic, as Joyce's on the Loud as Heard—there existed at origin the world as volume, the voice of full presence.

Derrida's essay is at this point overdue for a more dramatic subversive move against this (albeit satirized) mythology. We don't have to wait much longer. As it happens, the ground of the Loud's pun-ridden originary parole is seen to be undercut by not staying put in one langue at a time. Occulted here, beyond "ear" and "hear" in "he war," is the Hebrew for the Lord as Warrior, the hint (by anagrammatic transposition) of the vowels of "YAW EH." This passage from English into Hebrew is accompanied as well by a Babel-like displacement into the mispronounced German "he war." Layered over the additional echo of the German "he wahr" (for "he true" [with a /v/]), we also find in play a solecism of predication ("he were"), related (Derrida may be implying) to a low-dialect response to the preceding question, almost a Cockney joke again: "He war" for "he was." While Derrida does not explicitly recall this passage from Portrait, his reading would work to deconstruct the chauvinist linguocentrism of Stephen's belief that, though "Dieu was the French for God," and though "God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages," nevertheless "God's real name was God" (16). For Derrida the whole issue of translation explodes not only this myth but the phonocentric assumption itself. How, he asks, with his own pun on Joyce's Shem the Penman, can the Word of God, the Logos, undergo "dishemination" when only the sensible plenitude of the word, its presence, can incarnate God? The Logos dissipates in confrontation with homophony, with the homology between separate tongues, or with any punlike superimposition of two meanings upon the same word. Derrida has written earlier in the essay that the "audiophonic dimension of the divine law and its sublime height is announced in the English syllabification of he (w)ar " (152). But with the introduction of the Hebrew and Germanic traces of this trace (let alone the Cockney v for w ), all Babel upends itself to the Book where such multiplicities can be assimilated. Translation is therefore a "graft (and without any possible rejection) of one language onto the body of another."

As much as in Shakespeare's sonnet 15, a narrow acceptation of this "grafting" trope would take the issue out of earshot altogether. Leaving aside the contorted Saussurean anagrammatism by which "He war" congeals to "hear," even such a strictly sequential bonding as the transegmental hint (taken by Derrida three sentences later in the passage from the Wake ) of an "Anglo-Saxon god" (Got) in "Go to" (154) may be said, given divergent pronunciation, to be more visible than audible. This cannot, though, be assumed as the inevitable priority of eye over ear, and especially not for such transegmental drifts. The specific phonemic differential behind the ambiguous parole, because ambiguous langue, of w/var (not to mention associated cross-lexical effects) directly teases the auditory imagination. This is the para-vocal excitation Derrida wrestles down by too quickly redefining its terms. He admits of the Wake "this book's appeal for reading out loud," yet insists that "the Babelian confusion between the English war and the German war cannot fail to disappear—in becoming determined—when listened to. It is erased when pronounced" (156). But what about listening with "the mind's ear," as Joyce recommends?

In using Joyce's comic prayer as witness against the logophonic myth of divine fiat, as well as against all subsidiary shibboleths of voice as presence, the leverage of grammatology, for all its gains in the demystifying of metaphysics, has in fact backed Derrida's argument into an impasse on the score of Joycean polyglossia—or, at least, a contradiction. For just a moment more, however, Derrida's line of attack seems to sustain the explanatory force of a dialectic. It is true that for him linguistic différance, however much determined by the phonetic alphabet, rules out the phonological basis altogether. The Joycean turn in question becomes the primal scene of an exclusive—and exclusionary—inscription. But Derrida rephrases it this way: "The homography retains the effect of confusion, it shelters the Babelism which here, then, plays between speech and writing" (156). Here, then? Where else? When otherwise? Even while acknowledging that something is indeed going on "between speech and writing," Derrida would insist that such play, such interplay, is foreclosed by any attempt at phonic determination. This case of Joycean "translation"—between homographic but not homophonic inscriptions—gives Derrida what he takes to be the supreme instance of a grammatological confirmation at the very inauguration of the Word's war on Babel, a war booked and brooded over by Joyce. Since listening is excluded, only inscription can take up the slack between pronunciations, a difference reduced to the sheer gramme of différance . Yet this passage from the Wake may also be singled out as a test case for a revisionist approach to a postgrammatological "stylistics"—a test case, in short, for phonemic reading. In this sense it highlights the recovery of a graphonic trace in the reading effect of textuality.

It is just because there is no difference in script between German and English w that the graft is not entirely graphic, that one must "seehear lipspeech" in order to activate the pun, to recognize the "translation" at all.

Against a too insistent grammatological reading, one might lodge the implications of Joyce's own portmanteau coinage in the very passage under discussion by Derrida, the virtually performative self-enunciation "phonemanon" (258.22)—not, importantly, the more predictable "phonemenon." Mentioned briefly by Derrida (153) in tacit allusion to his own conjunction of speech and phenomena in the book by that title, the anagrammatic twist actually encodes a more suggestive point about the voice in relation to the phenomenon of a phonetic alphabet disposed as text. By this compbound of transposition and abbreviation, Joyce seems to signify a system of signification that has no roots in an authorizing voice. It is a process that is nevertheless textualized and decentered only through the heard play of the phoneme anon . The author is dead and gone, but the banding and disbanding of words plays on. Such is the anonymous (anon. ) trace of pronunciation (rather than record of enunciation) not kept in play (from some voiced origin) but rather (sourcelessly, ceaselessly) put in play by the differentials of script.

In direct contrast to a Derridean approach, it is instructive to see how one of the most verbally alert recent scholars of Finnegans Wake thinks he can defend a thematics of such slippages only by rejecting the whole poststructuralist approach to Joyce. For John Bishop, as we learn from the title of his study, the Wake is "Joyce's Book of the Dark," a nighttext, a dreammode of audition.^[8] For him, the "subject" of the text, the dreaming Earwicker, lends a quasi-psychoanalytic rather than narrative authority to all its verbal play—by focusing it continuously around oneiric mechanisms and motifs: the counterlogical transmutations of dreamspeech, whether generated or overheard in the register of half-conscious imagination. Freud is repeatedly adduced, but never his particular approach to the condensation and displacement of jokes as well as of dreamwork—those mechanisms of wordplay examined in the Prologue as a revealing analogue for the reciprocal phonic incursions and junctural overlays of the transegmental drift. Even this aspect of Freud seems too anarchic for Bishop's position, which stiffens itself against all notions of the Joycean text "as a free floating scud of signifiers disengaged from contact with the concrete" (299). The real, the "concrete": few terms could more completely beg the question, when it is precisely the concretized, if impalpable, materiality of the signifier itself, opaque and often intransigent, that is most profoundly at issue in the arguable divorce of Joyce's text from any transparent representation of reality.

No critic before Bishop has more avidly cataloged those instances of homophonic punning—including, without special notice, many transegmen-

tal effects—that bear on the thematics of dream audition, while few have had less to say on the linguistic implications of Joyce's coinages and portmanteaus. But what better example of the free-floating "scud" of signifiers, only fleetingly attached to reference, could a reader otherwise inclined hope to adduce than one of Bishop's most often cited puns on the paradox of death and wakefulness in the novel's title, the "trope" of sleep figured by a head nodding off so decidedly that it looks like the last slump of a corpse: "tropped head" (34.6; Bishop 29). Joyce's text is in just this slippery way audible, an "auradrama" (517.2; 270), its voicings "auracles" (467.28; 298), its waked subject the embodiment of the "earopean" (310.21, 598.15; 276) consciousness subject perpetually to the "noisance" (479.20; 281) of garbled language in a confluence of tongues—indeed, transegmentally again, the "tacit turns" (99.2; 265) of a laconic unconscious. "Phonoscopically incuriosited," as the Wake recurrently suggests (449.1, cf. 123.12–13; 286)—inciting the curiosity of eye and ear at their conjoint textual site —such effects are what I have been calling graphonic undulations of the materialized text, highlighted by specific disjunctures between sighting and silent hearing. They are exemplified also at the revelatory locus of decentered subjectivity in the novel: in the very nomination of its oneiric protagonist, what Bishop calls "the obliterate reduction of the Wake 's sleeping subject to a 'belowes hero' (343.17 ['below zero'])" (62). As we are to see in Chapter 7, with joint reference to abstract mathematical theory and to a heroine's immediate fear of numbers in The Waves, here too the zero interval in syntactic computation, transgressed and so activated, razes the very noun of identity. It thus writes a subject in as hero only to zero him out. Scudding or skimming, this is the drift of significant that rewrites lexicon and syntax together from within the very script that would fix them, incurring alternatives at the cost of disfigured contiguities, exploding combination by the shimmer between equivalences still differentially in play. To deny the deconstructive ramifications of what Bishop so acutely observes in the Joycean text is at once to disperse and curtail the force of his findings, to dissipate them in the name of the "concrete" world with which these effects are supposedly in touch.

For a last pair of "phonoscopic" examples that work against the preferred referentiality of Bishop's reading, we can look to phrasings explicitly concerned in the Wake with the vagaries of language in functional process—even as they manifest the lateral detachment and redistribution of the single letter as single phoneme. Most suggestively, at least for a transegmental reading of Joyce's text, we find invoked those "lines of litters slittering up and louds of latters slettering down" (114.17–18). The coinage "slittering" may hint at "slithering," but "slettering" is a neologism of pure phonemic displacement. As in this case, so later in "whose sbrogue" (581.16)—a slipspeaking about

speech itself. By the transegmental migration of the possessive sibilant over to the term "brogue," Joyce has, typically, plumbed to a polyglot etymological depth, springing undertones of both "spoke" and "sprach." From such lexical oscillation in the Wake, we can return now to the birth throes of this preeminent modernist idiolect in Ulysses, where the dialectic between graphic and phonic is first put thematically as well as stylistically to work.

"Aural Eyeness":
A Protean Modality

Near the close of "Proteus," we read how "lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air" (48), with the lapsus "slip" twice slung across the segmental interval. The apocalyptic speech so characterized envisions the "road of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring wayawayawayawayaway," an onomatopoetic reverberation of some such idiom as "way far away." If the Hebrew God "Yaweh" was present for Derrida (by a phonetically crisscross anagram) in "he war," how much more, in this primal astronomical thunder, is the anaphone of this sacred name to be heard four times repeated in the looped, iterative portmanteau "wayaway  . . ." Here, in protean recurrence, is a graphonic metamorphosis by which the deus absconditus is audited in withdrawal from within roar of his own created "chaosmos" (Wake, 118.21). Manifested only by the reflexive logos of a phonemically ambiguous neologism, divinity is to be heard and not seen. The lexical misrule that lords it over the text in this way can be expressed by the punning anagram-like twist on "royal highness" in the Wake: "aural eyeness" (623.18). In terms sketched out in the "Proteus" episode of Ulysses, what we have been considering as the graphonic interdependence of textual signifiers honors not just the "ineluctable modality of the visible" but the "ineluctable modality of the audible" as well. This pivotal early episode in Ulysses, with its famous scene on the Sandymount Strand, develops a textual negotiation between these two irrefutable claims of eye and ear. It thus demonstrates the deep structuring logic behind Joyce's footnoted portmanteau pun in the Wake, "words all in one soluble" (299n.3). These are letters dissolved in the volubles of their syllables, in the latent enunciation of their segmental process.

The first line of "Proteus" is taken up mostly by that "mouthful" of a noun phrase, "Ineluctable modality of the visible," asserted and not demonstrated (except as we read with our eyes this self-substantiating substantive). The line then adds: "at least that." As we read, since we read, we are constrained to agreement. Reading becomes, in fact, the explicit semiological trope for the remainder of this paragraph: "Signatures of all things I am here to read." The phenomenal world is awash with "coloured signs." But what else? The paragraph closes with a paradoxical turn of phrase, the turning inside out of an idiomatic dead metaphor of sight: "Shut your eyes and see." Not our eyes,

though. By way of indirect discourse, Stephen is talking, that is thinking, to himself. If we closed our eyes, there would be no next paragraph at all. Yet what we do find there is not altogether visible in its effects:

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the Nacheinander . Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible.
(37)

The one-thing-after-another of audibility, of sound as duration, is opposed a few sentences further on in this paragraph to the Nebeneinander, the one-thing-next-to-another, of visible contiguity. Like the phonological basis of language, the world mediated through closed eyes and thick boots is the world of the ear. Stephen does not feel what is beneath his feet but hears it, does not feel the "wrack" (whether meaning "kelp" or "strewn wreckage"—or both at once) but hears the sound of it. In this first instance of a purely heard world, the ineluctable modality of the Joycean phonic subtext is recruited to offer—as befits the description—an auditory effect before the assigning of any other material cause. In the Nacheinander (or sequencing) of phonemes, what Hopkins might call the after-ing of syllables and sounds, the phrase "crush crackling wrack"—by a holding over of the /h / and then by "dynamic displacement" of the /g/ from within it—ends up sounding like the iterative "crush crackling wrack " (or, in a word, crack ). It is thus processed as rendering no more and no less, through a syntactical onomatopoeia, than the crush of bootbeats on the shore. This is the way sound works in and as text, a continuous modality of auditing not entirely marshaled by the contrary modality of script.

When Stephen begins talking to himself—"You are walking through it"—the text must as always, to make its meaning, order itself by demarcation, by signaled contiguities, by the Ne/ben/ein/an/der of one-thing-next-to-another under constraints of lexical and syntactic demarcations. Without this, we would have only the modality of the audible to guide us. We would then be likely to hear in the above passage, without interruption, the phrase "I am astride" rather than the cogito of "I am, a stride," the latter punctuated twice over by a comma and a lexical gap that enact the tread of identity in the world of touch. Schismatic at base, subjectivity is hereby mounted upon the break into speech and the breaks between it. It is constituted by the introduction of a determinate lexical rhythm into an ambivalent phonic pulse: in Kristeva's terms, by the emplacement of the symbolic upon the undulations of the semiotic. Of this there is yet another, fainter suggestion in the immediately

following sentence. This comes with the transegmental trace of a pluralized and contracted "I am"—"I'm s"—in the fissured lexical tissue of "very short (t)imes of space." When, near the close of this chapter, Stephen again speaks to himself in the imperative mood, invokes his own audition, it is to hear the language of nature, of otherness, as a syllabic play, a delineation of seaspeech: "Listen: a fourworded wavespeeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos" (49). This is the ineluctable modality of the audible as an oscillation of cryptophones, a sign system "forwarded" (a homophonic pun on "fourworded," like "sea's" in "sees oo") in such a way that it evokes the verging of the world's semiotic plenum upon the human symbolic, the churning of sound toward and into language. The opening disyllable, if more than sheer onomatopoeia, is an echo of the seesaw motion it locally enacts, a rhythm to which the last syllable offers a chiastic response ("soo" into "ooos")—even as it phonetically calls up its phonemic variant in "ooze." With the incremental iteration "rss rsseeiss," there is not only the hint again of "sea's" but the cadenced overlap of the sea's "rece ding," without ever "ceas ing" its motion. This is the speech before language waiting in the "signatures" of the phenomenal world. Echoing Ponge, here is the world's "gnature" when processed by and as text—a world always, in yet a third valence of Joyce's homophone, "foreworded." Such is the ineluctable semiosis both reproduced in textual play and generated by it as a reading effect.

S/lipspeech

If such a passage appears to yield nature's s/lipspeech as inscribed by the Joycean text, it is only within the reciprocal modalities of reception. The "sonorous silence" of the text, before it can be extrapolated to anything like the "science" thereof (Wake, 230.22), is voiced only, as it were, visually: evocalized. At the end of Joyce's Voices, Hugh Kenner suggests that Molly emerges as the voice of the Muse passing unnarrated into sleep as the "pure composing faculty."^[9] Molly's utterance, transcribed but unmarked as text, is thus the last of Joyce's voices, none of them really acknowledged as such by the text. It is the one that erases every storyteller's convention, every intervention (even "said Molly to herself") in order to produce voice itself, inevitably deputized but supposedly unmediated. Hers is the gnomic omniscience not of narrative principal—or narrational principle—but of consciousness itself in registration. The technological emphasis of Kenner's more recent book, in which Joyce's scrivening is understood in light of printing innovations, leads him to a radically different position, one that surfaces only briefly in a passing early aside. In The Mechanic Muse the voices are no longer read as Joyce's at all, nor do they belong to the characters. Technology having demystified text production, the typewriter and the linotype machine having served to expose the delusion of the speaking voice incarnate in print, the result is that Joycean

voicings, robbed of their phenomenality as overheard speech, have resurfaced into phonology as the reader's activation of the text. For Kenner, both Joyce's city and his book are "haunted by the shades of people," the novel in particular by "a vast roster of people whose voices, even, we may think we hear though it's we ourselves who silently supply them" (76). Nothing in Kenner's tone signals the critical emergency of this recognition. Nonetheless, in a single remark, the presuppositions of his previous study are swept out from under him. The technologies he finds informing modernism have led him, quite without his admitting it, to an impasse: an acknowledgment of the voiceless mechanics of textuality for which he has no further theory in reserve. In giving up more than he knows, however, Kenner also allows more than he illustrates. His understanding of the Joycean text leaves it precisely where we have taken it up. Joyce is voices, but the text's alone—in production. The Mechanic Muse cedes authority to this verbal drive, and through it, to us; our reading bodies its wake, supplying the only "volume" ever displaced by the path of its signification.

At one point in Molly's closing episode, folded away in the overtly musical contours of this singer's silent monologizing—and, it is now claimed by the new editors, smoothed out at some point in the passage's deviant transmission into print—is the vocal phrasing "dear deaead days beyondre call" (627.874–75). Molly's half-asleep inner phrasing turns the adjective "dead" into an elongated dirge all its own. In addition, the subsequent syllabic stretching involves the dismemberment of an adjacent lexeme, her thoughts fusing the preposition with the iterative prefix of the next word (a process normalized to "beyond recall" in the 1961 edition [762]). The variant wording ("beyondre call") would thus serve to dismantle in advance the lost possibility it mourns, further distancing the past with the surfaced etymological hint of "yon" (or "yonder") in "beyond." What is indeed called to mind here, and perhaps recovered from oblivion by the new edition, is certainly not Joyce the maker of books exclusively nor, on the other hand, Joyce the transcriber of a singer's internal melody. Returned to us in this tiny moment, among a multitude like it even before the Wake, is the Joyce whose verbal slips and lapses, whose transegmental ambiguities turning to psychological ironies, whose polysyllabax—in short, whose textuality—manages to speak, by being not just written but read, of the unconscious-structured-like-a-language. Voiceless itself, but in a continuous evocation of the enunciating function, the Joycean text plays out those condensations and displacements that enact in articulation the slippages attendant on desire as s/lack.

In the contrasting section just before Molly's sustained stream of consciousness, we encounter the "musemathematics" of an antithetical stylistic mode across which, nonetheless, something of the same phonotextual energy

is manifest. Into the reasoned stretches of a categorical and analytic style, a discourse stripped of rhetoric and flattened by relentless terminology, bursts a complex lexical mutation carried on the irrational "wavespeech" of ebbing and fluctuant subject-positions. In "Ithaca," the penultimate episode, Bloom and Stephen, urinating side by side, enter upon a wordless hush that is not just a mutual but a textually reciprocal silence. Beneath the suspended conversation of the scene, and the silence of the script that represents it, seethes a graphonic metamorphosis that refuses to settle on any new constitution of psychic boundaries, rippled impertinently with the slide and denial of pronomination itself: "Silent, each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal flesh of theirhisnothis fellow faces" (702). Few moments in Joyce's novel more fully justify the poststructuralist work that has been done on the relation between consciousness and signifying practice in its pages. Nor does any moment in Ulysses open this 1922 text more directly to the motivated lexical mayhem of its 1939 successor. Looked at in one way, according to the prevailing scientism and parodic precision of the "Ithaca" format, "theirhisnothis" might be (simply?) an idiomatic (and grammatically questionable) plural for "each other's"—that is, "their"—corrected by specification to a parsing of pronominal reciprocity itself: "their, or rather his and at the same time not his." Instead, looked at askance, the phrase (word?) scans in the manner of the Wake as a virtually schizophrenic designation convulsed by an indeterminacy lexical because psychic.

In this sense, the phrase is found erupting into the discourse of science as its Other and its annihilation, the end of precision in the breakdown of -cision itself. For once read, silently enunciated, the compbound begins immediately to unravel and reloop. As an unabashed stumbling block in the hypertrophic prosiness of "Ithaca," this hybrid of lexicon and syntax, this word-phrase, works free of any tripartite adjectival determination to take on a textual life of its own. To begin with, "Theirhis" registers as a phonetic exaggeration of "theirs," while also (therefore) of the predicating "there is" in the composite lexeme when construed as a clause: "There's no this." Which is only to say that, as is the case with "theirhis," the attached "nothis" is bound by no junctural law (neither phonic nor graphic)—but merely inclined by parallelism—to read as "not his" rather than "no this." Yet in the strained latter case, the phrase makes acceptable ("reciprocal") sense as well—at least when registered as instantaneously reformulated from the point of view of either self in turn. With the grammatical shifter "this" detached from any set antecedent, each self is lost to a stable subject-position in the text's process of denominating the other's. Demonstrative grammar, in short, can no longer demonstrate the site of the subject. There is suddenly no "here" there where "this" can take hold, neither in the signified space of reference nor even in the signifying

chain. In such a radical collapse of possessive upon demonstrative grammar, the textual ironies of segmentation and juncture in this fourteen-letter collocation figure the disjuncture and interchange between the dis-positions, the continuous dispossession, of self-consciousness itself. Nowhere before Finnegans Wake will a collision of homophony ("theirhis"/"theirs"/"there's") and homography ("not=his"/"no=this") bring what we might finally call the profound "spaciness" of Joycean verbal tactics more strategically to the fore. In the remarkably layered and stunningly unpoetic lexical knot of "theirhisnothis," that bastard offspring of scientific refinement and psychotic contradiction, Joyce has pushed so far beyond the domain of traditional stylistics that almost every letter of this textual compress has become, in short, a phonotextual free agent.

No less dismembering, except on the written face of it, is probably the most recognizable utterance from Ulysses, lexically discrete until read. I speak of that sensualized murmur of eros and acquiescence in the book's last line, Molly's famous reiterated affirmative: "and yes I said yes I will Yes." Out of the sheer expiration of this sibilant breath, the inner speech of Molly as "auracle" (Wake, 467.28) designates the condition of its own unspoken, its own unconscious, utterance. It is as if language were urging itself toward the surface of the almost sleeping body in the form of the very word transegmentally named by its emergence. This is the "sigh" that punctuates her remembered desire between the monosyllable of self-surrender and the identifying pronoun of its retrospect: "yes sigh said yes sigh will Yes." With the iterative sequence evocalized in this way, the whole self as (pro)nomination—the "I"—is passed over and away into a phrasing of the very sound which that self is complicit not only in making but in producing—by naming—as a reading effect. Then, too, one thing leads to another in the phonotext. At the other end of this phantasmal monosyllabic hiss is a potential pluralizing ligature with the sibilant of "said," which serves to render all the more syntactic a phonemic reading of this speech about repetitive speech, with the "sighs" as grammatical subject rather than punctuation or filler: "yes sighs said yes." Can it be doubted that the treatment of such an utterance in Finnegans Wake would be entirely likely to spell out this punning alternative in so many letters? And that those letters would thus count as a passing gloss, by exaggeration, on a homophonic latency in that whole literary and even linguistic prehistory upon which a work like Ulysses first turned not its back but, rather, its analytic machinery?

On the subject of just these last lines in Ulysses, in fact, a revealing moment in Derrida's approach to textuality as a whole, as well as to Joyce in particular, appears in the essay, "Ulysse gramophone: oui-dire de Joyce," accompanying the previously translated essay on the Wake in the original French volume.

The second essay, more recently appearing in English as "Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,"^[10] is preoccupied in good part with Molly's "yes," especially in its last capitalized appearance, "the last word, the eschatology of the book" (86) as it circles round to the opening capitalized "Yes" of her monologue. Like word breaks and punctuation, as we have seen before in Derrida, the "majuscule inaudible" (86)—the capital seen only, not heard—becomes in this context a quintessential gramme. It is, we are told, activated only "dans l'oeil de la langue" (86).^[11] As usual, despite the duplex "Gramo/phone" of Derrida's present title, the gram(me) remains privileged, at least in rhetorical emphasis, over the phone—without always the qualifying admission, as there was in his discussion of the Wake, of the play "between."^[12] Beyond its being exclusively privy to the "eye of the language," hence to the reader's eye rather than ear, Molly's "yes dans les eyes " is thereby defamiliarized by Derrida into a partial anagram of the organ that sees just such letteral play: sees at this point, in other words, an unsayable but operable alphabetic shuffle.

In this sense, Derrida reads the Joycean text at hand as if it were in itself a parable of any text's affirmation only through the eyes that produce it—produce it within his own version of an "ineluctable modality" of inscription. Again, to rescue Joyce from the phonocentrism of which Hartman expected that Derrida would accuse him, the Joycean text is rewritten wherever possible under Derrida's gaze, rewritten as sheer script. In the present case, however, to isolate this exclusive "eye"-ing of the "yes" without passing the latter through the incremental "graphonic" generation of the text as phenomenally processed is to miss even such a further and directly relevant insinuation (or "phonemanon") in the actual syntagmatic succession of the passage as "yes eyes said yes." This is a symptomatic oversight in Derrida precisely because such a transformation, unlike his associated sense of a graphic switch (or ana-gramme), could emerge only as a "modality of the audible," an aural modality even in the mode of silence. Illustrating what I have earlier characterized as the recurrent deaf spot of deconstruction when too programmatically applied, such is also the case with that other overlooked homophonic—and, so to speak, metaphonic—alternative educed above from Molly's closing "enunciation": "yes sigh(s) said yes sigh/I will Yes." Entirely through the "productive" medium of the text as process, the language of the body's desire is here sighed forth by the (in one sense only) breathless, the entirely passive, body of the reading agent. Read according to a genuine gramophonology rather than grammatology, then, the differential principle of the simultaneously protensive and retensive trace would find in Joyce its most relentlessly phonemic experimentation. The tacit question lodged at such a moment in regard to the "site" of textual processing, or again "pho-

noscopically incuriosited, " is one that Joyce will later pose explicitly, but already nearly a decade after Woolf's 1931 experiment in consciousness as evocalized stream. With or without The Waves as intertext, the Wake takes time out, amid its wash and wake of phonemes, to ask of itself the question: "what are the sound waves saying?" (256.23–24).

7—
Catching the Drift:
Woolf As Shakespeare's Sister

Before Virginia Woolf's Waves, there were those of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The sketch and caption reproduced as frontispiece show Hopkins—it is almost irresistible to put it this way—writing the world. He inscribes the inscape and instress of the sea's rippling tracery in a hand curled and fluted like the froth it details, first in iconic, then in symbolic lines. By the latter array of finely etched characters, Hopkins actually models the principle of undulation, crest, and reversal under analysis, evokes it in script while evocalizing it in the "lettering" (his special sense) of junctural fold and overlap. The phrase "a network oof f oam," for instance, invites a layering in its own phonic rather than scriptive medium. Further along, the script itself, in sheerly graphic terms, and if only by an "accident" of handwriting, repeats and compounds this effect with the lexical aberration of "only amass of foam." The use of "amass" as substantive was obsolete by Hopkins's day, and the participial form "amassed" is present only by arrested association. Whether or not this orthography departs from dictionary logic to form a new word (and new prepositional idiom: "amass of," on the partial analogy of "awash with," say), Hopkins's handwritten notation has, on the very face of it, curiously amassed its constituent alphabetic characters in a single irregular gesture of registration. To insist that the article and noun of "a=network" earlier in the caption seem almost as closely bonded by the eccentricities of Hopkins's hand—as if this point would entirely rule out the graphic interest of the scrawled "amass"—is to refuse Hopkins full self-consciousness about the physical basis of his transcriptive enterprise in this verbal "sketch." In any case, within the fragmented grammar of the passage, however inscribed, there remains an active, if only instantaneous, aural ambiguity—between a phantom participial phrase, "amass(ed) of," and its (immediately revised) substantive sense—an

ambiguity whose onset, whose pressure point, is the segmentally uncertain juncture of "a" and "mass."

Intentionality and manuscript evidence aside, the phonemic microdrama produced by the phrasings "of foam" and "a/mass of" finds its own ideal characterization in this brief text's final image of marine backwash—with one word after another, much as one wave, caught "upon the point of encountering the reflux of the former." There is scarcely a more evocative description to be found anywhere, as it happens, of the linguistic subject to which Reading Voices is addressed. The transegmental drift is indeed the "reflux" of one junctural phoneme upon its predecessor. Woolf's own most self-illustrating phrase for the verbal fluctuation that permits such effects comes from her 1931 novel, The Waves, and comes bearing a trace of the original working title, The Moths: "the silver-grey flickering moth-wing quiver of words."^[1] However troped, this is the oscillation of words as sonic waves, the quiver and flux, the flux and reflux, of silently voiced phrasing. Woolf's Les Mots, by any other name. If at the draft stage, therefore, the "moths" of the provisional title referred to the lexical divisions of utterance, it was not this ultimate referent, only the working metaphor, that was altered in the change to The Waves . Evoked thereby are the figurative waves whose "flickering" and "quiver," in all their difference from Joyce's equally transegmental "wavespeech" before them, shape the subject of this final chapter—where they will be subjected to the work of a fuller interpretive operation than these pages have yet attempted.

While at work on Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf in 1924 bestowed on her diary the following confidence: "As I think, the diary writing has greatly helped my style; loosened the ligatures."^[2] The word "ligature," of course, as it has occasionally found its way into these pages, is a technical term from music: for those "ties" that bind together a phrasing, those holds and prolongations that can be readily transferred to the linkages of an alphabetic text. In this sense, stylistic advances of the kind we know Woolf to have been making at the time of The Waves might better be said less to loosen ligatures than to allow them their full play in loosening the rule of diction. The novel which Woolf came to feel was "my first work in my own style!"^[3] —and which Yeats singled out, along with Ulysses and Pound's Cantos, as one of three "typical" modernist works in which language conveys "a deluge of experience breaking over us and within us, melting limits whether of line or tint; man . . . but a swimmer, or rather the waves themselves"^[4] —is certainly one place to test the fluidity of "ligature" against the narrative crises of emotional blockage which such writing wants at one and the same time to analyze and, at least for the reader, to assuage. Reading the novel for its psychological as well as linguistic ligatures, their tenuous strain and occasional failure, can discover in Woolf a resolute but never irruptive modernism continuous with the literary history of

which she was so sensitive a reader and critic. Quietly culminating the tradition of phonic play in the English canon, without going beyond to its multilingual deconstruction as did later Joyce, a novel like The Waves offers a molding of the "masterly" to the pen of a writing woman. Woolf's resistance to the high style of the fathers often takes the form of a textural resistance, a thickening or impedance of syntax, an intrusion of the phonic into the scriptive. As inferred in the Prologue from her essay about disease and sickbed reading, Woolf at times appears to favor an ill-locutionary mode of textual processing dependent on what we might call a slowed phonic pulse. Woolf's explicitly antipatriarchal style is thus designed to render opaque the received, authoritative handling of literary diction and syntax. This is the poetry of her prose. At the same time, of course, in Shakespeare or Milton, not to mention in Father Hopkins, as of course in many of the novelists down through Forster, let alone Joyce, the practice of literary phrasing has always generated not just a facility and power but a curious phonemic fluency as well. It is just this that Woolf must work to maximize in a strategic feminist blend of homage and departure.

Separable Ligatures

It should by now be expected that the verbal phenomenon this chapter will be listening for in Woolf's The Waves isn't really there. Or, to be more exact, it is neither here nor there in any given unit of prose. It falls, or flashes, between words, as something they can be said to keep between themselves in enunciation, as, for instance, in the doubled phoneme—become ligature or bridge—between "wing" and "quiver." We have come to understand this aural, not necessarily oral, phenomenon as a mode of ambiguity—but one whose doubleness is not primarily semantic. The ambivalence in question subtends not two senses of a word but two senses of the reading body. It divides between eye and ear, between script and a tacit voicing fractionally out of phase with it, overlapping the boundaries between written words. At such moments, Woolf's prose is more permissive than expressive; it lets in as lingual disruption the stray reverberations ordinarily contained or suppressed by the marshaled effects of literary style. Woolf's phonic counterpoint to the rank and file of script, her syncopated collaboration between the written and the read, creates a poetic resonance that is at the same time a dissonance within the logic of inscription, of textuality itself. In vibrating upon the inner ear, this conceptual discord between the graphic and the phonic matter of words appears to reroute the written text through the palpable, the palpitating upper body, its passively engaged organs of articulation. Not back through the body, as if voice were the privileged ground of all language. Rather, once again we find the body providing not so much the recovered origin as the secondary medium of poetic

utterance. This chapter will return for a final consideration of the reading body as the ultimate field for the poetic irregularities of Woolf's late style. In the meantime, we will need to examine the relation of Woolf's prose to the life and death of her suicidal heroine, Rhoda, the character who is quick to figure what is most unforgiving and disruptive in temporal consciousness as a precarious linguistic terrain and to find textual metaphors for the unyielding succession of her clocked, disjunctive moments. If Woolf's prose is in any functional sense to be read as an appeal to the articulating, tactile body, then we must note the manner in which such sensual apprehension fails at the same time, even by analogy, to anchor the novel's doomed female character in a meaningfully eased sense of temporal succession. Even when a given effect cannot be semanticized, its guiding logic may still be more generally thematized: hence the culminating place of this chapter in a theory of reading drawn inevitably toward interpretation. In a diary entry dated 7 January 1931, while Woolf was at work on The Waves, she wrote, "I want to make prose move—yes, I swear, move as never before."^[5] But movement, negotiated duration, is the very thing that terrifies and defeats her character Rhoda, who is tortured by scriptlike intervals that provide no respite, torn by the knowledge that getting on with it is always a getting over of the dead spots. Rhoda's recurrent prepsychotic lapses and eventual suicide may thus seem to embody in a single fictional character the notions of linguistically based subjectivity and its traumas prevalent both in poststructuralist theory at large and in the particular bearings of its feminist (or, at least, gender-oriented) investigations. My general procedure thus far of isolated audition will now gather, provisionally, toward a more comprehensive reading of a literary narrative as it takes focus around such a distraught psychology. The reading will attempt to suggest what psycholinguistic options for the maintenance of subjectivity Woolf's feel for verbal duration as pulsional drive might seem to hold out, even as this one narrative withdraws its recurrent promise of rhythm and fluidity from the ruptured consciousness of a single female character.

In Woolf's last novel, Between the Acts (1941), the heroine, Miss La Trobe, retreats after the staging of her play into a crowded pub, where indirect discourse retreats further with her into a reverie on the nature of language. The printed version of the passage goes like this: "Words of one syllable sank down into the mud. The mud became fertile." But Woolf had originally thought to write: "Words copulated; seethed, surged. Phrases began shouldering up from the mist," with "mist" at once changed, even at this stage of composition, to the more fecund "mud."^[6] One is tempted to generalize from this passage, even though Woolf later euphemized it, to say that in Woolf's late style words shoulder each other as well as up, and in so doing, interlock, couple, give, and blend. Such an erotics of style is nowhere so directly

referred to in Woolf's published prose. Yet what implications might it have for that implicit "woman's sentence" she seems to call for in A Room of One's Own?^[7] In view of the shattering, linguistically figured experience of Rhoda, what kind of sensual charge, what yielding, what abandon, what giving way between the acts of wording, so to speak, would serve to feminize or diffuse the insistent syntactic drive of a male-preempted mother tongue? Or is this sexual differentiation, this gendering of utterance, a false lead even in Woolf's own dream of something beyond the "man's sentence"? Might language perhaps lay claim instead to a sensual component apart from gender, where the rhythm of phrasing is itself sexualized without being co-opted by one sex or the other, where words "copulate" with each other, abrasive, fertilizing, well before they can be commandeered by the forces of sexual politics?^[8] If so, this frictional pulse of language must nevertheless, in the interlinked silent soliloquies that compose the text, also be taken to compose the articulate self, to found subjectivity itself. In this structuring of story by inner discourse, The Waves demonstrates more strenuously than any other novel by Woolf how the stream of consciousness, in its expressive projections, is licensed only by a simultaneous act of the unconscious—one that must attempt, often vainly, to posit, and position, a subject behind all such verbal energy. The drama of constituted identity is thus played out within the soliloquies by the pressure of language exploiting its own clefts, ruptures, elisions, and deflections, its subjective continuity riven and recontrived, breached, appeased, or radically reconceived.

While other characters, for instance, "cannot follow any word through its changes" (42), or sense themselves "tied down with single words" (16), Bernard—alter ego for Woolf in her androgynous verbal imagination—insists, by contrast, that "we melt into each other with phrases" (16). As a novelist he is therefore "dabbling always in warm soluble words" (68–69), seeking out "the hot, molten effects," the "lava flow of sentence into sentence" (79), by which language, dissolving under its own pressure, will burn away the borders of received distinctions. Even his occasional skepticism about language manages an unconscious celebration—a recuperation by the very language of the unconscious. Toward the end of the novel, for instance, Bernard has actually come to despair over the power of words to achieve identity with what they would designate, to convey rather than just name experience. Despite its plasticity, the opacity of language always sabotages its referential intent. "There are no words" sufficient to his task, none transparent enough. "Blue, red—even they distract, even they hide with thickness instead of letting the light through" (287). Reality is masked, rather than manifested, by words. Unless, of course, at the metalinguistic level, this phonic veiling, this lexical thickening and gathering, is precisely what such words are

sometimes attempting to represent. A transegmental nexus like "with thickness" merely exaggerates the inevitable overlapping of phonemes either by an almost irresistible elision or by the labored emphasis necessary to forestall it. This offers a clue to the entire mimetic premise of Woolf's textual effort, where prose, never transparent to reality, often abstracts and reduplicates its structure in the form of words. The sort of phonemic clotting audible in "with thickness," for instance, can elsewhere suggest a merger or bleeding between semantic units, as when in an italicized interlude "all the blades of the grass were run together in one fluent green blaze " (149). Framing the whole clause is the phonemic matter of "blades" displaced to the undentalized, slightly compressed acoustic echo of "blaze," not to mention the echo of "were run" in "one." At the same time, the entire verb phrase itself, "were run" (not just "—re run"), slackened and rushed enough in enunciation, is pronounced as one swift blurred "run." At most, however, this is only an acoustic collapse into a part term of the complete phrasal verb. The lexical segmentation succumbs at its border, but no new word emerges, no third term wrung from contiguity or stretched between its scripted units.

The reflexive "with th ickness" phenomenon can, of course, also occur in mimetically or thematically irrelevant contexts, as with Jinny's fantasy of "a thin dress shot with red threads" (34)—unless this double stitch in the transegmental prose (what phonetics, again, calls "dynamic displacement") is taken to figure the metonymical anticipations of the unconscious itself. More often though, and more directly, the transegmental drifts of Woolf's text seem contextualized to enact processes homologous with their own operations, as here the oddly hued and diaphanous folds of lexical accumulation: "Our eyes seem to push through curtains of color, red, orange, umber and queer ambiguous tints" (135). In that profusion and confusion of color, the ordinary sequence would have unveiled, after red and orange, the dark orangish yellow of "amber." This expectation is suppressed in that blending of the phonemic palette which softens the overt paronomasia of "amber" grading to "ambiguous" with the earthiness of "umber." As we move through Woolf's veiling and layering of overtones, we may even suspect a cloaked pun in "curtains"—for chromatic "shades." In any case, the word "curtains" provides a metaphor for the opacities "which y ield like veils" only to remind us—by what phonetics calls the "fusion" produced by an intruded "glide" sound—of the "shielding" that must precede its own visual and, indeed, phonemic yielding. Certainly, Bernard the writer would appear to be summing up Woolf's textual experiment with a final transegmental play in the last soliloquy. His flagging faith in language suddenly recovered, we hear that "loveliness returns as one looks with all its train of phantom phrases" (287), the host word "train" coupling itself with the preceding sibilant to form upon its trace the new noun "strain."

To hear such a strain on the nexus of syntax in Woolf is to attune ourselves to a reading unpledged to the eye, an active realization of the phonotext.

"Intermitten(t/ce) Shocks"

It is at just such a juncture, such a conflicted sense of lexical juncture, that the psychology of Woolf's novel addresses and is answered by its very textuality. Woolf's prose discourse transcends the strict limits of syntax in a novel whose suicidal heroine is shackled by such limitations. In an apostrophe to life itself, Rhoda bewails "how you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and hour . . . and tossed them into the wastepaper basket"—as if they were scrap paper, without a shred of useful meaning. "Yet those were my life" (204). She lives for, and in, the interstices of duration imaged as the white blanks of a text. And she does so having addressed life itself, reified it in the vocative case, "given it face" by prosopopoeia, as if it were nothing more than the textual ground of inscription, the neutral base for the ups and downs, the starts and stops, of any particular story—as, of course, in prose fiction it is, even when consciousness is not explicitly figured as transcription. Only by hiding out in her coveted gaps, those all too infrequent remissions in the inexorable logic of sequence, can Woolf's heroine bear the rhythm of intermittency that would pummel her with sensation. Reaching her breaking point, Rhoda goes to her death to avoid the further punishing disruptions of temporal existence, the chief analogue of which, for her as well as for Woolf, is the nature of script as a series of differential notations and recurrent blanks.^[9] Rhoda, in short, cracks over the breaks between words, even while she yearns for their supposed nullity. At the same time, the metalinguistic implications of Woolf's fluent style work to bind and heal these very fissures, attempting this within a complex plot that keeps other lives in motion around the violence of Rhoda's existence and the vacancy of her unenacted death.

Concerning the irregularities of her temporal existence, Rhoda realizes that "we have invented devices for filling up the crevices and disguising these fissures" (64). The silent soliloquy continues: "So I detach the summer term. With intermittent shocks, sudden as the springs of a tiger, life emerges heaving its dark crest from the sea." Language and duration here coalesce once again in Rhoda's imagination. The temporal unit "term" becomes itself an admitted lexical term, to be etymologically and paronomastically embedded in its successor, "intermittent." A mounting acoustic density now presses finally toward the actual shearing of a lexeme. In the phrasing "dark crest," the rest between words, the fissure that separates them, loses the cutting edge of its crevice, as it were. Out of quiescence comes energy; out of submergence, emergence; out of the leveled, the heaving. That seems to be Rhoda's sense, but we also sense the seams—and the anarchic textuality of their elision—into

whose contingencies she herself cannot relax. At the chiastic juncture between "dark" and "crest" a lexical dissolution appears that allows the ear to hear in the rendered swelling a "dark rest"—a death?—brought turbulently to light, as if from the undulant langue beneath the scriptive intermittence of parole . This acoustic flux in language is not a drift with which Rhoda can synchronize her mind. Neither is she capable of managing the intermittencies of lived duration, whose shocks grow unendurable, whose lacunary spaces become at last unsurvivable. She cannot, in short, assume her fictional birthright as a function of Woolf's sliding, elided, resilient, and rippling style.

Ciphering Time

And in a formative scene we are to see why. Early in the novel's first section, at the end of a lesson in Latin grammar, Woolf shows Rhoda emerging into voice at precisely the moment of her exclusion from written discourse, her incomprehension of the lesson going forward on the blackboard and in the copybooks of her friends: "But I cannot write. I see only figures" (21). Only graphic shapes, that is, not their possible meaning. Here is the otherness of language stressed as the language of others, an accession to the symbolic whose rite of passage, whose writing, Rhoda, alone among her peers, cannot achieve. What Rhoda "cannot write," as it happens, are after all not "figures" as alphabetic characters to be bunched together into words but, instead, the cardinal "figures" of numerical ciphering, whose logic of representation and combination she cannot master. The inculcation of Latin grammar has shifted, in other words, to a lesson in arithmetic, yet the Arabic notation is for Rhoda even more of a dead language. "'Now Miss Hudson,' said Rhoda, 'has shut the book. Now the terror is beginning. Now taking her lump of chalk she draws figures, six, seven, eight, and then a cross and then a line on the blackboard'" (21). Beginning with the "six" that sums up her place alongside the major otherness in her life (her five present friends), the challenge for Rhoda is to generate continuity out of that precipitating integer within a signifying chain of numeration: 6, and then what? She cannot meet that challenge. "The figures mean nothing now," she says. "Meaning has gone. The clock ticks."

Confusing the circular clockface with the curvilinear figures of mathematical script on the board, not realizing that numbers can calibrate without containing time, Rhoda says to herself, "Look, the loop of the figure is beginning to fill with time." In so doing, it would seem to siphon off all temporality from the space Rhoda woefully inhabits. Whether belonging to the 6 or to the 8, for instance, the loop she mentions yawns as the cipher of an empty plenum, the zero of evacuation. As in all writing, only more dramatically here, Rhoda is cast outside the signifier she has been asked to set down.

But for her the loop that inscribes this fact also sketches her lack of access to the potential signified of human time. If the circuit of the hours can be drawn closed as a loop, then, as Rhoda says climactically, "I myself am outside the loop; which I now join—so—and seal up, and make entire" (21). By these words, and the letters that form them, the linguistic and mathematical parables of this episode slyly overlap in a conjoined argument about a "writing" to whose circuit the self is at best tangential. For that inscribed adverb "so" in "which I now join—so—" also contains in the second of its characters a loop of its own, the rounding off of the "o." In this context "so" becomes a quasiperformative locution that closes off by enacting the graphemic gesture it names, reflexively instancing the sealing shut of a transcribed letter rather than a described integer or loop thereof. Then, too, what the zero-loop and the circle of the letter o have in common is that for enunciation they both require a sound that is elsewhere the signifier of exclamation itself, "O." No sooner has Rhoda rounded off the loop of "so," than she recognizes how with exactly that gesture she must confront the fact that "the world is entire, and I am outside of it crying, 'Oh, save me, from being blown for ever outside the loop of time!'" (22)—as if the very O (or the chiastic reversal of "so" in the lurking pluralized O 's of "Oh, s ave") were the vocative object(s) of her prayer.

Though figured (out) by arithmetic in one sense, time is also figured in another by the rigors and irregularities of inscription. Numbers may mark time, add it up, but their own enciphering as lines and spaces, every bit as much as in linguistic writing, may also trace visual metaphors for the forward toil and voiding gaps of temporal succession. Since the loops of numbering have become by the end of the classroom passage the graphic holes in the scriptive characters themselves, since we have thus passed from arithmetical back to alphabetical writing with that symbolic but also hieroglyphic "so," a major question remains about this schoolroom lesson. Apart from its thematic links with other modes of writing as attempts to order duration, why has arithmetic been introduced in such direct psychological terms, its unmastered disjunctions staging the scenario of Rhoda's first major crisis?

Zerography

The start of an answer, before it returns us to linguistic particulars, might be found in Lacan's use of the number theory of Gottlob Frege, an attempt to bring abstract logic to the aid of psychology. To follow out the considerable complications of this line of thought, we can turn to an essay by Jacques-Alain Miller that explores at some length the applicability of Frege to Lacan in terms of the "suturing" process whereby the subject is sewn into its own discourse.^[10] Since logic demands that any object be identical to itself, each object is therefore identified singly by the number "one," naming not wholeness but the

concept of being one of itself, one with itself. If, according to Frege, "one" thus names the number assigned to the concept "identical with itself," and that concept subsumes one of everything taken singly, then what would name the concept "not identical with itself," and what object could it possibly subsume? Since this concept is a logical contradiction, it subsumes among possible objects exactly "none." Thus the zero is engendered. As the number that names a concept having no object, zero is paradoxically the first "one" among the series of numbers but is represented there not by the numeral "1" but by the arithmetical "0."

Zero thus oscillates between an inauguration and a naught, a cipher in both senses, an integer and its own negation, logically engorged by the sequence it institutes. This "zero lack," as Miller has it, produces "by the alternation of its evocation and its revocation the zero number" (30). We are reminded here of the Derridean notion of writing sous rature , designation under its own erasure as mere trace. The zero lack, counted as the 0 number, surfaces into inscription as the trace of an absence—both a void and the necessary disappearance of that void from the concept of sequence—an absence or lack placed under erasure as one among the numbers, the first. Rhoda was asked to draw, and couldn't, what she knew not, but intuited: the loop that inscribes a lack even as it introduces a unit of succession, the trace of an absence not entirely masked by a signifying presence. In his account of Frege, Miller introduces the concept of "suture" as that seaming over of the lack by a number (to start with: of nothing by zero) necessitated by the stitching together of a logic of succession. Tamed here is the lack behind not just the number one but all numbers that proceed from it. Once this zero lack has been taken up as number in order to anchor the chain, its nullity must next be neutralized from step to step in the sequence, canceled as lack "in each of the names of the numbers which are caught up in the metonymic chain of progression" (31). Hence, to add one more to any number is to subsume the zero once again in each unit of addition.

Following Lacan, Miller then asks rhetorically, "What is there to stop us from seeing in the restored relation of the zero to the series of numbers the most elementary articulation of the subject's relation to the signifying chain?" (31). This is the critical sticking point in recent rejections of suture theory as a false importation of subjectivity into the realm of number. But even if this aspect of the Lacanian project does "disfigure" Frege, as has been argued,^[11] it might well gloss Rhoda's fate in The Waves (24); Woolf's heroine makes no claims to a purity of perception, no promises to keep subjectivity out of arithmetic or any other subsequent "writing." Let us grant that zero marks the rupture where suturing must make its start. In Lacan, however, suture cannot obscure the "deconstruction" or splitting of the subject taking place in the very process of its constitution. If the subject must somehow come first in order to

institute the metonymy of the zero, suturing it, then the "I" which stands in this place can only instance the very principle "not identical with itself." We can thus summarize the paradox, and potential crisis, as follows: the subject is sutured into discourse without benefit of identity. There may even be a distant hint of this logic in the "Proteus" section of Ulysses, when Stephen conjures the telephone number that would "link back" to his Adamic source: "Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one" (38.4–5). In the shift from alphabetic to numeric characters, he seems to imagine an incremental zero between each of the cardinal numbers, even between nothing and one, while at the same time punning on the psychic emptiness ("nought, not one") which defines the supposed originary "self" at the non-self-identical point of origin.

Take again the case of Rhoda, who sees only abstract numbers on the board, knows nothing of counting, has as yet nothing to count, and therefore, in a manner of speaking, can count on nothing. In her desperation it is as if she sees the gap of the zero opening not merely before and between the sequence of numerals but actually gaping from within the loops that compose them. Mistakenly, one may say, but all too vividly, she also seems to envision an inescapable relation of the subject to the signifying system in mathematics, as well as to the chain of speech. In any such metonymic system, the self is zeroed out by what Miller calls that alternate "evocation and revocation" of the subject which is necessary in order for any "I" to enter upon succession. Rhoda's recoil from language as system, from writing as sequence, is only a measure of her expulsion from it at its point of origin. She is one of the first characters in the modern novel to recognize in this way the self's native effacement.

But what about the novel's own sense of language, of style? By mathematical analogy, a theory of displaced lack within succession may begin to elucidate the transegmental phenomenon of Woolf's acoustic wavelengths as themselves engendering a stylistics of the phonemic zero, of that ambivalent juncture between silence and sound at the edge of certain lexical bondings. This is the border between absence and the differentiations from that absence (in the first place, and thereafter) by which speech is raised upon a silence into which it repeatedly fades back. If, in other words, the zero in arithmetic must logically be held to as a preliminary as well as eliminary point of departure, and then held off from there on, canceled from integer to integer as a principle of negation and converted to one of augmentation, may we not perceive a comparable logic of intervals in transcribed speech? From word to word a ceaseless yielding to and then abolishment of phonemic lapse? Especially when the apparent phonemic interruption between words has been called the "zero allophone"?^[12] Suture may thereby preserve for semiosis those moments or nodes that seem merely to keep silent, keep silence in place, make room for

wording. In this sense suture may be found to negotiate the rules and ambiguities of lexical closure and adjunction, allowing for the very seams between words, the apparent gaps that are in fact ligatures, the nonce values covertly enounced into auditory sequence. Phonemic suture would therefore be analogous to the Lacanian paradox of a subject, to use Miller's phrase, "flickering in eclipses" (34) in its own discourse, a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't phenomenon comparable to the disappearing act of the zero in the chain of numbers. But Rhoda's is a mentality "outside the sequence" (155), we hear, exiled from it, in danger upon return of excision by it. This is the fate ultimately figured in her suicidal jump, itself elided from direct representation in the novel. Her death figures by its very narrative absence her refusal to strive for continuity any longer, an embrace of the blank space, a plunging into the gap. We have already noted how Derrida understands the textual blanc —the white as blank—as a check on all possibility of "phonic plenitude" or "presence" in writing.^[13] Rhoda's traumatic failure of acculturation into the mysteries of script bears in this sense upon Derridean notions of textual spacing, the break that is also a signifying join. Rhoda would choose to lose herself in the lateral as blank, surrendering to it as sheer lack rather than availing herself of its freeing slack between words. Woolf's novel, however, hints at another view of language, instances a verbal energy not entirely bound to the symbolic, to the file and defile of semantic succession.

R/evocalizations

In any attempt to place Woolf's verbal innovations in the representing of consciousness—and, within them, the symptomatic case of Rhoda's breakdown—against recent theoretical developments in language and psychology, the linguistic work of Julia Kristeva is particularly illuminating. As we noted in Chapter 3, there is in Kristeva's terms a semiotic activity well before any accession, or capitulation, to the symbolic—an unlettered tongue not yet given over to words, syllables, phrases, and sentences but content with the uncoded signs of rhythm and phonic free association, with vocalized harmonies and intonations. Kristeva claims that this is a "maternal" utterance of the generative hum and murmur rather than the regimented word.^[14] Such intuitive semiosis has not yet succumbed to the laws of number, division, grammar, discrete sense. It is "mobile, amorphous," hence premorphemic. Melodic rather than syntactic, this modulation of sound is the very pulse of voice before it becomes talk, pulsional though not yet circulatory. It generates a tremulous destabilization by means of which, well after the acquisition of language, instinctual and lingual energies may still erupt into the linguistic and deconstruct it, inserting in its cracks—its defaults—a reminder of voice first entering upon its motor function before the regimentation of rational

segments. When Woolf speaks about the desire to make prose "move as never before," she indeed prefigures Kristeva by imagining the range of such motion on a scale from (in Woolf's words) "chuckle" and "babble" to "rhapsody."^[15]

Exploring such fractured and fantastic gabble in Woolf, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar instance the rhythmic moaning of the ancient "crone" opposite the Regents Park Tube station in Mrs. Dalloway, for them a prototypical case of the female voice absconded—or cast out—from patriarchy. In the still pulsional flexion without articulate inflection of her "frail quivering sound," it is as if the Shakespearean seventh age of human life has again circled round to the first, the superannuated mutter at one with a child's first utterance in this "voice of no age."^[16] In their brief mention of this chanting female, this "battered woman—for she wore a skirt," Gilbert and Gubar not only follow Woolf's lead, naturally enough, about the sex of this figure (though a paragraph of the novel has gone by without determining the gender of her ancient "shape") but also seem to take Woolf at her word about the "absence of all human meaning" when they remark on her "famously enigmatic song." Yet when we first hear her voice, her song, it is said to be "of no age or sex " (my emphasis), "running weakly and shrilly and," yes, "with an absence of all human meaning into" the twice quoted two bars "ee um fah um so / foo swee too eem oo—." Even assuming the first line to be more like a rehearsed musical scale than a private code, nevertheless in the interrupted fa (or fah ) so transition, given what is soon said about this as a lament for "her lover, who had been dead these centuries," we may well hear the anagrammatic plangency of "so far." Taken in this way, the passage would not represent some weird introversion of the female voice in a spurt of decrepit baby talk but almost, instead, a distillation of Woolf's own syllabic fluencies in the impersonal alembic of an entirely desocialized voice. In any event, the fact that "she crooned" of love appears to contradict the narrator's own mention of "no human meaning" or, at least, to suggest the possibility of a significance without ordinary signification. This latter possibility seems quite likely to be impinging upon the incoherencies in the second line of her refrain. Indeed, it would match exactly my sense of the junctural leaps of lexical succession in Woolf's own late style to discover even in the nonce-sense of this toothless voicing, this tired speaking in tongues, an encrypted poetry beneath the cackle, perhaps even a "rhapsody" beneath the "babble," some bent remembrance of a season long past when this now-withered sybil of the semiotic itself could once have found it in her strength as well as in her heart to have been "foo" (full?), maybe even foolishly, "swee(t) to(o) (h)eem (wh)oo . . ." In this "running weakly . . . into each other" of her broken sounds, the phonemic ligature at "swee t" may indeed seem to mark in its loosened, exhausted bond the bittersweet trace of a lost liaison: Molly's "swee . . . tsong" in refrain.

Out of the prose format as well as the narrative sequence of Mrs. Dalloway, this indented, isolated poetry breaks free, "the voice of an ancient spring" not only spurting up amid the plotted sounds of London commerce but blurting out its semiotic chaos within the symbolic monopoly of prose discourse. My sense is that the latent energy of similar irruptions, though not stationed so visibly on the page, churns frequently beneath Woolf's prose from Mrs. Dalloway on. Call Woolf's access to such language (along with that of the male modernists Kristeva discusses) an erosion of the partriarchal order and ordering of language or not, in any case it is just the received regime of segmentation that Woolf's style around its edges, precisely around its lexical edges, resists. Rhoda's fate in The Waves is simply that she can neither maintain this resistance nor survive without it. How then does Woolf sustain it, and what does the voice of such resistance actually sound like?

Sproken Words

One guess is that it will be felt to take its wavering tonalities from some primal flow, from the "ancient spring" of desire in Mrs. Dalloway, for instance. Such is an energy glimpsed elsewhere only under constraint or erasure, flickering, as it were, only in eclipses, in the crevices of the unsaid. All writing can be said to start from scratch, from the first mark of inscription, but textuality as a system must reach back axiomatically to the initiating blank encroached upon by that first scratch, recapturing the differential authorization of absence from word to word. When that differentiating blank starts slipping along the chain of signification, however, an effect, say, like Woolf's "whi(ch / sh)(y)ield" skid may emerge, a lexical enjambment to be heard and not seen. In Rhoda's terms, this phonic event deflects the "crevice" of script with the "device" of inflection. Such sliding or splaying—such dialogizing of the monosyllable—is induced by an oblique friction between the lexeme and the phoneme that, to borrow Rhoda's verb, can be said to fissure into a semantic redistribution without thereby erasing the original sense. This is the give and so take of succession, the lending as blending, that might ultimately help to construe sequence as continuity—for all its wounding lapses. Bernard knows that "for pain words are lacking" (263), with a play on the idea of "lack" itself, since to communicate such pain there should be "cries, cracks" and—Rhoda's own two obsessional words again—"fissures, whiteness," in short, an "interference with the sense of time, of space" (263), including the time of lexical spacing. Bernard knows also that this "lacking" in words applies as well to pain's supposed contrary, desire fulfilled in love, since there too he yearns "for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet [in part metrical feet, an inference highlighted by transeg-

mental alliteration (of f eet)] on the pavement" (238). One suspects that this "little language" of the emotions, microphonically calibrated along the contours of such s/lack, can be glimpsed, even across the (debatably audible) comma, in the differential ambivalence of a plosive drift at "lovers use, broken words." A similar example, also in connection with the passage from thought into language, and again triggered by plosive ambiguity, surfaces in the silent voicings of the text's other maker of texts, the poet Neville, who remarks on how "we sit silent, or perhaps be thinking us of some trifle, suddenly spea k" (145). Shortly before the spe cluster, there emerges a suballiterating and just barely perceptible liaison between the closing sibilant of the conjectural "perhaps" and the prefix of the archaically reflexive "bethinking us." Put another way: if there emerges any such unbinding link, it would provide the first surge of denotation for that "speaking" which is to bubble up from this crucible of thought and which, when it does, will of necessity be an attempt to articulate a continuity across the lags of consciousness. With or without the transegmental emphasis, what we hear discoursed upon is the origin of all discourse, what we might call the very pressure to speech.

Addicted as Bernard is to "solacing myself with words" (184) in just this way, many of his laments find amelioration in their very wording. Even the "lacking" of his depleted self-image may turn on the play of an acoustic irony, a phonemic halftone, as well as on a visual recognition. This we discover, farther along in his final soliloquy, when we come to the novel's second mirror scene of sorts, answering to Rhoda's earlier terrified avoidance of the mirror at school. Hiding behind Susan as if to occlude the identification with her own gaze, Rhoda boasts in her evasion: "I am not here. I have no face" (43). Since she has already been painfully initiated into the symbolic through her schoolroom routines, the mirror would have only revealed this faceless non-entity to her as well—but not as a contingent, rather as an exigent, fact of subjective (em)placement. When the "I" is still an image, not yet a linguistic subject, it can still seem authorized as object by perception; once passed from the imaginary into the symbolic, however, once uttered as "I," it is effaced as signified object, even if there were no one blocking this particular mirror. Furthermore, the vexed locative in Rhoda's "here I have no face" becomes in the double process of record and reception—here then, in the story's subvocal transcriptions, here now in our reading of them—a metatextual admission; the adverbial shifter "here" designates a textualized speech act (however silent) that evacuates presence not only from any and all mirrors but from the two-dimensional plane of once written, presently read page as well.

In Bernard's climactic mirror scene, by contrast to Rhoda under cover of Susan, there is no one blocking his line of sight—and no one in it at all, perhaps, but himself as Other. Whether or not Bernard is still in the company

of a temporary companion at his last supper, during which his inner voice has been buzzing with reverie and regret, in any case he is at least in part addressing his own reflection as alter ego when he catches his image in the restaurant mirror. "Oh, but there is your face. I catch your eye. I, who had been thinking myself so vast, a temple, a church, a whole universe, unconfined and capable of being everywhere on the verge of things and here too, am now nothing but what you see—an elderly man, rather heavy, grey above the ears, who (I see myself in the glass) leans one elbow on the table, and holds in his left hand a glass of old brandy" (292). For all the suspense of Woolf's typical periodic grammar, dilating here until all at once strategically contracted, the most striking suspension in this passage is not syntactic at all but phonemic. Across the homophonic echo between "eye" and "I" at the turn of the second into the third sentence—between an organ of subjectivity and the name of a subject, each the other's object—is a difference within repetition that constitutes the self on the very trace of an otherness, whether that otherness be a second-person addressee (again, the text by now seems deliberately ambiguous about this dinner partner's presence) or the self's own image. This sense of repetition as simultaneously a phonic and psychic trace is, we might note, an effect achieved in redrafting. After "I catch your eye," Woolf had originally written "There is no escape. No no immunity. No end it seems to the eternal struggle." At which point she continued with the initially unpunctuated "I who had been thinking."^[17] Even the comma after "I" in revision sets the pronoun not only off but back, fractionally more attracted into the vicinity of the homophonic precursor "eye."

When the redrafted version of this passage hits upon the contracted "I catch your eye. I," the scene's narrated mirroring seems translated to script as an echo. The imaginary oneness, as it were, the self's unitary image in the mirror (or the eye of another caught and held) cedes to an inevitable symbolic divergence at just the point where script is necessary to differentiate sound from like sound. Identity is thus the function of a pun diverged from mere repetition, a word broken loose from its double. The phrasing verges, as we hear, on yet another transegmental blend. But, of course, what phonetics accounts for as the y -glide of the syllable "eye" creates a kind of disyllabic diphthong that must be renewed rather than merely prolonged in order to engender its unelidable repetition as the pronoun "I." Self-and-Other remains a dichotomy instituted by the breakdown of the imaginary field into its symbolic differentials. What is more, this primal dichotomy is held in place by a phonemic integrity that resists elision in the name of those very boundaries in Woolf that so often need alleviation. If the phonemic law of transegmental gravitation is a rule to be honored exclusively in the breach—in or across the repeated breach between words—then Bernard's language in this

passage has worked to hold tense against this breach, if just barely. As much as in Lacan, therefore, the recuperation of an at least hypothetical subject can be tracked down to an analogy with the smallest increments of pertinent linguistic opposition, the difference that founds—or, in Bernard's case, finds again—the language of identity.

In an earlier wordplay that straddled the crucial distinction in The Waves between an inhabitable and a merely serviceable language, between words that fashion and those that can merely express a self, Bernard had written "I shall enter my phrases" (36), meaning both that he will compose them and that they will encompass him. This is the Woolfian ideal given scope in one character while denied to his suicidal counterpart, the woman who is blown forever outside the figures she is called upon to draw. Rhoda's suicidal slippage reverses Bernard's success in inching to identity through phrase. For Rhoda's battle against the rigidity of sequence, a language would be needed that loosened script back to the looped play and continuity of vocal overtones, a language whose necessity is theorized and even exemplified in the novel's own streaming of consciousness—and preserved, if fitfully, in the voice of the novelist hero through to the end. The transegmental phenomenon would be one such gesture of a softened differential writing, its junctures more forgiving, its borderlines relaxed. When, near the close, an awesome "space" of wordless silence is suddenly "cleared" like a vacuum in Bernard's consciousness, its yawning void does not appall or swallow him up, as it might have Rhoda. Words, failing, have simply fled, and the lifelong creature of phrase enters this new acoustic vacuum at the very moment when "the rhythm stopped: the rhymes and the hummings" (283). Described here, of course, is a dead space that Bernard must somehow have gotten past in order even to put it this way in retrospect, since once again we hear the lava flow of his gift for phrasing. By a syncopation of spacing and acoustic pacing, and in what phonology would call a loosening diphthong sequence, the disyllabic "rhyth(u)m" is at first glance syllabically dispersed into the "rhymes" and "the hummings" of which it is comprised. That final collocation of article and gerund also reveals a phonetic prolongation of thm 's lingering hum into the faintly engaged transegmental elision of "th(e h) ummings," hinting in turn at its own part-echo of the "th(r)ummed" vocal cords that produce it. Without this echo there is only the drift of phonation itself, tending toward a sound—"thumming"—that is not even a word, only a vocalized murmur. Spanned here is a breathing space between words whose medial aspiration does not aspire to articulate discourse, an ever-deferred echo from the undifferentiated matrix of speech, a mimesis of semiosis itself in embryo. It is the onomatopoetic rhythm of signification without the sign. It is Woolf the writer, in the inwardly voiced consciousness of her delegated verbal artist Bernard, silently speaking

in tongues across the bridged abyss of the phonemic zero, across a silence pregnant with meaning but still undelivered of it.

For Kristeva this rhythm and thrum would exemplify the virtual definition of the poetic quotient of literary language, the irruption of the underlying semiotic (in Kristeva's special sense) into a symbolic system mounted to contain and repress it. Such irruption is the "effraction"^[18] or breaching of the signifying chain by phonic play, the breaking and entering of syntax by the subversive laxities of a sublexical music. It sounds intriguingly close to what Woolf imagined, without exampling, in A Room of One's Own, an uninhibited language—beyond the "man's sentence"—whose diction would involve "those unsaid or half said words, which form themselves, no more palpably than the shadows of moths" (88). The novelist of such a sentence would have "to hold her breath," would have to get at somehow, without necessarily getting down, those "words that are hardly syllabled yet" (88), words whose ordering not only breaks up the masculinist assurance of classic sentence but the syntagmatic "sequence" itself. All of this is to come about, according to Woolf, in order to bring to voice, if not to ordinary articulation, a woman's expressive potential within the proper androgyny of art. Rhoda, her surrogate, is scapegoated to the fragility of this hope. She has trouble learning to add, trouble learning to write, because she cannot abide even those analogies in discourse for the constitution of subjectivity, those irruptive equivalents, that she finds also, and more piercingly, in the existential discontinuities of a life in time. To sustain herself across the "shocks" of such "intermittence"—the shock waves of consciousness—Rhoda would have to submit, without succumbing, to something akin to that freedom of "blank pages, gaps, borders, spaces and silence, holes in discourse" which recent French feminism has seen as the touchstone of écriture féminine .^[19] In fearful recoil from the rigidity of the symbolic order, in full recognition of the need for some controlled preschizophrenic release through what Kristeva calls the "pulverization" (51) of discursive language, Rhoda, incapable of this release, vanishes instead into the temporal blank of death, a vanished death at that.

Bernard, who can write, who can even finally accept his own phasing out within the very articulation by which he abides, comes through ordeal to another fate: the return to continuity. Rhoda, by contrast, leaves the novel as the most extravagant avatar of discontinuity in modern fiction, her death scene syncopated out of plot entirely in Bernard's elegiac reconstruction. We sense the voice of the Other, typical of the heightening and thickening of Woolf's language in the rendering of death,^[20] breaking through his soliloquizing retrospect: "I . . . feel the rush of the wind of her flight when she leapt" (289). Sensing only intermittency and rupture, Rhoda leaves the novel in one of those white spaces so terribly familiar to her, an unspecified gap in the text that is

only retroactively filled in by Bernard's mournful retrospect. In her last set of speeches in the penultimate section of the novel, Rhoda seems to sum up her lifelong attitude toward temporality and its sonic contours by regretting "how short a time silence lasts" (226), itself an irrefutable rule of phonic juncture. The female character at once drained by endurance and rebuked by vacancy is to encounter in her pending death the only sustained silence Woolf has to offer her: a lapse in representation itself, a long stretch without any mention. Yet in Bernard's ultimate allusion to her death, many pages later, its violence can just barely be heard to reemerge in the blanc, the blank, the empowered white lateral, of the very language that elsewhere mirrors for Rhoda the punitive disruptions of life. Beyond the precipitant cadence charted by those doubled "of"s ("the rush of the wind of her flight"), what is so grueling and at the same time elusive about the phrasing is the flickering displacement between the "rush" and the preposition that places it, that ascribes it to Rhoda. A fissure into which falls, or is plunged by its own momentum, the doomed self in flight: gone out of sight in a fatal crevice wedged open within time itself, a hole incapable of any but merely verbal suturing. Between "rush" and "of," in other words, in quite another word, flashes in eclipse the very "shoving" off that brings her to her death. Overheard, that is, in the interstice, flung between monosyllables, is the phantom reshuffling: "rush of ." Though the verb "shove" can be intransitive, it usually takes an object; yet the ghostly hint of some unspoken external agency here—someone shoving her —remains just that, phantasmal. It is immediately internalized by the fact of self-murder, the spectral assault vanished in a sort of schizoid rift, or phonemic schism, within the linguistic play itself. Though ungrammatical, because too fast for the logic of syntax, nevertheless this recasting of the lateral does at the same time implicitly name the push of succession, finally become fatal, which characterizes the metonymic chain and permits the transegmental drift in the first place. Dying by ellipsis, Rhoda is mourned by ligature—as the very repeal of intermittency that might have offered her reprieve.

Catching That D/rift

And so, once again, we are prompted to suspect that the form of the novel models a continuity that can at any given moment fail its characters. The crevices that permit language, if they are to be traversed rather than merely vanished into, terrify the astylistic consciousness of Rhoda, who suffers a virtual paralysis of syntax. Woolf's style is there to pose an alternative from within its own diagnosis of this condition. The primal disjuncture of the self or split subject, in its passage into the symbolic, is ordinarily not just mirrored in the separation anxiety of inaugural self-image but mirrored also, and forever after, in the gaps of language itself, those severances that not only violate the

imaginary but eventuate in the symbolic, that explode wholeness into the parts and particles of speech. Continuity, at the textual level, can emerge only from a sense of language that assuages these gaps, turns them to segues, stretches across their rents a harmonizing reverberation, cleaves them only with the leavings of a previous sound still carried on the air of silence. This is the sound that makes the white spaces between hour and hour, number and number, word and word, a never utterly evacuated space, a duration no more voided than the ambiguous blankness of white noise. Since Woolf's Rhoda is unable to claim her right to a mother tongue instinct with rhythmic ligature, what galls and daunts her about utterance taken up into the regime and regimen of spacing, about "writing" in the rudimentary form of numbering, for instance, is that it feels, it looks, so much like the psychic life she has come to suffer, all manic fits and starts and stops, arbitrary, abrupt, and discontinuous, an oscillation of blacks with lacks. The other side of that "little language" such as lovers might use, gaping at times across the surface of its "s/broken words," is thus the voice of death: the lateral as void. Woolf's verbal fluidity cannot directly counter or sanitize this view, only open it to other rhythmic possibilities, releasing paranoia into relaxation and capaciousness.

But to what extent, finally, is this writing a body language—and whose? In our promised return to this question, we can also usefully return to Kristeva. In an essay closely related to her work in Revolution in Poetic Language, she borrows Mallarmé's phrase, "the vibratory uncertainty of language," to cover in part those moments in "a strongly ambivalent if not polymorphic semantics " when "phonemes reacquire what the sounds lost in becoming the sounds of a given language"; when, that is, "they reacquire the topography of the body which reproduces itself in them."^[21] Though the return of this nurturant and "maternal" phonic vibrancy in adult language, including literary style, is not necessarily a gendered phenomenon, it is not sexless either. Rather, it seems more like a polymorphous eroticism of the voice escaped for a split second from the circuit of lack and its designations in ordinary discourse. Unlike signifying language, this pulsional body language in a sense satisfies its own desire, not by naming it but by utterance itself, a vocal play ultimately devolved upon the alert, the listening reader. This does not, of course, return the reader to some prelinguistic euphoria, but it does set up a sensory overload whose momentary force is a kind of giddy synesthesia between eye and ear. Touched by this, writing and its reading emerge once more at generative odds with each other, phonetic impulses slipping out from under the visible rhythm of script. As with Joyce's "earsighted view," this is again a partial discipherment of writing into phonotext, a process going forward in and across that reading which produces its text glancingly off the ear.

It is Woolf's more radical peer in feminist modernism, Gertrude Stein, who

recalls our own point of departure in this book in the "hear with eyes" sonnet—when she stakes her sense of literary language on the reciprocal definition of graphic and phonic energies in the poems versus performance pieces of the "Shakespeherian rag." For in the cryptic wordiness of her formulation, "Shakespeare's plays and Shakespeare's sonnets even when they are all here are different to the eye and ear. Words next to each other are different to the eye and ear. . . . Words next to each other make a sound to the eye and the ear. With which you hear."^[22] Even when the words are "all here," as for instance here before us as text rather than there on stage, we are all ears for them. Yet what they offer is not sound but the occasion thereof. The point bears repeating, as Stein does in her next paragraph: "Oh yes with which you do hear" (125; my emphasis). She has also made this explicit a few paragraphs earlier in a wording that seems a direct allusion to Shakespeare's (Bottom's) "The eye has not heard" speech, since for her "words next to each other . . . sound different to the eye that hears them or the ear that sees them." The "sound" they are later said to make is not audited, then, but provides instead the material, the "with which" and the wherewithal, of visual hearing: in other words, evocalization.

In Woolf's case, the polymorphemics of reading generated by the unique "sounding different" of graphonic evocalization—stretched unsteadily across the shifting granules of a syntax in dissolution—is likely to recall the emphasis on the androgynous jouissance of the body in Roland Barthes, where an ecstatic interference with the logic of transmitted meaning releases language beyond all clear-cut oppositions, including the dichotomy male/female. The year before Kristeva published Revolution in Poetic Language, Barthes brought The Pleasure of the Text to very similar conclusions, more explicit if not more specific. He called there for a "writing aloud " that "is not expressive; it leaves expression to the pheno-text, to the regular god of communication; it belongs to the geno-text, to significance"^[23] —to what Kristeva would call semiosis. It may be maternal in origin but for Barthes its effects are neither male nor female. "Pleasure is a neuter (the most perverse form of the demoniac)," a categorical "suspension" that rejects the presumption of the clearly signified for "the sumptuous rank of the signifier" (65). In the penultimate paragraph of his book, however, Barthes concedes too hastily, perhaps, that such "vocal writing (which is nothing like speech) is not practiced," even though he wants to "talk about it as though it existed." On the contrary, I think we can find it, in a unique and allusive concentration, on almost every page of Woolf's late fictional prose—find it as a writing that amounts to a virtual rereading of the whole English literary tradition, its sensuist impulses and its missed chances. For Barthes such writing would be an "erotic mixture of timbre and language . . . the art of guiding one's body," sustained primarily by

"pulsional incidents." Given Empson's sense, as we saw in Chapter 3, that the polyvalent skein of poetic language "has the character of the flesh of an organism,"^[24] for Barthes—as, in a sense, for Louis Marin as well—that organism is no metaphor, but ourselves. Sent into play by the opposing tugs of an ambiguity all its own, the tensions in Woolf's style between script and sound attain frequently, it would seem, to what Barthes envisions as a "language lined with flesh" (66). If Woolf's writing does not produce the sustained "carnal stereophony" of which he dreams, nevertheless it does depend, at least intermittently, upon "the grain of the voice"—and this often against the grain of the script, sounded between and across discrete words, luxuriating in the precincts of the betwixt. What leads Barthes to think of such writing as not yet having been realized is doubtlessly that, in pure form, it would have to replace all normative procedures of meaning by an undercoded "signifying" at the level of the "geno-text." Defined as "not phonological but phonetic," this sounded writing would unharness a lingual energy not fully bound back into phonemes, into syllables, into words. When functioning as part of narrative prose, however, with all semiotic impulses in tow to a continuous symbolic organization, unspoken vocalizing could only remain a surplus of the discourse—in excess of, and in tension with, the very language that releases and impels it.

If we provisionally attend in The Waves to this dialectic between discursive language and the undulations of a semiotic pulse, we can further see how such verbal interplay foregrounds again the logic of Woolf's text in its arrangement as a network of soliloquies. The quoted passages are not spoken really, yet they can still be said to be "said," as one might say something to oneself rather than declare it. The "speeches" are not whispered or muted enunciations either, not uttered at all or even intoned, but somehow inflected—inflected into a zone between verbalization and vocalization, between phrased impression and overheard expression. In other novels, interior monologue, when dictated to the page in the format of dialogue, is often interrupted by the predication "felt," as in "felt Bernard," say, or "felt Rhoda." Though not signaled in this way, what is "felt" in the monologues of The Waves, as in the italicized descriptions that take their flavor from them, becomes sensory as well as sentient, the sinuous heft of words half-bodied into articulation along a given line of thought. Barthes talks of "writing aloud," but in our reception of these speeches we encounter a vocality without sound. In its unique tension between graphic and phonic signification, however, the transegmental drift does seem particularly apt as a conjectural (hardly exclusive) illustration of what Barthes might mean to infer by a vocalized inscription. Woolf, believing she had "not yet mastered the speaking voice" in The Waves, planned extensive revision of the novel, to be guided by "reading much of it aloud, like poetry."^[25] Without

transcribing any such authorial voicing as a recoverable dimension of the novel, of course, she nevertheless charged the text with the latency of just this enunciation — displaced upon her readers' reading to themselves.

What I am suggesting about Woolf's language is that it subscribes in its lingering junctures to the liquid transitions of an unprogrammatic music, even as it necessarily takes part in the cohesion, even the wit, of a reading effect. In the ripple of lexical overlap, there is a perceptible but not immediately processed ebb to the phonic flow. Between the written and the reread, between two scripted units as they oscillate in the release of a cryptic third term, opens a moment of extraneous pulsation — before the regularizing provided even by conceptual ambiguity. This moment is not produced by an Edenic innocence speaking through the text, trailing filaments of prephonemic glory, but it does precipitate a certain freedom between beats of the reading brain. It does so, however, not by repositioning the deconstructed textual subject as the consolidated "I" of the reader. Rather, it transmits textual energy along the momentarily ungendered and nonsignifying body of a vocal agent without identity, whose subvocal cooperation alone spans the recesses within that combined cerebration and subjectivity known as reading. To remark this in Woolf is in no way to champion the unfallen prattle of infancy, and certainly not to associate women's verbal originality with such a vocal sphere. It is simply to respect the sensual determinants of one kind of verbal play, one kind of freedom from the given, the dictated, the pre-scribed: a freedom that speaks, speaks up, against the normal constraints of discourse, if only for the split second before a second thought sets in. Between the instant when an antiphone is heard and the immediate regrouping of its inscribed or imagined letters into a new semantic claimant, between truant sound and its segmentally de-cisive assimilation to meaning, fall away the sign-bound operations of a reading subject into the palpable fund of sheer, of shearing, sound.

We are not induced by the cooperation of Woolf's language and narrative format in The Waves to think that we somehow hear the characters behind their transcribed words but, rather, that our own private reading takes place somewhere between thinking (reading) and hearing (voicing). To apply Barthes's term "vocal writing" (Pleasure of the Text, 67) without qualification here would certainly be misleading. The passive enunciation of a reader must be distinguished from anything that goes on in the act of writing. Given Barthes's stress elsewhere on the writerly text as cooperative with its active, productive reading, his account of "writing aloud" seems too quick to conflate textual generation with its processed effects. Surely "the art of guiding one's body" in such "writing" must be understood in part as the art that guides our own bodies (silent, silenced) in the act of reading. Voice no more inheres in such writing, conferring presence, than in any other text. The felt voicing of

Woolf's style is not a residuum of script, nor, in reverse, is the writing a deposit of voice, an impress of body. Containing nothing of organic origin inherent in it, Woolf's writing — epitomized by her deployment of the transegmental drift — does, however, incur the body through a disturbance in the process of reception, an "evocalization" of the reader's own physical presence. On the page, the characters are gone from us and from themselves, even as an existence kindred to theirs finds silent voice in the sympathetic vibrations of another reading — of an other, reading. It is through no embodiment other than the disposition of the reading body, then, that the oscillating drift of Woolf's style can serve to flesh out her text. "Oh yes," to recapitulate Stein, "with which you do hear." Throwing ourselves into The Waves in this way, we yet again realize the phonotext, recognize and activate it, as a true theater of reading.