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).