"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.