1. See, especially, Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984); and two special issues of Representations --"Sexuality and the Social Body," Representations, no. 14 (Spring 1986), and "The Cultural Display of the Body," Representations, no. 17 (Winter 1987).

2. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 120; hereafter cited in the text.

3. W. H. Auden, Introduction to A Selection from the Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1944), p. x.

4. I use the vernacular "plus" here (rather than the debated phonemic signal /+/), and indeed the term "segmental," in a way that warrants some explanation at the outset. Concerning the history of the junctural phoneme--or /+/--devised by linguists to account for both the internal and external borders of lexical units and the long-standing arguments on its utility, see Stephen R. Anderson, Phonology in the Twentieth Century: Theories of Rules and Theories of Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 298-304. In view of my investigations into the workings of ambiguous juncture, I repeat a revealing anecdote rehearsed by Anderson concerning Leonard Bloomfield's desire to save for phonology the concept of "the word," insisting as he did on "grammatical boundaries as potential conditioning factors" for those "subphonemic differences" by which word division is linguistically secured: "Bloomfield, Hoijer, and Hockett lunching together in Chicago. Hockett proposed that when it is impossible to hear word-boundary there is no justification for representing it by a space (or otherwise) in a phonetic transcription. Hoijer, with Bloomfield's obvious continue

approval, says that that is just where the space is most needed. Subject changed" (p. 267). Given the urgency of junctural signaling, I should further clarify at the start that I deploy the coined term trans-segmental in these pages primarily in reference to the formative procedure known as "segmentation of the chain" in structural linguistics--closely akin to syllabic demarcation--rather than to the notion of the unitary phonemic "segment" (the single distinctive sound feature) and its "suprasegmental" complements. For a discussion of lexical "segmentation" as distinguished from "segmental elements"--in other words, the morphemic versus phonemic categories--see Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, trans. Catherine Porter (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 17 and 176, respectively. It remains the case, however, that a sliding phoneme transferred across scripted word boundaries--or, in other terms, putatively displacing the /+/ of external juncture--might be said not only to confuse the morphological "segmentation" within or between words but to produce a trans-formation, as it were, of its own "segmental" elementation of the phonemic cluster, now "pertinently opposed" in one lexical frame of reference, now in another. My coinage can thus be taken to evoke both definitions of "segmentality" after all.

5. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1960), 8:19, 22; hereafter cited by page number in the text.

6. Gilles Deleuze, "The Schizophrenic and Language: Surface and Depth in Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud," in Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); hereafter cited by page number in the text. This essay originally appeared in Logique du sens by Gilles Deleuze, translated and condensed in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979).

7. Roland Barthes, "Listening," in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985), p. 245; hereafter cited in the text.

8. Although Barthes's "The Grain of the Voice" is collected along with "Listening" (see n.7 above) in the subsection entitled "Music's Body," it has explicit bearing on the somatic dimension of writing as well.

9. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984 [originally published in French in 1974]).

10. Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974 [originally published in French in 1970]), especially pp. 3-6. An earlier suggestion of this concept appears in his Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967 [originally published in French in 1953]), where Barthes continue

explains in his terms "why there is room, between a language and a style, for another formal reality: writing" (p. 13).

11. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974 [originally published in French in 1967]), p. 59.

12. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970 [originally published in French in 1966]); hereafter cited in the text. What follows is an extremely condensed summary drawn from the whole sweep of Foucault's argument.

13. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), p. 92. In "Silent Reading in Antiquity," Journal of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 9 (1968): 421-35, Bernard M. W. Knox, beginning with the famous anecdote about Augustine and Ambrose, explains Augustine's astonishment at silent reading as the result in good part of being "an African provincial from a poor family" (p. 422). (The passages quoted from Augustine in my text are from the Confessions, trans. Edward B. Pusey [New York: Random House, 1949], bk. 6, pp. 98-99). Knox proceeds to demonstrate--against previous scholarly suppositions--that the practice of silent reading must have been fairly widely practiced in fourth- and fifth-century Athens and in Italian imperial circles of the same period. Yet Knox does not deny that earlier readers relied on the predominantly oral perception of textual meaning. From a less rigorously historical perspective, H. J. Chaytor's influential study "Reading and Writing" in From Script to Print (Cambridge: Heffer, 1945) implies that the reader's primary dependence on voice lasted well into the medieval period, so that "the common manner of reading to oneself meant whispering or muttering" (p. 14). Chaytor quotes a medieval scholastic on "the interior force of reading," which was often beleaguered--indeed by "devils"--who, making him pronounce the words out loud, denied him complete mental comprehension (p. 15). Even for the modern habits of fully interiorized reading, Chaytor follows certain perceptual studies in positing "a half-felt tendency to articulate the word, a feeling known to psychology as a 'kinesthetic' or 'speech-motor' image" (p. 5), adding the curious anecdotal remark: "It is said that some doctors forbid patients with severe throat affections [ sic ] to read, because silent reading provokes motions of the vocal organs, though the reader may not be conscious of them" (p. 6).

Drawing on philological research, McLuhan pursues the implications of an original oral reading in view of the subsequent erasure of "scribal culture" ( Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 108) by the advent of "typographic man." He stresses that only "the phonetic alphabet makes a break between eye and ear, between semantic meaning and visual code; and thus only phonetic writing has the power to translate man from the tribal to the civilized sphere, to give him an eye for an ear" (p. 27), a transition involving in part, from the seventeenth century forward, the "levelling of inflexion [ sic ] and of wordplay" (p. 233). continue

Beginning as my study does with Shakespeare, my claim for this same modern epoch is that literature itself, among the mass productions of language, keeps these eccentric aural contours in mind (though safely out of sight) within the normalizing tendencies of print culture.

14. Hegel's Philosophy of Mind (pt. 3 of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 1830), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), p. 218.

15. See Paul Saenger, "Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society," Viator 13 (1982): 316-414, an essay demonstrating that texts "regularly divided into words" began to be common on the continent "over the course of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries" (p. 377), a century later than in England and Ireland. "Saxon and Celtic priests," Saenger maintains, "living on the fringes of what had been the Roman Empire, had a weak grasp of Latin and needed spaces between words to recognize them in order to pronounce liturgical texts correctly as they read aloud" (p. 377). But he also claims that word breaks permitted the spread of silent reading, transcription, and composition: "It is therefore no coincidence that the first textual evidence to document the practice of silence in the scriptorium dates from the British Isles when word-blocks and word division became common in Insular manuscripts" (p. 378). About the gradual effects of the "inner solitude" (p. 411) of silent reading on composition (rather than self-dictation), Saenger notes that it was not until the fifteenth century that "the word écrire became synonymous with composition" (p. 407). A brief overall sketch of the history of punctuation in regard to the shift from orality to literacy has recently been provided by James Thorpe in The Sense of Style: Reading English Prose (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Press, 1987), pp. 17-36, in connection with his emphasis throughout on the oral "performance" of expository prose.

16. "Most twelfth- and thirteenth-century miniatures continued to show people reading in groups. To read in groups was to read aloud; to read alone was to mumble. When a single reader was portrayed, a dove was placed at his ear representing the voice of God, again suggesting audial communication" (Saenger, "Silent Reading," pp. 379-80).

17. See L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 2d ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), p. 201, where this passage from chapter 43 of the Satyricon is discussed.

18. Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, p. 209.

19. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), p. 132. My own sense of even subvocal text production is closer to the kinetic microshocks suggested by Walter J. Ong, S.J., in his chapter "Auditory Synthesis: Word as Event" in The Presence of the Word (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967), where he insists that "words are powerful. We take them in tiny doses, a syllable at a time" (p. 112). It is just such a principle that explains why in silently reading the first clause of continue

this very sentence from Ong, without a decisive spoken inflection to disambiguate its twofold "power," we may well momentarily read "take them in" as a verb phrase, before revising its third monosyllable so that it merely attaches instead, as preposition, to the not quite synonymous "take them [by way of]," the designated "reception" in this case not conveying the idiomatic sense of internalization. In the larger framework of his discussion, the sensory presencing effected by language in "oral-aural" culture is not, on my account, somehow reproduced by texts but instead made available for the first and only time in the latent sound waves of silent reading. If this constitutes a resistance to the "visualist" regime from the "verbomotor" instincts (pp. 174-75), it is accomplished nonetheless without that resacralization of the word implied at times in Ong's discussion.

20. Virginia Woolf, "On Being Ill," Collected Essays, 4 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967), 4:200.

21. John Russell, Style in Modern British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 212.

22. Stanley Fish, "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics," New Literary History 2, no. 1 (Autumn 1970): 123-62; hereafter cited in the text. (Fish's essay was reprinted as the appendix to Self-Consuming Artifacts [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972].) In something like a poststructuralist updating of reader-response theory for the 1986 presidential address to the Modern Language Association (carried in PMLA 102, no. 3 [May 1987]: 281-91), J. Hillis Miller called for a return to the material specificity of reading. In an epoch of cultural critique, Miller finds that "a frontier topic for literary study these days is precisely [the] distinction between base and superstructure" (p. 288). He further insists: "In literary study the first material base is the words on the page in the unique, unrepeatable time of an actual reading" (p. 288). Left at that, however, his definition begs--or, anyway, leaves open--a crucial question. For within his formulation inheres, unacknowledged, a further distinction, one to which the present study is directed. In nominating the "words on the page" as the material base, Miller's subsequent preposition, "in," also further positions them. They are not, his language might be taken to imply, just there to be read but there only in the reading. That "unique, unrepeatable time of an actual reading" during ("in") which these words are realized is part of the "first material base," then, in the sense of providing the field for its activation by a complementary "materiality," a body, of considerably more weight and gravity than any such words on whatever pages. To refashion Miller's definition in terms already developed in the preceding discussion, we may stress again that in "literary study" the "compound material base" of any reading "is the words on the page" only as they are produced as text--materialized, corporealized--by the silent or speaking body across the "unrepeatable time" of each engaged and generative reading. break

23. Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 156.

1. This Eliotian line gives the title to a recent essay, and volume, by Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London: Methuen, 1986). Drawing on Barthes's notions of textual jouissance and Bakhtin's theories of dialogism, Hawkes uses Eliot's line as a filter through which to rehear Shakespearean dramatic poetry as a "play-text" full of "paralinguistic" signals that depend upon "the manner of their voicing , over and above their overt meaning" (p. 79). The quasi-musical power of the Shakespearean text, as hinted by Eliot, is designed to invoke our articulatory investment in a manner that, Hawkes closes his essay by stressing, "turns us, even as we read, from spectators into participants" (p. 90). Though his emphasis is on the performance text, his generalizations about literary language at large bear directly on the work of my opening chapter: "As the site of competition between different ways of reading, the play-text stands, not as a different kind of text, but as the occasion which calls into question some of our presuppositions concerning the activity of reading all texts. That is its value" (p. 77).

2. Stephen Booth, An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 174-86, cited hereafter as ESS, and Stephen Booth, ed., Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 155-58. Subsequent quotations from the sonnets are from this edition; Booth's commentary on the sonnets is cited hereafter, by page number, as SS .

3. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Lost" (London: Macmillan, 1967).

4. Booth is harking back here to Roman Jakobson and Lawrence G. Jones, Shakespeare's Verbal Art in "Th' Expence of Spirit" (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), where the authors borrow the phrase "figure of sound" from the journals of Gerard Manley Hopkins to account for the way in which "perjured" in the first quatrain of sonnet 129 chimes against "purpose" in the second, "proposed" in the third (p. 304). Booth takes comparable note in sonnet 15 of the echoes "among When, When, and Then, among consider, perceive, conceit, and con-, con-, and incon- " (p. 157).

5. Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Essays on the Language of Literature, ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), p. 303.

6. Booth has also taken counsel in this vein from David I. Masson, "Free Phonetic Patterns in Shakespeare's Sonnets," Neophilologus 37 (October 1954): 277-89 (quoted in SS, p. 193). For other essays by Masson, see below, Chapter 2, n. 12. break

7. See Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), and Text Production, trans. Terese Lyons (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); hereafter cited, as TP, in the text.

8. See Chapter 3, n. 8.

9. See Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, chap. 3, with its subsections "Expansion" and "Conversion," pp. 47-80.

10. Paul de Man, "Hypogram and Inscription: Michael Riffaterre's Poetics of Reading," Diacritics 11 (Winter 1981): 17-35.

11. Geoffrey H. Hartman, "The Voice of the Shuttle: Language from the Point of View of Literature," in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays, 1958-1970 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 337-55. "Reading a poem is like walking on silence" (p. 342), writes Hartman, and this leads him to consider various eruptions of semantic value out of the most silent of all components in the textual membrane, the nonce value of juncture: "Juncture is simply a space, a breathing space: phonetically it has zero value, like a caesura. But precisely because it is such a mini-phenomenon, it dramatizes the differential or, as de Saussure calls it, diacritical relation of sound to meaning" (p. 341). Within three pages, however, Hartman has moved on to another figure not so directly bound up with a strictly linguistic silence of diacritical opposition: "From juncture, usually represented by a slash, it is only a step to the grammatical figure of tmesis, best represented by a dash" (p. 344). I assume it to be quite in the spirit of Hartman's pathbreaking essay not necessarily to follow him in taking such a "step" until the full suggestiveness of junctural "micropoetics" itself has been exhausted. Similarly, in his book-length meditation on Derrida, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), Hartman singles out, within the whole range of ambiguity, the way in which "Derrida relies heavily on one device of coupure, that of tmesis or variable juncture" (p. 22). Indeed, in precisely the mode of Hartman's analyses in "The Voice of the Shuttle" (its title alluded to on the penultimate page of Saving the Text ), a reading of Donne's lines about the debated moment of death--where some lookers-on say "now, and some say no,"--is used as an instance of Derridean "thanatopraxis," whereby the "mere breathing space between 'now' and 'no' is the economy of death as a principle of phonemics, the subtlest 'glas' [death knell]" (p. 26).

12. In The Force of Poetry (New York: Oxford, 1984), Ricks borrows the term "flicker of hesitation" (p. 98) from Donald Davie to describe the passing ambivalence of certain enjambed lines, but he then applies the notion far more widely to those "intended flickers of warring possibilities" (269) that animate the "potent absences" (p. 268) of the "anti-pun."

13. Jan G. Kooij, Ambiguity in Natural Language: An Investigation of Certain Problems in Linguistic Description (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1971), p. 19; see also my discussion of related matters concerning phonetic "fusion" at the start of Chapter 3. break

14. Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning, trans. John Mapham (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978), p. 11.

15. Henry Fielding, A Journey from This World to the Next, vol. 5 of Works (London: John Bumpus, 1822), p. 39.

16. All quotations from Shakespeare's plays are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974); citations are to scene, line, and act.

17. Dell Hymes, "Phonological Aspects of Style: Some English Sonnets," in Essays on the Language of Literature (see n. 5 above), pp. 33-53.

18. According to Booth in one of his glosses on the sonnets, the negative connotation of censure --meaning, to judge unfavorably --was "only just emerging in Shakespeare's time," which might mean that Hamlet's pun has a neutral as well as an ironically antonymic face. Booth would perhaps be more likely than elsewhere to credit such an example of segmental sleight, since he himself indulges in a nonetymological dissection of the verb's appearance in sonnet 148: "Note the accidental presence in censures of the sounds of two words generally pertinent to the sonnet's topic: 'sense' and 'sure'" ( SS, p. 520). The instance in Hamlet goes one step further by rendering the punning matrix grammatical. A similar homophonic interplay between two words and one is taken up, though as an isolated instance, by Margaret W. Ferguson in " Hamlet: Letters and Spirits," in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), when she turns to the editorially vexed response of Laertes to Claudius after the latter's description of the "gentleman of Normandy" (4.7.81)--Laertes' exclamation, "Upon my life, Lamord" (4.7.91). Erupting here is a proper name (Lamond in the second quarto) which Ferguson follows Harold Jenkins (the Arden editor) and Harry Levin in reading as a pun on la Mort (p. 301)--thus personifying death, and doing so through what I would call a transegmental disengagement of monosyllabic integers. She even suggests that the utterance doubles as well for l'amour, a transformation which would involve the standard French variety of those elisions elsewhere on view in the English lexical displacements of Shakespearean verse.

19. See Chapter 4, p. 158, for Keats's allusive revision of these lines.

20. Fausto Cercignani's Shakespeare's Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981) is the first definitive advance over Helge Kökeritz's Shakespeare's Pronunciation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953). On the basis of Cercignani's findings, it does seem probable that such modern English rhymes as Keats's of "adieu" with "songs forever new" ("Ode on a Grecian Urn") or Tennyson's of "adieu" with "true" ( In Memoriam ) would have been less likely in Elizabethan English than Shakespeare's own "adieu"/"Montague" from 3 Henry VI (4.8.29), derived more directly from the word's French origin. Cercignani attempts to correct the tendency in Kökeritz to place undue weight on internal echoes rather than on rhymes as philological evidence, precisely because paronomastic effects are often more continue

effective--and hence more likely--when subtle and inexact. This logic, provided with the specific evidence about "adieu" as "adyew," may militate against a perfect pun in the line. But the same logic would argue all the more in favor of a homophonic slippage: the wavering relevance of an anti-pun comparable to a collapsed or superimposed paronomasia. In the present case, therefore, of "into a dew" (as a possible supralexical play on "adieu"), whatever a philological reconstruction takes away from this line of the play conceived as performance text, it gives back to a subsequent moment. Quoting the ghost's last admonition, Hamlet enjoins himself: "Now to my word: / It is 'Adieu, adieu, remember me'" (1.5.110-11). Given the received philological wisdom about "adieu" rhyming with "Montague" or "due" (rather than with dew ), the comma in "adieu, remember" is likely to give way to the supralexical shadow of a doubt: "adieu, a- d'you remember me (?)." In general, though, Cercignani's explicit discussion is aimed at disproving certain previously assumed puns, including at one point a segmental wordplay that must be disallowed because of too great a difference between the sounds transcribed by o: "As for common-come on 1.1.57-9, it cannot be accepted as an actually intended jingle" (p. 121). The same applies (though without specific mention) to wordplay I had always assumed to be operating (as it does in any modern production) in Hamlet's first encounter with the ghost: "Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, / Bring with thee airs from heaven or blast from hell " (1.4.40-41). To the modern ear, the opening phrase would thus, in a vanishing moment--the split second of a splintered lexeme--name by homophone the antithetical possibility of origin here under inquiry: "spirit of hell." Yet Cercignani's researches suggest that the Shakespearean, or late Middle English, vowel sound in "health" was related more to the long e of "heal."

21. It was Karen Cunningham who first called my attention to this sibilant anti-pun.

22. Cercignani, Shakespeare's Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation , p. 61.

23. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 191.

24. Pun intended, this line happened to provide the title for an historicist lecture by Lisa Jardine at Princeton University (Spring 1988) on Othello and Elizabethan adultery laws. She opened by noting that this salacious aside in Othello , unlike its counterpart in Troilus , is never glossed in editions of the text.

25. In Godard's 1987 King Lear the disjoint play of sound against visual track helps foreground the explicitly vexed distinction between "image" and a narrower sense of analogy, and this as indirectly related to the play's own thematics of withheld speech. The "violent silence" of Cordelia (so described in Godard's own English-speaking voice-over) is contrasted with the sovereignty of a king named (in intertitle) "1-E-A-R." This is arguably Shakespeare's own pun, aural as well as graphic, since Lear is first addressed by name in the play during Kent's attempt to check his rash plan for the division of continue

the kingdom; once rebuffed, Kent tries again for a hearing from the "Roya l L ear" (1.1.139; emphasis added). In Godard's film, a further route into the text's metalinguistic density is opened up in a later intertitle playing both typographically (again) and also phonemically this time on the transegmental drift of "King Lear: a cLEARing" (with the velar / h / becoming /k/). Finally, the sound track itself engages a transegmental ambiguity in its summary account of the nonrepresentational "image" confined neither to mimesis nor to metaphor: "An image is true only because it is born outside of all limitation and all resemblance." Hearing this voice-over as a strictly oral text, we know that what we may well alternatively have heard is "all imitation" rather than "all limitation," the two negatively interchangeable in their supposed transcendence by "image."

26. See Anthony Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (London: Methuen, 1983), a study which resembles Foucault's broad periodizing of discourse. Designated by Easthope as a founding moment for subjectivity in the lyric, Shakespeare also marks an early stage on the road toward modernism. Similarly Joel Fineman, in Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), sees the constitution of subjectivity as a verbal field negotiated in the development of the sonnets from a specular to a linguistic paradigm or, in other words, from presentation to representation.

1. Mentioned in passing by James Milroy in The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Andre Deutsch, 1977). This is one piece of Milroy's evidence in his critique of Hopkins's editor, Robert Bridges, whose dismissal of such effects proves that he "did not really know how to read the poems (with the ear)" (p. 133).

2. See William K. Wimsatt, "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason," in The Verbal Icon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), pp. 153-66; Hugh Kenner, "Pope's Reasonable Rhymes," ELH 41, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 74-88; and John Hollander, Rhyme's Reason (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981).

3. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination , trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 277.

4. Debra Fried, "Rhyme Puns," in On Puns: The Foundations of Letters , ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 83-99. Her essay is prefaced with a brief overview by Culler, whose intriguing title, "The Call of the Phoneme" (from Fried's essay, p. 88), seems less to the point of his comments than the pun on "letters" in his subtitle. Phonemic matters are given no particular stress in his remarks, except in the most general sense of homophonic punning, nor are they explored per se in any of the later essays to the extent to which Debra Fried takes them up. Nonetheless, the notion of the continue

reader as "juxtologist," highlighted in Culler's introduction (pp. 8-9) and developed in the essay by R. A. Shoaf that coins the term, "The Play of Puns in Late Middle English Poetry: Concerning Juxtology" (pp. 44-61; esp. p. 60), might well have particular bearing on the phonemic sequencing of the syntagmatic chain--if, that is, the term were taken to refer more literally, more narrowly, to textual juxtapositions and junctures rather than merely to intertextual convergences and semantic collisions. Pursuing this emphasis, Fried at one point raises important doubts about Anthony Easthope's claim in Poetry as Discourse ([London: Methuen, 1983], pp. 110-21) that (in her paraphrase) "Augustan poetics reins in the dangerous materiality of words" by deploying end rhyme so that its sound play "is consistently written off to convention," a sense of the phonic "so scrupulously licensed that it cannot affect its neighbors," even though they are "equally a jostling of like and unlike sounds" (p. 88). Fried doubts that "the infectious, babbling echolalia of the phoneme" can be so easily "put . . . into quarantine." So, of course, do I in this chapter and this book, the former isolating in particular rhyme's own inability to "inoculate" its most nearly adjacent "neighbors" not only against associated sound play but against more of the very same rhyming span.

5. Published well before Rhyme's Reason , John Hollander's earlier consideration of phonetic iteration, "Rhyme and the True Calling of Words," is reprinted in Vision and Resonance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), a collection concerned, as the title implies, with the difference between the "poem in the eye" and the "poem in the ear." Hollander illustrates his version of accretive echo with lyrics from Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart that rhyme across three words, "wreck to me"/"neck to me," and then across the syllables of a single lexical unit, "appendectomy" (p. 126). He connects this phonic comedy to such fractured rhyming as Marianne Moore's "could not/pilot-" (p. 128), where the lexically and syntactically requisite ing after "pilot-" is enjambed onto the next line. He does not, however, examine the opposite sort of phonemic enjambment between the gap of words themselves, rather than lines, an overlap that bonds further echoing matter to already rhyming syllables. When he argues, for instance, that rhymes like nick/flick/tick/lick tend to imply a "hypothetical morpheme" like ick ("I shall not follow linguistics in calling it the 'phonestheme'" [p. 120], he adds in parentheses), his commentary stops short of following out the complementary process by which single phonemes or phonemic clusters--without the quasi-morphological, quasi-syllabic nature of a false root like ick --might repeatedly invade from the left and extend the rhyming nucleus, whether or not the accretion could stand alone as a monosyllable. This is what I have called a polyphonemic rhyming, a pattern with no particular allegiance to syllabic demarcation.

6. John Hollander, "Dallying Nicely With Words: Poetic Linguistics," in The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature , ed. Nigel Fabb, Derek Attridge, Alan Durant, and Colin MacCabe (New York: continue

Methuen, 1987), p. 129 (rpt. in Hollander, Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988], pp. 180-93).

7. John Hollander, The Figure of Echo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), p. 32.

8. Walter Redfern, Puns (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 100.

9. Wimsatt, "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason," p. 164; Kenner, "Pope's Reasonable Rhymes," p. 80.

10. Donald Wesling, The Chances of Rhyme: Device and Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), p. 21.

11. In correspondence about these lines from Pope, Marie Borroff has suggested a "kinaesthetic" dimension as well to what I hear as a latent drift from "maxims bring" to "maxims spring." She calls attention, in a thematizable upswing or upspring, to the phonetic "rise" within sibilance from the heavier /z/ of "maxims" to the /s/ of "spring," this differential enunciation in keeping with the comparable voiced-to-unvoiced shift from /b/ of "bring" to the lighter /p/ of "spring."

12. David I. Masson, "Free Phonetic Patterns in Shakespeare's Sonnets," Neophilologus 37 (October 1954): 277-89. See also Masson, "The Keatsian Incantation: A Study in Phonetic Patterning," in John Keats: A Reassessment , ed. Kenneth Muir (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1958), pp. 159-80.

13. The example from Beppo appears in Susan Wolfson's "Couplets, Self, and The Corsair, " Studies in Romanticism 27 (Winter 1988): 507 n. 26. I am grateful to the author's correspondence for the Don Juan example, and to Jocelyn Marsh for pointing out that the manuscript version of the first of these rhyming lines was originally "And all mouths were applied unto all ears!"--with "all mouths" changed to the eliding "all lips" as if to anticipate the reverse slippage at "all (l)ears."

14. Answering Kingsley Amis's charges (in "The Curious Elf: A Note on Rhyme in Keats," Essays in Criticism I [1951]: 189-92) against this "hopelessly inadequate," telltale "Cockney" rhyme, William Keach (in "Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style," Studies in Romanticism 25, no. 2 [Summer 1986]) concentrates on the predecessor of this rhyme, as cited by Amis as well, in defending the political ramifications of Keats's virtually decentered notion of self in Endymion . The early rhyme, with no transegmental "justification" this time: "The journey homeward to habitual self / A mad pursuing of the fog-born elf" (276-77). Keach on its behalf: "Readers more interested than Amis apparently was in Keats's brooding about the self as a construct at once deceiving in its significance and yet hauntingly persistent may find that the rhyming precipitation of 'elf' out of 'self' (it's like a miniature of Blake's 'spectre' and 'emanation'), far from being 'hopelessly inadequate,' is intrinsic to Keats's thinking through the issue of poetic subjectivity" (p. 192). In my reading of the subsequent, more "conservative" rhyme from the Night- soft

ingale ode, it is more the deceptive nature of fancy, as it inflects but cannot wholly encompass the poetic self, that must be not just precipitated out but separated off from identity.

15. Donald Reiman, Shelley's "The Triumph of Life": A Critical Study (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), p. 97 n. 15.

16. William Keach, Shelley's Style (New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 200.

17. Milroy, The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins, p. 148.

18. James Joyce, "A Flower Given to My Daughter," Collected Poems (New York: Viking, 1957), p. 49.

19. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Vintage, 1962), 1. 736; the four-canto poem that begins this work hereafter cited by line number; the subsequent "Commentary" by page number.

20. John Hollander, "Summer Day," New Yorker, 14 August 1989, p. 28.

1. R.-M. S. Heffner, General Phonetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1950), pp. 175-202. The types of such phonetic "fusion" include "dynamic displacement" ("dynamic" implying the sequential pressure of "motor context"), as when a phrase like "all but universal" tends to be pronounced as "all bu(t) tuniversal"; "doubling" (where the "back stroke" of one word becomes the "beat stroke" of the next), as in "ha ve v arious" or "an d d egrees"; "reduction" (an unwritten contraction), as in "extr ao rdinary" when enunciated as a five- rather than six-syllable word, or in "th' eternal"; "omission" (the contractive forms of aphaeresis, syncope, and apocope when graphically indicated by apostrophe); "glides" (related to "dynamic displacement," but involving the introduction of an adventitious transitional sound), as with "don't ch ew" for "don't you"; "linking" (a bridging of hiatus either through retention or insertion of a consonant), as in the strict form of such French liaisons as raconte-t-on des histoires; "adaptive changes" (shifts that alter the enunciation of a speech sound either to match--by anticipation or continuance--or sometimes to avoid reduplicating a proximate sound), a tendency often related to "doubling" in consonant conjunctions like "hi p b oots," "re d t ie," or "bi g c ake." In Heffner's own account of these categories, however, no likelihood emerges of any real morphophonemic--hence lexical, hence semantic--ambiguity, unless one could imagine a context, say, in which "Don't chew?" (the negative imperative cast into an interrogative fragment) could be misheard for "Don't you?" According to Heffner's meticulous phonetic transcriptions, the phenomenon of "fusion" is ultimately prevented between "speech measures, or phrasal groups" (p. 200), inhibited by the nature of speech rhythm itself; and between morphemes by the self-signaling "initial element" (p. 201), pronounced as it could never be in the position of a terminal feature (a phonetic difference, therefore, within the same functional phoneme). The "cessation of the commingling of movement patterns at the continue

end of a speech measure" (p. 200)--the arrest of fusion--thus also obtains at the boundaries of a morpheme; most potential fusions are therefore suspended by "intonational and accentual patterns" (p. 201)--what linguistics elsewhere calls "suprasegmental" features--if not by clear phonetic distinction.

2. Ibid., p. 3.

1. R.-M. S. Heffner, General Phonetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1950), pp. 175-202. The types of such phonetic "fusion" include "dynamic displacement" ("dynamic" implying the sequential pressure of "motor context"), as when a phrase like "all but universal" tends to be pronounced as "all bu(t) tuniversal"; "doubling" (where the "back stroke" of one word becomes the "beat stroke" of the next), as in "ha ve v arious" or "an d d egrees"; "reduction" (an unwritten contraction), as in "extr ao rdinary" when enunciated as a five- rather than six-syllable word, or in "th' eternal"; "omission" (the contractive forms of aphaeresis, syncope, and apocope when graphically indicated by apostrophe); "glides" (related to "dynamic displacement," but involving the introduction of an adventitious transitional sound), as with "don't ch ew" for "don't you"; "linking" (a bridging of hiatus either through retention or insertion of a consonant), as in the strict form of such French liaisons as raconte-t-on des histoires; "adaptive changes" (shifts that alter the enunciation of a speech sound either to match--by anticipation or continuance--or sometimes to avoid reduplicating a proximate sound), a tendency often related to "doubling" in consonant conjunctions like "hi p b oots," "re d t ie," or "bi g c ake." In Heffner's own account of these categories, however, no likelihood emerges of any real morphophonemic--hence lexical, hence semantic--ambiguity, unless one could imagine a context, say, in which "Don't chew?" (the negative imperative cast into an interrogative fragment) could be misheard for "Don't you?" According to Heffner's meticulous phonetic transcriptions, the phenomenon of "fusion" is ultimately prevented between "speech measures, or phrasal groups" (p. 200), inhibited by the nature of speech rhythm itself; and between morphemes by the self-signaling "initial element" (p. 201), pronounced as it could never be in the position of a terminal feature (a phonetic difference, therefore, within the same functional phoneme). The "cessation of the commingling of movement patterns at the continue

end of a speech measure" (p. 200)--the arrest of fusion--thus also obtains at the boundaries of a morpheme; most potential fusions are therefore suspended by "intonational and accentual patterns" (p. 201)--what linguistics elsewhere calls "suprasegmental" features--if not by clear phonetic distinction.

2. Ibid., p. 3.

3. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 63, quoting Saussure (see Course, p. 66, cited in n. 6 below).

4. In her Translator's Preface to Of Grammatology, Gayatri Spivak stresses this as the very principle of the written trace, or gramme, "the name of the sign 'sous rature,'" calling "grammatology" the "science of the 'sous rature'" (1).

5. Jacques Derrida, "Différance," in Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 132. In engaging with the Derridean sense of such issues, I am attempting a very different level of textual reception than the more traditional approach, for instance, of Raymond Chapman in The Treatment of Sounds in Language and Literature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, in association with Andre Deutsch, 1984). With a dozen chapters devoted to the linguistic representation of sounds, he only then turns to the sound of representation itself, the phonological aspect of scriptive signification. In his chapter "The Sound of Literature," he admits that the "implications" of the question "how far is sound inherent in written language" do "lead towards areas of literary criticism which would go far beyond the present study" (p. 210). In regard to the "counterweighting of possibilities" (p. 217) between eye and ear, he offers a brief section on how the "study of rhyme is illuminating for the relationship between sight and sound in language" (p. 215), with subsequent commentary on onomatopoetic devices and closing remarks on poetry in oral performance.

6. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Press, 1983).

7. See Jean Starobinski, Words upon Words: The Anagrams of Ferdinand de Saussure, trans. Olivia Emmet (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), and Sylvère Lotringer, "The Game of the Name," Diacritics (Summer 1973): 2-9, reviewing the French edition of Starobinski on Saussure.

8. The generative model of this eccentric theory anticipates the tenets of a more sustained later methodology. Whereas Saussure saw an incantatory or ritual motive behind the encrypted name of the god or hero, Michael Riffaterre substitutes an entirely secularized logic of explanation in his encoded semiotics of poetry. As we have seen, the indirectly voiced core of the text is not, for Riffaterre, a "theme word" necessarily but often a fuller sense of a thematic idea. Literary language is in this way found to develop motifs that cannot speak their names--because to do so directly would be to fall from originality, to lapse into cliché. The unsaid matrix of a poetic text surfaces in continue

paragrammatic variants that are the virtual equivalent of Saussure's "hypogram" (a term Riffaterre also uses at certain points). Further, the "model" in Riffaterre--first and guiding form of the variant, which sets a pattern for ensuing conversions and expansions of the theme--would seem to have derived its own model from Saussure's "mannequin" or locus princeps: "a tightly drawn sequence of words which one can designate as especially consecrated to that name" ( Words upon Words, p. 33)--consecrated, that is, to the theme word. The "mannequin" closely resembles what a phonologist like Masson calls the "bracket," with the Saussurean example " Prima qui es " yielding up, for instance, the first and densest suggestion of the name "Priamades." Framed or bracketed by the mannequin, in this case, are the structuring pieces of the name, modules known as "syllabograms." Paul de Man has also mentioned, more briefly, the derivation of Riffaterrean semiotics from the Saussurean anagrams in his omnibus review of Riffaterre's work, "Hypogram and Inscription: Michael Riffaterre's Poetics of Reading," Diacritics 11 (Winter 1981): 24.

9. To borrow Saussure's own example of a diphone as base unit (with annexed monophones), the coded cluster TAE can be given by TA + E, T + AE, or TA + AE; but since it cannot be given TA + TE--which would require the letters "to be amalgamated outside time, as could be done with two simultaneous colors" ( Words upon Words, p. 30)--neither can the diphone be overthrown altogether, as would be the case with T + A + E.

10. Gilles Deleuze, "The Schizophrenic and Language: Surface and Depth in Lewis Carroll and Antonin Artaud," in Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 329.

11. Otto Jespersen, Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin (New York: Macmillan, 1922), p. 8. In line with childhood's illiterate transformations of the language as studied by Jespersen, one must confess that solecisms based on junctural ambiguity can creep into almost any written utterance; indeed, it was only in a late redrafting of one of the present chapters that I finally noticed how I had taken down in phonemic dictation from myself--and many times reread without correction--"making could on."

12. This seems to me what Barthes is suggesting as well when he asks rhetorically, "Is not the entire space of the voice an infinite space?"--adding, "No doubt this was the meaning of Saussure's work on anagrams" ("The Grain of the Voice," p. 272; see my Prologue n. 8).

13. Jonathan Culler, Ferdinand de Saussure, rev. ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 134.

14. Jacques Derrida, Signéponge/Signsponge, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984).

15. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 240. break

16. Walter Redfern, Puns (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), pp. 78-79, quoting Leiris's collection, Mots sans mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).

17. Paul de Man, "Shelley Disfigured," in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Seabury, 1979), p. 60.

18. Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. Charles Ruas (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1986), pp. 38, 31. Foucault explores another example from Chiquenaude (1990), where the multiple meaning of doublure (understudy, lining, rehearsal) underwrites a more complex homophonic play (p. 27). After the early mention of a theatrical piece called Red Claw the Pirate (Forban talon rouge), the play's title returns, through metamorphic recirculation, as the phonemic doublet fort pantalon rouge . As with billard/pillard, the "metagram" turns once again on the alternative plosives /b/ and /p/ from the phonemic paradigm of secondary articulation, but it projects them onto the syntagmatic axis as latently copresent alternatives this time, the trace of alternation itself. Quite by coincidence, the most sustained Rousselian experiment I know since his writing, in a relentlessly farcical vein, is the Nabokov-like parody of a found manuscript dutifully transcribed and meticulously glossed without the fictionalized pedantic editor recognizing that the recovered verse fragments under examination are nothing more than Mother Goose rhymes in ludicrous French phonetic transcriptions. The absurd contortions of glides, elisions, and liaisons in Courtlandt H. K. van Rooten's Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames (New York: Grossman, 1967) amounts to a checklist of effects by which the Rousselian "metagram" was negotiated. Here Humpty-Dumpty is rechristened "Un petit d'un petit" (p. 1), Peter, Peter, Pumpkin-Eater, emerges as "Pis-terre, pisterre / Pomme qui n'y terre" (p. 8), Jack and Jill are fused in "Chacun Gilles" (p. 11), the Baker's Man buried under "Pas de caïque, pas de caïque, bécasse, mâne" (p. 17), and the whole rounded off with "TIENS, DE" in place of "The End."

19. Raymond Roussel, La doublure (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1963), pp. 45, 46.

20. See frame enlargements from Duchamp's Anemic Cinema in Arturo Schwartz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), pp. 319-28.

21. Marcel Duchamp, Rrose Sélavy (Paris, 1939).

22. Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), p. 102.

23. It is a muted form of this same aural preoccupation that appears implicitly in Virginia Woolf's essay, "On Being Ill," her approach to the alogical force of poetic sonority at which we glanced briefly in the Prologue (see n. 20). When Woolf quotes two lines of Rimbaud without further specification of effect--" O saisons ô châteaux / Quelle âme est sans défauts? "--who, she asks rhetorically, "shall rationalize the charm?" (p. 200). Not Leiris, certainly not Roussel. But their work can nonetheless be taken to continue

analyze, even to systematize, the mysterious seduction of such phrasing. In doing so, such work, as if according to the very definition of modernism, places under intensive scrutiny the irrational machinations of language itself out of which poetry from any period has always drawn a part of its force. In Woolf's example from Rimbaud, we find the Leiris-like internal rhymes of " saisons " with " est sans, " the latter, when reversed, a sly chiastic belling of the former (given the liaison of "sans est"). Exaggerating the euphonious recurrence of poetry in general, it would be more like the radical modernism of Roussel to tease the double liaison of " Quelle âme est sans " into an irrelevant semantic echo of la maison --in contrast, somehow, to " châteaux ." In this line of willful homophonic effects, there also appears in Leiris's glossary just the sort of encompassing lexical slippages that--if separated by other textual material inserted to "process" the transition from one to the other--might well have been found in one of Roussel's experimental exercises: "AMEN--âme mène" (p. 74); "OCEAN--eux et ans" (p. 102). In the closed system of langue, with its fluid depths like an opaque "lagune" indeed (as Leiris's earlier transform suggests), one of the most accurate "glosses" on a word--as act of wording rather than as single lexeme--is always, as Leiris joins Roussel in suggesting, the transliteration of its constituent phonemes, the parsing of its material base.

24. These are terms drawn from Peter Brooks's chapter "Freud's Masterplot" in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984), pp. 90-112.

25. De Man, "Hypogram and Inscription," p. 22. The example given of Riffaterre's "phenomenal"--hence, in part phonological--criterion: "The French novelist and occasional theoretician Ricardou is reproved for claiming to discover the anagram 'gold' in Poe's phrase 'right h old ing,' despite the fact that the 'g' in 'right' is not sounded in English."

26. Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 16.

27. Julia Kristeva, "The Semiotic and the Symbolic," in Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Without relying on the Kristevan notion of the semiotic "chora," Geoffrey H. Hartman, in Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1981), muses on the "intransitive intimacy" of certain verbal formations that bespeak "the wish to encrypt in oneself the womb--the maternal (paternal) source--of verbalization[,] . . . of chatter and babble developing into verbal thought" (p. 144).

28. From a series of lectures at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in Spring 1987, based on Kittler's Grammophon, Film, Typewriter (Berlin: Brinkmann and Bose, 1986), soon to be published in translation by the University of Minnesota Press. The dangers of transegmental slippage--for "practical" rather than poetic communication--are confirmed by an experience I once had in a noisy restaurant. I was trying to explain Kittler's thesis to continue

a friend who hadn't encountered his work, but over the din, I sounded, it seems, as though I was discussing a critic with the unfortunate name of Friedrich Hitler.

29. See Denis Donoghue, Ferocious Alphabets (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

30. John Vernon, Poetry and the Body (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979).

31. Ake W. Edfeldt, Silent Speech and Silent Reading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 13.

32. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

33. In chapters focused on Stendhal's autobiography, Louis Marin posits the nature of discourse as "necessarily auto-bio-phonic " and speculates on the "ruses" and "machinations" by which space is made therein--the space of the "silence of the saying within the said"--for that unique narrational condition of discourse "called auto-bio- graphic "; see "The Autobiographical Interruption: About Stendhal's Life of Henry Brulard, " MLN 93 (1978): 599-600. This essay appears as part of the untranslated book La voix excommuniée: essais de mémoire (Paris: Galilée, 1981). By "interruption" in the English title of this material, Marin intends two related meanings of "syncopation" at the lexical level: "excision of a syllable from a word" and "liaison" in the musical sense, "the end of a note in one section . . . heard at the same time as the beginning of a note belonging to the opposite section" (p. 614). Exploring the insistent refrain of certain dates in the Stendhal text, for instance, Marin reads the slippage between " deux cent cinquante " and " cinquante " as one of the revealing "rhythmic movements woven with phonic signifiers in the written text," movements by which, presumably, the excommunicated "saying" returns to haunt the autobiographical memorial of the "said." The interplay between phonic and graphic signifiers is even more apparent in another section of La voix excommuniée previously appearing in English translation, "The 'I' as Autobiographical Eye: Reading Notes on a Few Pages of Stendhal's Life of Henry Brulard " ( October 9 [Summer 1979]: 65-79), where a vertical list of women's names by which the memoirist charts the arc of his desire, when later rewritten horizontally and by initials only, presents the reader with a vexing but fertile instance of the unreadable. What we encounter are "pure graphemes, mere signifiers without signifieds" (p. 75) that can only be spelled, not apprehended as words. The "two directions" of attention posed by the text at this point, in its contradictory pull between the strictly visual and the actively verbal, tend to emphasize by default the inherence of the phonic within the graphic manifestation of the latter. According to Marin, the reader resists the sheerly pictographic response, even in the vicinity of an actual drawing inserted into the text, and attempts rather to "stammer" (p. 75) out something like a continuous verbal processing: "To take now the other direction, that of continue

reading, what we read, or better what we hear when trying to read the letters as a word or as a name, what is uttered in the mumbling in which, suddenly and for a moment, our reading is deconstructed, is the mother's name stuttered by a child's voice" (p. 76). In the letters "v A A M A A A M c g A" (as capitalized by Marin), that is, an enunciation of a 's and m 's tends to produce a phonetic anagram as well as a babbling pronunciation of that "auto-biophonic" sign at the origin of all life-writing. Though Marin does not mention Kristeva, we may find in the Stendhal text, under Marin's voicing eye, a genuinely strategic emergence of the maternal semiotic in syncopation with the symbolic order of script.

Marin's approach comes even closer to the procedures of this book when he pursues moments of lexical fissure and suture within ordinary vocabular, as well as alphabetical and numerical, sequencing. Working from a cryptic and abbreviated inscription that Stendhal recalls writing on the inside of his belt--"J. vais voirla 5." for "je vais avoir la cinquantaine" ( La voix, p. 119)--Marin submits it to a detailed linguistic analysis concerned with the syllabic "amputation" and "disappearance" (p. 124) it involves, as well as to a generalizing analysis about the "secret" recoding of script by voice in the reading of autobiography. Here the Stendhal text itself lends occasion to the most minute lexical and syntactic instances of that "syncopation" (the technical syncope, or dropped letter, as well as "liaison") and "reprise" which provide the master-tropes of Marin's theoretical introduction (pp. 21-22). The latter term is cited from Littré's dictionary as, among other more common acceptations, the "action of mending or darning torn or cut material" in which "the needle uses the thread not yet sewn by the first stitch . . . so that the eye does not perceive the joining of the thread " ("The 'I' as Autobiographical Eye," p. 66; Marin's emphasis). This invisible seaming of invisible rendings, this tear and repair in the weave of the graphic text, is the work of the voice otherwise excommuniée . This approach through "what we hear when trying to read" is to be even more intensively deployed later in La voix excommuniée for a listening "deconstructed" to the point of eliding the differentials of gender itself, in ways which resemble the logic of "liaison" in the verbal experiments of Virginia Woolf (see Chapter 7, n.8).

34. Lucette Finas, Le bruit d'Iris (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), p. 190. As does Donoghue, I will give my own brief selections from Finas in translation.

35. See below, Chapter 7, under the subheading "Catching That D/rift."

36. Christian Prigent, "Reading in Every State," Enclitic 6, no. 2 (Fall 1982): 44-49.

37. Roland Barthes, "Question de tempo," Preface to Le bruit d'Iris, pp. 7-11. English excerpts are from the translation by Annwyl Williams, "A Question of Tempo," Oxford Literary Review 5, nos. 1-2 (1982): 150-53.

38. Christopher Norris, in Derrida (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), understands supplementation in the readily available sense, for instance, of a so-called supplement to an encyclopedia or dictionary continue

(Norris's example is the OED, p. 110). Named thereby is that extra yet necessary extension of the thing without which it would have no claim on the encyclopedic in the first place: the additive that definitively completes.

39. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).

40. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947), p. 45.

41. See below, Chapter 6, under the subheading "Phonemanology."

1. Robert O. Evans, Milton's Elisions (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1966), p. 2.

2. See a related sense of punning on "Angels ken" in Edward Le Comte, A Dictionary of Puns in Milton's English Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 10.

3. Le Comte, following Fowler's gloss (ibid., p. 38).

4. Thomas Vogler, "Re: Naming MIL/TON," in Unnam'd Forms: Blake and Textuality, ed. Thomas Vogler and Nelson Hilton (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), p. 146.

5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge to James Gillman, 31 October 1821, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 5, 1820-1825, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), p. 185; letter no. 1281.

6. See The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 3, 1808-1819, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 4124.

7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor, 2 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1960), 2:103.

8. M. H. Abrams, "Coleridge's 'A Light in Sound': Science, Metascience, and Poetic Imagination," in The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 164.

9. It was Susan Wolfson who called my attention to this phonemic ambiguity in Coleridge.

10. In The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), Susan Wolfson has recently expanded on Cleanth Brooks's suggestion that the urn of the ode is appealing to a kind of hearing "just below the threshold of normal sound" (p. 320). She detects at one point what amounts to the junctural disintegration of "endear'd" when registering a conjoint "sight and sound" pun that "shades into 'end ear'd,'" as if "to signify audience beyond the bourne of 'the sensual ear'" (p. 320).

11. John Keats to Fanny Brawne, [?] March 1820, The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:247. break

12. This is the original version of the sonnet given in John Keats: Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), p. 198 n. 1.

13. Shortly preceding the earliest recorded appearance of the term "sod" as a collective noun for the material of ground cover (rather than simply for a piece of turf)--a usage first cited in the OED from the Romantic writers Hood and Scott--this phrasing from Keats's "Ode" may indeed have helped to instigate such a linguistic change. Tracked back to an antiphonal matrix, the normative sense of "become a sod" is not the speaker's reduction to a single square of earth but, rather (buried under it), to a condition of analogy therewith, as insensate as the unresponsive turf: "to become a(s) sod."

14. Keats varying a line from Spenser in a letter to Shelley, 16 August 1820, Letters of John Keats, 2:322.

15. Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Defence of Poetry," in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 487, 488.

16. See William Keach, Shelley's Style (New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 186.

17. Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 3.

18. In The Linguistic Moment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), J. Hillis Miller calls attention to one such verbal "moment," decentering and potentially deconstructive, which concerns the issue of translatability between languages in Browning's "The Englishman in Italy" (p. 207). Rupturing the apparent seamlessness of this English textual retrospect with the contractions and bucklings of another tongue, the mountain named "Vico Alvano" is compressed in transliteration--by both aphaeresis and synaloepha, the ellipsis of the first and the blurring of the second syllables--to become "Calvano." It functions thereby as a transegmental signal (characterized by Miller simply as a linguistic anomaly or shorthand) to keep us on linguistic alert in this poem of two cultures, two languages.

19. The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphrey House (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 9.

20. From a passage cited from Coleridge's Notebooks (without more specific reference) as epigraph to the first chapter of Geoffrey Hartman's Saving the Text (see Prologue, n.23).

21. Geoffrey Hartman, The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke and Valéry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1966 [originally published in 1954]), p. 62.

22. See James Milroy, The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Andre Deutsch, 1977).

23. Hopkins, "Lecture Notes: Poetry and Verse," in Journals and Papers, p. 289. break

24. See the opening of Chapter 6 below for a discussion of a comparable phrasing in the frontispiece from Hopkins.

25. Hopkins, "Lecture Notes: Rhetoric," in Journals and Papers, p. 268.

26. John Unterecker, A Reader's Guide to William Butler Yeats (New York: Noonday Press, 1954), p. 81.

27. Helen Vendler, "Poets' Prose," New Yorker, 16 March 1987, p. 104.

28. This is Pound's definition of "logopoeia," in "How to Read," in The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions), p. 25.

29. "All Sounds have been as music," in The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. C. Day Lewis (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1963), p. 127.

30. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971), p. 76.

31. In a three-paragraph article for Tyro, no. 1 (1921), called "The Lesson of Baudelaire," Eliot wrote that "Dadaism is a diagnosis of a disease of the French mind; whatever lesson we extract from it will not be directly applicable in London" (p. 4). The mythic force of the Thunder's enunciations in Eliot's poem of the next year represents everything Data parodistically degrades. The only critic I have found who notes a probable allusion (without cross-lexical biplay) to such French countercurrents at the close of The Waste Land, Grover Smith, comments briefly: "The fable of the Thunder with its thrice uttered 'Da' may have been invoked partly to get the kind of attention that French avant-garde activities were drawing; moreover there is a parable in it, a moral criticism, which they could well have taken to themselves" (Smith, The Waste Land [London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983], p. 119). One wouldn't put it past Nabokov--whose character Hazel Shade in Pale Fire notices, among her other "mirror words," that T. S. Eliot spelled backward is "Toilest" (see notes to ll. 347-48)--to be hinting at the undertone of nonsense in Eliot's ponderous mythopoetic finale with his own stuttering cryptogram "pa data" (discussed in Chapter 2 above).

32. Marjorie Perloff, "The Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties," The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 215. See also Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, ed., The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984).

Unless otherwise noted, citations from the novels under discussion here are by chapter and page or by book, chapter, and page to the widely used Penguin paperbacks, except where Norton Critical editions are available, namely, for The Ambassadors, The Egoist, Hard Times, Heart of Darkness, Jane Eyre, Jude the Obscure, Middlemarch, and Wuthering Heights . Other editions cited continue

are Diana of the Crossways (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), Tristram Shandy (New York: Odyssey Press, 1940), and the Vintage editions (New York: Random House) of novels by E. M. Forster and Ford Madox Ford.

Unless otherwise noted, citations from the novels under discussion here are by chapter and page or by book, chapter, and page to the widely used Penguin paperbacks, except where Norton Critical editions are available, namely, for The Ambassadors, The Egoist, Hard Times, Heart of Darkness, Jane Eyre, Jude the Obscure, Middlemarch, and Wuthering Heights . Other editions cited are Diana of the Crossways (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), Tristram Shandy (New York: Odyssey Press, 1940), and the Vintage editions (New York: Random House) of novels by E. M. Forster and Ford Madox Ford.

1. William Makepeace Thackeray, The Yellowplush Papers and Early Miscellanies, ed. George Saintsbury, The Oxford Thackeray, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1908), p. 155.

2. John Orr, Three Studies in Homonymics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1962), p. 22.

3. William Matthews, Cockney, Past and Present: A Short History of the Dialect of London (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1970), p. 172. See also Julian Franklin, The Cockney: A Survey of London Life and Language (London: Andre Deutsch, 1953).

4. Frank Kermode, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Chance (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 130.

5. Otto Jespersen, Progress in Language (New York: Macmillan, 1894), pp. 323, 324.

6. See the anthology of undated excerpts by Phil May, et al., Mr. Punch's Cockney Humour, ed. J. A. Hammerton, Punch Library of Humour Series (London: Bradbury, Agnew & Co., c. 1910). The egregious Cockney punning of the lampoons from Punch include not only dropped-aitch humor like the "Appy 'Un" rather than "Appian" Way to "'Ampton races" (p. 18) but such false plays on nonphonetic abbreviations as "op. 13" at a concert being mistaken for a dance number, "hop 13" (p. 11). More strained yet--because ignoring even more punctuation--is the case of the Cockney bed-and-breakfaster assuming that the sign for the morning meal at 9 a.m. guarantees him a portion of breakfast "'am" (p. 22). Sometimes the Punch joke will even feel obliged to spell itself out typographically, so farfetched are its supposed ambiguities, as with this direct descendent of the Wellerism from Pickwick Papers: "'He is the greatest liar on (H)earth,' as the Cockney said of the lapdog he often saw lying before the fire" (p. 16). At other times, given a more credible play with ligature and elision, Cockney punning can revise a truism into a perfect homophonic sequence, as in "All's swell that ends swell" (p. 7).

7. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 273.

8. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, the original autograph manuscript (J. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City), p. 47. The last phrase and its parenthetical extension were added in the margin, with their self-consciously tagged malapropism on "gorging" for "gorgeous." Here is a syntactic accumulation that not only comes to Dickens in an associative afterthought but is then said to have occurred to the character himself by the same route: a delegation of the verbal imagination in its almost unconscious machinations. break

9. There is a closely parallel modern "narrative" instance of such homophonic puns occasioned by lipreading in the story "strip" of a syndicated cartoon by Toles (c. 1989, Buffalo News ) in response to George Bush's presidential campaign vaunt "Read my lips: No New Taxes." In the cartoon version of this speech, which takes its rhetoric at face value, the lone perplexed audience member hears only the injunction, the message itself not given out loud. He then stumbles through three guesses in separate frames, two of them turning on junctural ambiguities: "Uh . . . No . . . Nuke . . . Texas?" or "No . . . Nude . . . Axes?"

10. Mark Schorer, "Fiction and the 'Analogical Matrix,'" in Essays in Stylistic Analysis, ed. Howard Babb (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1972), p. 347; originally published in Kenyon Review 6 (Fall 1949): 539-60.

11. Judith Wilt, "'He would come back': The Fathers of Daughters in Daniel Deronda," Nineteenth-Century Literature 42 (1987): 314.

12. See George Meredith, Diana of the Crossways, original autograph manuscript as sent to the printer, 1885 (J. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City), p. 606.

13. I am alluding to the central claim of my Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), which I extend here into the sublexical phonology of certain passages otherwise discussed in that earlier study of linguistic negotiations.

14. See Steven Marcus, Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (New York: Basic Books, 1965), on the way in which Dickens's father "never wearied of displaying his young son's precocity" in comic singing (p. 285).

15. This song is quoted in Matthews's chapter "Cockney in the Music-Hall," in Cockney, Past and Present, p. 85.

16. See the manuscript of Our Mutual Friend, p. 66.

17. Without the present emphasis on sublexical breakdowns in the disintegrating exchange system, the link between the arbitrary signs of money and language has received extended recent attention outside of Foucault. Marc Shell's The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), drawing on A. R. J. Turgot's "systematic comparison of verbal and monetary semiology" (p. 6), explores the literary ramifications of these two circulatory systems, both the "poetics" of monetary inscriptions and the face-value "economy" of fictional texts. These are themes which Shell pursues further in Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Period (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1982), where he quotes Wittgenstein's analogy between the relation of grammatical wording to the thought animating it and that of "mere printed slips of paper" to the meaningful, that is negotiable, nature of the same scraps taken as currency (p. 19n.41).

18. See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), p. 161, where continue

the complete "cycle" of dirt as the eventually decomposed Other to orderly classification is summarized: "Dirt was created by the differentiating activity of mind, it was a by-product of the creation of order. So it started from a state of non-differentiation . . . [and] finally it returns to its true indiscriminable character. Formlessness is therefore an apt symbol of beginning and of growth as it is of decay."

19. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 101.

20. See Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel," in The Dialogical Imagination, pp. 84-258, esp. p. 251: "Also chronotopic is the internal form of a word." Yet Bakhtin's emphasis here is not on the dialogical processing across the time of a reading but, rather, on the diachronic (etymological) and syntagmatic collaboration whereby "the root meanings of spatial categories are carried over into temporal relationships (in the broadest sense)."

All parenthetical page references from Joyce's works will be cited from the standard American editions: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Viking Critical Library ed. (New York: Penguin, 1968); Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin, 1976), where according to standard practice, line numbers will also be given; Ulysses, Modern Library ed. (New York: Random House, 1961), and see also Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. (New York: Random House, 1986).

All parenthetical page references from Joyce's works will be cited from the standard American editions: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Viking Critical Library ed. (New York: Penguin, 1968); Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin, 1976), where according to standard practice, line numbers will also be given; Ulysses, Modern Library ed. (New York: Random House, 1961), and see also Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. (New York: Random House, 1986).

1. Hugh Kenner, The Mechanic Muse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 6, 8.

2. Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe of "Finnegans Wake": A Structuralist Analysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 128. In a film from the same decade as The Dentist, featuring a hero even more directly in touch than the Dickensian Fields with Victorian journalistic and almanack humor, Lamar Trotti's script for John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) includes an extended digression into the folk wit of homophonic wordplay in the middle of the film's climactic trial sequence. Honest Abe is the defense lawyer in a murder trial, attempting to discredit the chief eyewitness for the prosecution, a shifty character who calls himself "J. Palmer Cass." After wondering aloud what the "J." stands for, and being told "John," Lincoln asks whether anyone ever calls the witness "Jack." Hearing that they do, he presses the interrogation: "Why not John P. Cass? Anything the matter with John P.?" "No," the witness admits, and "no" is again his answer when asked if "J. Palmer Cass" is meant to "conceal" anything. "Then what do you part your name in the middle for?" asks Lincoln, proceeding by his own subsequent pun to repart it right down the middle of a new lexical juncture, to the uproar of the court: "Well, if it's all the same to you, I'll just call you Jack Cass." break

3. James Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text, p. 628. Page references hereafter will be given to the Modern Library edition (see headnote above) except where some particular divergence is being called attention to; minor discrepancies, however, will be corrected without comment according to the revised edition.

4. Among the spliced coinages in Portrait that similarly give pause--because of their inoperable inclusion of an extraneous morphological recombination--are such inevitable phantom pluralizations as " hollows ounding" (83), " fires hovel" (150), and " roses oft" (155). This sort of stray plural occludes any semantic sense in the remainder of the compound, even though potential lexical members such as "hovel" and "oft" are left hanging. The same is true of the hint of "seat" in "seatangle" (170), or, alternately, of "tangled" in "rightangled" (208), "lecturer" in "lectureroom" (208). Even more functional and tempting is the emergence of "sulphury" in "sulphuryellow" (209), arguably a true portmanteau. In pushing the principle of dis-hyphenation one step further into the suspension of all word breaks, there is a gambit more Joycean (even) than Faulknerian at the opening of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (New York: Washington Square Press, 1972; originally published in 1970), where the routinized rhythms of a child's "Dick and Jane" primer are syntactically and lexically deconstructed in two stages, first by the removal of all punctuation, then of all word breaks. The end result is a last spliceless para/graph that, by conflating utterance, releases it to new forms. The very enumeration of the family members pulses with the logic of its own generation in "hereisthefamilymotherfatherdickandjane" (p. 7), where "fatherdick," when read with more than the eye, turns sequence to the primal consequence of "fathered." Such is the process of morphophonemic pulsation that it seems to name its own undulant energies in a cross-syllabic run like "fathersmile seethed ogbowwow" (p. 8). In this neo-Joycean parodic primer, the reductio ad absurdum of childish gibberish circles round yet again, as we saw in Chapter 3, to the prehistory of word breaks in the Medieval manuscript tradition. Once more, we might say, textual ontology recapitulates philology.

5. This is one of the examples of "augmentation in echo" given by Jean-Michel Rabaté, "The Silence of the Sirens," in James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium, ed. Morris Beja et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 83. Other phrases from "Sirens" exemplify such varied rhetorical figures as aphaeresis, apocope, ellipsis, telescoping of words, anadiplosis, prosthesis, epenthesis, diaeresis, tmesis, gemination, anaphonic extension, interpolation, and so forth, all part of Rabaté's claim that this episode is better understood as an exploitation of verbal rhetoric than as an exploration of musical cadence.

6. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 45. Hartman himself has frequent recourse to the "echoland" (p. 45) of Joyce's textual terrain before generalizing later in his study that, "whereas 'the ineluctable continue

modality of the visible' (Joyce) has been explored, especially by analysts interested in primal-scene imagery, the ineluctable ear, its ghostly, cavernous, echoic depth, has rarely been sounded with precision" (p. 123).

7. Jacques Derrida, "Two Words for Joyce," in Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 145-59, an essay reprinted as the first half of Derrida's recent volume Ulysse gramophone: deux mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galilée, 1987). In the same collection with Derrida's separately published essay, other position papers on the idea of a poststructuralist Joyce are less insistent about the scriptive or graphic exclusivity of his texts. Jean-Michel Rabaté's "Lapsus Ex Machina"--on the textual mechanization of the slip--takes up a position more Bakhtinian than Derridean in a passage like this: " Finnegans Wake is not so much written polyphony as experience of patterns of prosodic polyphones: it is woven, braided, loomed with voices" (p. 87). Such tropes of the braided weave are only drawing out the etymology of "text" to begin with, a webwork which in Joyce becomes, at least on Rabaté's reading, predominantly phonic in the origin of its puns and pregnant slips. He is interested in the lapsus, the lapse, the default of the tongue, as a slip of but also between letters--not alphabetical characters but letters read as phonic signifiers. More explicitly a dramatization of the conjoint work of eye and ear in Joycean textuality is the passage Rabaté passes over too quickly as his first example. It boasts a striking chiastic homophony reminiscent of the process texts of Roussel: "What can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for" (482.34-36). The idea of decipherment as "decording" again takes us back to the textured, the braided text, a text noded, looped, woven taut. Rabaté mentions the conflation of "ear aye" (ear ever) into the syn(aes)thetic "eareye," but he leaves the other transegmental bondings to speak for themselves. "If an ear ever grasp what no eye before missed" is what Joyce has, in (one) effect, written. By a "decording" of his verbal compressions, however, we may read it otherwise. Dropping out of the subjunctive, we find that "sieze" puns on "sees," the apprehension by sight, just as in a segmental ambivalence "an ear" becomes "a near," and "eye ere" conflates to "eyer." What we then have is an argument for close reading deciphered solely thereby--an argument providing its own best case in point by homophonic self-paraphrase, a lapsus from within: "If a near eye sees what no sight reader, no cursory eyer of the text, was ever bereaved to miss." The whole passage testifies--speaking in tongues as it does, in slips and lapses thereof--to what Joyce earlier designates (with unusually discursive determination) as the text's "variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns" (118.26-28). It is in view of such passages, well before the extremes of the Wake, that Rabaté's emphasis on the "eye listening" (p. 98) in the reading of Joyce seems to restore not at all the audiophonic sublime of a Logos before Babel, as deconstructed by Derrida, but instead a continue

certain phonic differential at work in the lapses and deferments of the multilingual Joycean polygramme.

8. See John Bishop, Joyce's Book of the Dark: "Finnegans Wake" (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).

9. Hugh Kenner, Joyce's Voices (London: Faber & Faber, 1978), p. 99.

10. Jacques Derrida, "Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce," in James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth, ed. Bernard Benstock (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1988), pp. 27-75, in a translation by Tina Kendall, with emendations by Shari Benstock.

11. Citations here are from the original French version (see n. 7 above). Of these two quotations from the French volume, only the former appears at all, strangely enough, in the Kendall/Benstock translation; the omission of the second decidedly skews the sense. When, in other words, "l'incorporation littérale du oui dans l'oeil de la langue, du yes dans les eyes . Langue d'oeil" (p. 86) becomes "the literal incorporation [] of yes in eyes . Language of eyes, [of ayes]" (p. 42), the excision and inclusion both soften the emphasis on the visual, in the latter case by interpolating a homophonic pun from another part of the discussion. Here, Derrida's stress is exclusively placed on the sheerly graphic Yes that "gives itself up only to reading " (p. 42), not to hearing. As usual, though, Derrida is hard to pin down. Focusing earlier on Bloom's own fantasy of "a gramophone in every grave" ("Ulysses Gramophone," p. 44), with its pertinent but unspoken link to textual "thanatopraxis," Derrida speaks of a "gramophony which records writing in the liveliest voice . . . archived into the very quick of the voice" (p. 43). We recognize again that arche-writing of the trace. This textual "voice" is therefore constituted only in Derrida's punning sense of ouï-dire (dear-say). It is a voice to which one "listens" solely by producing it in the differential interplay of textual processing. This, at least, would seem to be the gist of an earlier observation couched in symmetrical paradoxes: " Yes can only be a mark in Ulysses, a mark at once written and spoken, vocalized as a grapheme and written as a phoneme, yes, in a word, gramophoned" ("Ulysses Gramophone," p. 36).

12. There is no denying, though, the grammatological dimension of even this last supposed mono-logue, in particular its graphemic insistence. Indeed, there is striking reconfirmation of this dimension in the Gabler edition of the novel. Molly is musing about the death of a distant acquaintance when her stream of consciousness snaps on a matter of scriptive literacy: "bereavement symphathy * I always make that mistake and newphew * with 2 double yous in" (624.730-31), the former spelling corrected altogether in the Modern Library edition [758]. Not present in earlier printed versions of the novel, these explicit slashes of deletion are close anticipations of the Derridean sous rature, the placing under erasure of the trace. And they are purely graphic. No one could say them to herself; they do not represent misspellings of the mind but can only instance the grapheme itself under correction as mental script. Such is the line of thought along which one is carried by these signified continue

excisions of the signifier -- that is, if one can accept as plausible the assumption that the slash marks were intended for print rather than just for the printer. Given the debate over ink color alone (whether Joyce's or another proof-reader's) and without, in these mere slashes, a recognizable feature of alphabetic handwriting as a check, this seems a particularly risky "correction" -- or metacorrection -- but a tempting one in the very extremity of its textual effect. This putative instance of a graphemic bent in this most "vocalized" stretch of the novel, in the professional singer's internal monologue, would support -- up to a point -- Derrida's case for an "inscription" beneath all speech. The very consciousness of slip or lapse in Molly's misspellings is traced here through the alphabetic stray and its retrospective censorship. At the same time, this grammatological exaggeration on Joyce's part, this textualization of the unconscious, is complemented by the phonetic spelling of the unwanted w as "double you." The gramme comes before speech, yes, but it is not alone there, since the phone underlies -- or at least "ineluctably" accompanies -- such speech as well, as, for example, in the monosyllabic "you" for u when read. Joyce's writerly text, here and elsewhere, can be felt in this way not just to invite but to perform its own reading.

1. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1931), p. 215; subsequent parenthetical references are to this edition in its separate paperback issue (1978).

2. Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), p. 69.

3. 16 November 1931, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, ed. Anne Oliver Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1982), p. 53.

4. William Butler Yeats, Introduction to Fighting the Waves (1934), quoted in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, in re Woolf's allusion to "Old Yeats . . . writing about me" (vol. 4, p. 255n.28).

5. 7 January 1931, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, p. 4, where she is speaking, in particular, of the attempt in Bernard's soliloquy to "break up, dig deep."

6. Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich), p. 212; Woolf, "Longer version" of Between the Acts, p. 230, continued from "Typescript with author's ms. corrections, unsigned, dated throughout from April 27, 1938-July 30, 1939, 186 pp." (Berg Collection, New York Public Library).

7. See Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1927), where the aspiring female writer is said to find no "common sentence ready for her use," only "a man's sentence" (p. 79).

8. Attempting to rescue Woolf's call for "androgyny" from charges of feminine defeatism, Toril Moi argues in Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist continue

Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985) for a Kristevan reading of Woolf precisely because of Kristeva's resistance to a "metaphysical belief in strong, immutably fixed gender identities" (p. 13). My phonotextual approach to voicing in Woolf means to reject as completely as Kristeva does any feminine "essentialism" about voice as the unmediated language of the female body, a position one finds expounded, for instance, in the writing of Hélène Cixous, as summarized by Moi in her subsection " Ecriture féminine 2) the source and the voice," pp. 113-19.

More tightly focused around issues of linguistic engenderment at the level of morphology itself is the closing and title chapter of Louis Marin's La voix excommuniée: essais de mémoire (Paris: Galilée, 1981). The homophonic cryptogram, or inscribed cryptophone, of Stendhal's secret writing on the inner lining of his belt -- especially its junctural syncopation of letters and pauses at J(e) vais and voir/la -- seems to authorize in advance the concluding move of Marin's book. There, he audits the inner lining, as it were, of an operatic phrase from Manon, as sung by his sister, in order to mount an oblique argument about the return of voicing to text, an argument that he knows may seem like "verbal evidence substituted for the evidence of ideas" (p. 173; my translations of this closing section). The sung line in question: "Adieu, notre petite table" (p. 174). Over the course of ten pages, Marin speculates on an enunciation of the "t(e)" sufficient to forestall the liaison with " t able" and thus to introduce a stray vowel cluster into a new set of free-form associations. The graded run of these vocalic associations, ti/te/ta, anticipates, on Marin's hearing, both the iterative internal echo of "ti/tubant" (pp. 175, 180; for the "careening" of the echo's own "noise" [p. 182]) and the missing /o/ that would generate out of peti/to/table a virtual anagram of the " tableau phonologique" itself (p. 182). From such lateral counterplay is generated at any number of levels the "double difference" (p. 180) which casts "te" into simultaneous distinction from the substantive (and substantial) "table" it somehow reform(ulate)s as well as from that adjectival root it would ordinarily complete and feminize. This last is the most far-reaching aspect of Marin's reading: the "deconstruction" of "petite" (through its own hyper-articulation) leading to implicit inferences about the arbitrary engenderment of discourse and the polymorphous lexical perversity of its undoing. For Marin, there is a "force" in the "sonorous flux" that "displaces 'te'" (in its "floating between 'peti' and 'table'") and recasts it as a register of vacillation between "feminine and masculine, in a difference which is the difference, the neuter itself" (p. 181).

Marin ascribes this "secret" (p. 185) syncopation of the written text (in allusion, one presumes to the earlier "secret" on the inside of Stendhal's belt) to the productive rewriting of the written by the read. His book closes by offering -- in answer to the question "how is the auto(biographical) able to engender an ex(communicated or communicable)?" -- the final "affirmation: its Ex- has generated my Auto-" (p. 185). Expelled and/or expunged, exiled or continue

excised, the absent voice of the author has produced my voice as reader. Yet in all this theorizing of textual reception, there remains a vestigial mystification, it would seem, in which some sense of aural "communion" between author and reader -- rather than sheer textual generation -- is still the touchstone. Reading does the voicing, yes -- but then, on Marin's account, we also seem to be hearing voices, as if what is activated by the text, spun out of it, is in some sense an "echo" of what went into it. This is, again, that phantom of the "auto-bio-phonic" origin recuperated from within the "autobiographic" (see Chapter 3, n.33). Figures of origin may in Marin be just that, figurative, but at times something more may well seem at stake in his account than merely textual simulacra -- even in the co-productive sense of syncopated vocalization. Though admitting that the "communication of self to a possible reader" is constituted by "nothing else but the tactics of writing" and that any "singular essence" and "proper sense" always "melt into literal insignificance" -- hence suffer, in a word, "excommunication" -- nevertheless "they remake themselves in the same movement, outside of all signifying intention, and reproduce themselves outside of all transcendental synthesis" (p. 176). They do so, however, at least so Marin is moved to add -- in an acoustic metaphor(?) begging the very textual question he has so importantly located -- they do so "in echo of a voice that all symbolic articulation has 'originarily' excommunicated" (p. 176). Part of the question is to what extent autobiography -- self-writing, the very "life" of the author in words -- is the privileged locus of this echo. But this question aside, Marin's work, as I suggested in Chapter 3, joins that of Finas in its insistence on reading itself as a text. If all Marin means to suggest by the "echo" of origin is that the phoneme, rather than the speaking voice, is the victim of an excommunication by the grapheme, a banishment instated at the founding moment of symbolization, but that this e-dict against the "saying" within the "said" (again, see Chapter 3, n.33) is rendered reversible in the reading act, then this returning (from nowhere) of the phonic to the fold of read writing is very much what my book, and what Woolf in her genderless "reprise" of one word in the next (to borrow Marin's metaphor for textual "darning"), are after. In light of Marin's own earlier work (see Utopics: Spatial Play [Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1984 (originally published in French in 1973)]), this could indeed be called the return from the "utopic" space of internal difference, a return sounded, latently, upon the body of the reader.

9. Quite apart from her work in modernist poetics, Julia Kristeva has written of the female psyche in its uneasy relation to the three main modes of temporal consciousness that she finds governing Western culture. See her "Women's Time," trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, Signs 7 (Autumn 1981): 13-35, in which her hypotheses bear directly not only on Rhoda's exile from temporal continuity but on the linguistic metaphors that figure such an exclusion in her own mind. Woolf's title, The Waves, happens to signal one such temporal mode: the cyclic, the time of eternal renewal so often mythi- soft

cally associated with the feminine. Woolf has Bernard, her novelist spokesman, evoke this sense of time -- in chiasmus and in affirmation -- on the last page of the novel: "Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again" (p. 297). If cyclical time is associated with the maternal, the regenerative, the other pole of temporal consciousness, the one identified not with repetition but with eternity, is also linked with a feminine principle. As against cyclical time, this is what Kristeva calls "monumental time." Rather than linear, progressive, it is instead all-encompassing, potentially devouring. In between repetition and eternity, cyclicity and monumentality, falls succession, the "time of history," a temporality that, for Kristeva, "renders explicit a rupture, an expectation, or an anguish which other temporalities work to conceal" (p. 17). This is the temporality in which Rhoda, Woolf's female alter ego in The Waves, can never quite relax, for she "cannot make one moment merge in the next" (p. 130). It is no accident that, in Kristeva's terms, what fails Rhoda is not only the recalcitrant time of history but, by an analogous sense of successivity, the duration of language itself: the linear time, as Kristeva has it, of "noun + verb," a time which "rests on its own stumbling block, which is also the stumbling block of . . . enunciation -- death" (p. 23) or, in other words, void . This is Rhoda's central apprehension, her panic -- a recognition of that death by severance underlying the analogy between time and language, a death whose gaping blank returns as soon as it is repressed. This is because language, like time under the aspect of history, is founded (Kristeva here follows Lacan) on the separation anxiety reproduced by, if not reducible to, syntax itself. In Kristeva's view, a common (though by no means "essential") female reaction to this anxiety, exaggerated in those women psychoanalysis terms "hysterics," is "to deny . . . separation and the language which ensues from it, whereas men (notably obsessionals) magnify both and, terrified, attempt to master them" (pp. 24-25). Woolf plots a more complex story upon a similar gender grid, with the "terror" over severance and death being divided between her suicidal heroine and the male writer figure who never more than intermittently masters it.

10. J.-A. Miller, "La suture (éléments de la logique du signifiant)," delivered on 24 February 1965, to Lacan's seminar, and published in French in Cahiers pour l'analyse 1 (1966): 37-49; rpt., as "Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)," trans. Colin MacCabe, Screen 18 (Winter 1977-78): 24-34. For the technical argument upon which Miller bases his discussion, see Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Austin, 2d ed. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968). With a comparable psycholinguistic agenda, as indicated by the title Desire in Language (ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez [New York: Columbia University Press, 1980]), Julia Kristeva chooses to overthrow rather than revise Frege, along with other twentieth-century logicians, as "ineffective within the realm of poetic language," given their allegiance to the "0-1 sequence" (p. 70). Following Bakhtin in her approach to continue

nonmonologic form, Kristeva's "polyvalent narrative" requires a "poetic logic" which "would embody the 0-2 interval, a continuity where 0 denotes and 1 is implicitly transgressed" (p. 70). Instead of such a wholesale evacuation of the unitary in favor of the double integer, the interests of the present discussion--and precisely in their debt to the Kristevan "semiotic" realm before symbolic regimentation--gravitate instead toward that absence-within-presence of the 1-2 sequence: never a gradation in plenitude, always an elision of the recurrent blank, the sliding cipher necessitated by incremental transition.

11. See Joan Copjec, "The Anxiety of the Influencing Machine," October 23 (Winter 1982): 46, a position which might legislate, in turn, Kristeva's more radical departure from Frege's theory (see n. 10 above).

12. See above, Chapter 1, p. 46.

13. See above, Chapter 3, p. 104.

14. See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 25-27, from which this further paraphrase of her argument about the semiotic chora is drawn.

15. In my essay, "Catching the Stylistic D/rift: Sound Defects in Woolf's The Waves, " ELH 54 (Summer 1987): 442-43, I consider Sandra M. Gilbert's and Susan Gubar's critique of French psychoanalytic claims about female linguistic development, in light of Woolf's stylistic ambitions in The Waves; see Gilbert and Gubar, "Sexual Linguistics: Gender, Language, Sexuality," New Literary History 16 (Spring 1984-85): 537. My essay also finds room for a fuller discussion than here of the Lacanian mirror stage as it serves to illuminate Rhoda's crisis in The Waves (see pp. 432-36). In a recent argument often running parallel to my own, Makiko Minow-Pinkney sees Woolf steering in her verbal experiments between "the complementary pitfalls of both feminist realism . . . and schizophrenic modernism"; see Minow-Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1987), p. 155. Minow-Pinkney's study appeared at the same time as the ELH article on which this chapter is based. Her book answers, in a sense, half the call put out by Toril Moi (see n.8 above) for a "combination of Derridean and Kristevan theory" in "future feminist reading of Woolf" ( Sexual/Textual Politics, p. 15). Such an approach coincides with mine in finding much of the tension in The Waves focused around the character of Rhoda, a being "incapable of establishing the thetic subject" (p. 163). Minow-Pinkney writes that "though Woolf does not dislocate syntax, even in Rhoda's extreme assertions of psychic breakdown, she goes a long way toward emptying syntax of its function of articulation across the novel as a whole" (p. 172). Yet Rhoda's suicidal fate exposes the paradox of Woolf's endeavor: "Associated with whiteness and emptiness, outside time and logic, Rhoda marks out the locus of a feminine space, that non-symbolisable Other that must be repressed but none the less exist for a normative discourse to be installed." No such installation is possible, however, without selling out to the symbolic. "A continue

feminine discourse of the white spaces remains strictly a contradiction, impossible except as silence" (p. 183). This is where Minow-Pinkney's argument and mine part company. Among all the recent treatments of The Waves, hers is the theoretical investigation most drawn to stylistic issues, but her concentration on syntax as touchstone disables her from answering her own best question: "How indeed is it possible to actualise a feminine writing that is not organised around phallocentric identity and positionality, but would none the less not just be lost in silence?" (p. 186). My answer should by now be clear. Making syntax itself possible, segmentation creates the spaces that register as blanks; transegmental drifts invade and animate those gaps with a fluid continuity apart from strict "syntagmatic constraints" (p. 172). To write from, as well as across, those gaps may be Woolf's way of speaking the feminine in prose, loosening not only the "ligatures" but many of the other binding obligations of a hierarchical discourse.

16. Gilbert and Gubar, "Sexual Linguistics," p. 531, quoting the passage from Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway ([New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1927], pp. 122-23). It is interesting to note that the expository wordplay of these two authors, though far more cerebral and less "enigmatic" than Woolf's, is still lexically transgressive, a teasing of the spaces between words. See especially the sliding open of the idiom "alas and alack" into the Lacanian parody (in style as well as in substance) of "a lass and a lack" (p. 537). The passage at issue in Mrs. Dalloway is also mentioned in passing by Makiko Minow-Pinkney, where it is aligned with the "pre-symbolic" in Kristeva's terms; see Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject, p. 73. More recently yet, in Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), Jane Marcus's introduction to this collection of her essays on Woolf concludes with a section, influenced by Kristeva, called "Moaning and Crooning: The Charwoman's Song" (pp. 10-17) in which she numbers the old crone from Mrs. Dalloway among those representatives of Woolf's "socialist feminist aesthetic" (p. 11) who fuse the energies of labor and language, "tunneling a channel into the obscure origins . . . where language follows the rhythms of the body" (pp. 12-13).

17. Virginia Woolf, The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts, transcribed and ed. J. W. Graham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), draft 2, p. 733.

18. Translated as "breach" in Kristeva's Revolution (see p. 247n. 71).

19. Xaviere Gauthier, "Is There Such a Thing As Women's Writing?" trans. Marilyn A. August, in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), p. 164.

20. The first death scene Virginia Woolf wrote comes at the end of her first novel, The Voyage Out (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1920), where Rachel dies quietly in her fiancé's arms. As the heroine's mind is emptied out of the scene, we are drawn into the hero's with an indirect discourse, much continue

worked over at the draft stage, that would seem to cure the void of death with an idiomatic, a dismissive sense of "nothing." Writes Woolf for the hero: "this was death. It was nothing; it was to cease to breath." Those impacted infinitive phrases seem odd, deliberately clinical, unperturbed, until one hears them as part of a pulsional code, a counterpoint, something which the very fact of an infinitive grammar is meant to resist. The point of the passage in context is of course that death ends nothing between the lovers except Rachel's breathing. But listen to what shadows it in passing: "It was nothing. It was to cease  . . ." The infinitive phrase of an action, "to cease," itself the logical negation of an action, easily collapses, even in silent reading, into the disyllabic and etymologically related noun of death itself, decease, hermetically sealing the very gap of scriptive difference or functional negativity that syntax, on behalf of rhetoric, is still trying to keep open. Here, as in Bernard's sentence-long rendition of Rhoda's death, I am further developing the phonemic implications of two cadenced phrasings already investigated from a different perspective in my Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 263-64, 303.

21. Julia Kristeva, "Phonetics, Phonology, and Impulsional Bases," trans. Caren Greenberg, Diacritics 4 (Fall 1974): 36.

22. Gertrude Stein, Four in.7erica (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1947), p. 125, in an essay putatively on Henry James. My thanks to Lorrie Sprecher for directing me to these passages.

23. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975 [originally published in French in 1973]), p. 66.

24. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947), p. 45.

25. Woolf, 28 March 1930, A Writer's Diary, p. 153.

1. I. A. Richards, "Literature, Oral-Aural and Optical," in Complementarities: Uncollected Essays, ed. John Paul Russo (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1976), p. 201. This essay, nicely enough, was originally a radio talk that ended up printed in the Listener (1947).

2. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1927), p. 53.

3. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1925), p. 42. This "knocking of words together," which Woolf's writing courts in order to mitigate, is what Joyce more obtrusively exploits, putting at stake the technological as well as cognitive repercussions of such textuality. In view of Joyce's notorious bad luck on this score with the transition into print, I wondered about the fate of my own pages when this book, still a manuscript, went off to the typesetters. At least none of Joyce's own pointed slips, his "knocking . . . together" of graphemes under phonemic pressure--many of them normalized long ago by printers and lately restored by editors--suffered the fate of reverse correction in my typeset account. But curiosities there were (confirming ones, I like to think), giving pause precisely where no lexical break was intended. Proofreading turned up, for instance, the following transegmental slip of transcription across the hurdle of a closed parenthesis: "common sense) ensualizes the lexical interstices" (p. 5). Further along, an intended analogy had emerged instead as a clairvoyant aesthetic preference (by backward liaison) in "Shelley likes Stevens" (p. 85). Later, "made to pay" was short-changed (by dental assimilation) in becoming "may to pay" (p. 226). More striking yet, in the discussion of a knotty passage from Daniel Deronda, the overtone of "assailing" in "was a sailing and sailing" had been subliminally rethought by a compositor as the eerily appropriate "was ailing and sailing" (p. 216). Judging at least from this instance, there are some throws of the phonemic dice with which a text just can't lose.