Abstract
The brain cannot read human language; it can only make sense of the patterns of light waves and sonic frequencies. The problem with listening as a faculty remains in its assumption that it must entail understanding. Finnegans Wake (1939), read aloud, must be listened to, both with attention and intention, in order to experience or feel, beyond scholarly exegesis, what James Joyce was painstakingly inventing. The sonic frequencies of the Wakean sounds demand that the readers must be ‘in tune’ with it listening with all her being—for any kind of sense to take effect—thus leaving us with two options: the readers listening to themselves reading aloud, often stuttering or halting baffled by the neologisms they encounter, or they being immersed in a process of listening, of eavesdropping, to the varying wavelengths of word-matter. In later Joyce, ‘sensesound’ becomes a human condition. Joyce’s poor eyesight during his later years is perhaps compensated by his programmatic sharpening of his other senses, especially the aural, thus making this discussion toward an ontology of listening more relevant. For example, the murmurs of gossiping washerwomen give way to the babble of Liffey, the riverine feminine principle of the Wakean lifeworld. The paper examines this problematic relation between Joycean word-matter and the acoustic possibilities of language marked by embodied “plurabilities”, primarily in Finnegans Wake.
Keywords: sound, sense, language, listening, phenomenology, James Joyce.
It is told in sounds in utter that, in signs so adds to, in universal, in polygluttural, in each auxiliary neutral idiom, sordomutics, florilingua, sheltafocal, flayflutter, a con’s cubane, a pro’s tutute, strassarab, ereperse and anythongue athall.
— James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (117.12–16)
The process of sense-making functions through a negotiation between natural indication and linguistic signification. To enter into the process of sense-making is to enter into a dialogue with the world. Through this endeavour a linguistic sense emerges painstakingly as a system, through formal logic. Our ‘body’ brings forth this negotiation between words and things. This ‘body’ must not be understood as a thing, an object, material body, but a site accommodating slipping personages, constituting flickering moments, and recording everyday events. To make sense of the world around, to put it simply, is to know about it, perceive it, rationalise it. The body that experiences is both the body that the subject has and the subject is, simultaneously. The body is, therefore, neither an accessible, knowable object nor a pure, transparent, transcendental subject; it is rather a means to process the sense-data eventually organized by the mind, to reveal what is concealed, to breathe life into the words and symbols, to enjoy this correlation: “in the house of breathings lies that word” (FW 249.06). Derek Attridge obliquely hints at this when he says,
Joyce’s version of modernism, . . . by producing heightened attention to both language in its multiplicity of forms and functions and the concrete world of sensation, emotion, drive, and desire, situates the literary precisely in the conjunction or crossover of the cultural and the material – hence his curiously double notoriety, as exceptionally difficult in his handling of language and exceptionally direct in his handling of the body and the world it encounters. (Attridge xv)
Meanings are discovered by reacting to supplications already in our experience. Cogito or order is not present beforehand—either in metaphysics, in the mind of God, or the categories we make—but that order is continually created out of chaos by means of our ability to provide meaning to our experiences. The agency of meaning-making cannot be located in the subject position. Humans are not the final source. There is no transcendental outside from where we offer a sense to our experiences; to make sense of our experiences is to make sense out of the lifeworld, inhabiting it, being within it. Sense, contrary to the popular perception, is not given to experience, but obtained from it. The embodied subject presupposes an ‘outside’, to the conditions of which it is exposed. To understand that there is no ‘inner reality’ that Joyce’s stream of consciousness technique might hint at is to realize that there is no room for introspection. There is no behind or beneath that might serve as a structured concealment of thoughts or meanings. They are located on the surface to be seen and not read, to be experienced not by habitual passivity—often associated with the idea that structures of consciousness determine the process of sense-making—but ponder on seeing, listening, and touching as sense-making exercises. To know the word/world is to acknowledge the friction that the cloth offers on naked flesh, a point of contact, an embodied consciousness located at the contours of inside/outside.
Joyce, almost like a phenomenologist, investigates how experiences take on certain meanings they do, how a work achieves rationality. The acoustic sense in later Joyce thrives upon the sensory, how it feels to the ears. It is indeed difficult to establish whether such sensual/sensory effects should be considered belonging to the discipline of physiology, psychology, or physics. There lies a tension between a natural involuntary phenomenon and an inspired bodily intention. As Jean Luc-Nancy in his work Listening shows, there are categorical differences between our natural reflexes and conditioned manoeuvres or inspired modes of sensing:
Every sensory register thus bears with it both its simple nature and its tense, attentive, or anxious state: seeing and looking, smelling and sniffing or scenting, tasting and savouring, touching and feeling or palpating, hearing and listening. (5)
Both cornea and cochlea are extremely sensitive where lies a mosaic of sensitive receptors. The brain cannot read human language; it can only make sense of the patterns of light and sound energies. The problem with listening as a faculty remains in its assumption that it must entail “something else that might be more on the order of understanding”, as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it while discussing the difference between listening and hearing, the valences each bear that substitute “for each other with more affinity than the audible and the intelligible, or the sonorous and the logical” (1–2). This opens up a possibility of contestation, following Nancy’s argument, between ‘a sense . . . and a truth” (2). This can be understood as a problem quite akin to philosophising the difference between a vision and a gaze. While discussing the affect of reading Wake, and reading aloud in an ideal case, this becomes important in that it is placed at the space that coagulate the formal and the logical, the actual and the conjectural, the tactile and the sonic: words. As Nancy would put it, “The visual persists until its disappearance; the sonorous appears and fades away into its permanence” (2). He goes on to differentiate between the ‘perceiving sense’ and the perceived meaning, ‘sensed sense’ and questions how and why a perceived meaning privileges a “referent in visual presence rather than in acoustic penetration?” (2–3). This draws attention to the fact that meaning is not only transmitted or does not present itself only though the visual outputs, forms of representation but “arises instead in accent, tone, timbre, resonance, and sound” (3). Wake invites the readers to allow themselves to invest into a musical meaning and a sonic sense, (two being completely different in scope) that the textuality emits, while making any attempt of reading it, whether one chooses to play it silently into one’s mind or aloud into one’s own ears.
Meaning resides only in a space where there is a scope for understanding. Hearing does not call for an understanding. The manner in which a musical meaning appears is not equivalent to the formation a linguistic meaning which is primarily brought forth by generative grammar and cultural interpretations. Sound does not have sematic gestures as a linguistic sign does. The sonic frequencies of the Wakean sounds demand that the readers must be ‘in tune’ with it for any kind of sense to take effect, thus leaving us with two options: the readers listening to themselves reading aloud, often stuttering or halting baffled by the neologisms they encounter, or they being immersed in a process of listening, of eavesdropping, to the varying wavelengths of word-matter. This takes us to what Nancy has called ‘an ontological tonality’— “listening with all his being.” (4) The readers therefore must have an intention and equally importantly, an attention while sensing Joyce’s riddling and wriggling. It must, therefore, entail “an intensification and a concern, a curiosity or an anxiety.” (5) Joyce makes this auditory tension manifest: “Listen, listen! I am doing it. Hear more to those voices! Always I am hearing them” (FW 571.24–25).
Departing from the typified modernist modus operandi of using metonymic allusions, Finnegans Wake explores the limits of ontological metaphors. As Samuel Beckett rightly asserts in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress that Finnegans Wake is “not about something, but that something itself” (14). Beckett insists that “in the literary work, the ‘terrifyingly arbitrary materiality’ of language must be dissolved” in favour of a “linguistic undoing” which can be compared with certain musical examples of that period (Weller 1). In his letter to Axel Kaun, July 9, 1937, Beckett poses certain frustrating questions:
Is literature alone to be left behind on that old, foul road long ago abandoned by music and painting? Is there something paralysingly sacred contained within the unnature of the word that does not belong to the elements of the other arts? Is there any reason why that terrifyingly arbitrary materiality of the word surface should not be dissolved, as for example the sound surface of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is devoured by huge black pauses, so that for pages on end we cannot perceive it as other than a dizzying path of sounds connecting unfathomable chasms of silence? (Letters 518–19)
He seems to be favouring “literature of the unword” instead of James Joyce’s “apotheosis of the word” (519) in what then was regarded as Work in Progess and would eventually be published as Finnegans Wake in 1939.
One most certainly remembers how the expressions ‘Mkgnao!’ ‘Mrkgnao’, and thereafter ‘Mrkrgnao’ (U 4.16–32) are used instead of a commonplace ‘meow’, perhaps, to depict the effect of the sound that reaches Bloom’s ears. Experience is primarily a feeling. We feel what happens with us, around us. There is a bodily immediacy in the Wakean word-matter. It has a profoundly human meaning, an embodied meaning, not to discovered or constructed, but felt. We, as embodied subjects, must remain “keen” to feel the “soundsense and sensesound” even of the “whispering” (FW 121.14–15) of the text; it must touch us as external stimuli to be processed by the neural and motor functions.
Joyce writes to Harriet Shaw Weaver in a letter on 15 February 1928: “as for my poor brainbox why it’s falling down all the time and being picked up by different people who just peep inside as they replace it and murmur ‘So we thought’!” (Letters III 171). What Joyce achieves through his notoriety in punning and the use of perverse homophones is a literature that denies any sense that is sound enough while abounding in “soundsense” (FW 121.15). He adulterates English, both by converting and perverting it, in such a way that his Irish wit echoes and resounds even in his silences, even when he is in his voluntary exile to the continent. Stephen, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man voices, almost echoing what Joyce defence, his firm negation of any possibility of subservience, usually expected of an Irishman in general, to either the colonial master, the Irish nationalists, or the Catholic standards:
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning. (269)
Language becomes a proof of loyalty, when the master-slave dialectic is evoked; it becomes a site of mimicry and the desire of the native to echo the master’s voice in trying to surpass or usurp him, both in speech and writing. Although Joyce writes in a language more English than the English, it leaves no room for this polarization, for easy equations to be solved by anyone trying to unfurl his identity politics through a study of his linguistic politics: the exiled writes back, making sense from the margin. As Stephen envisages, “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets” (Portrait 220).
The Wake functions beyond what readers are allured to believe to be Joyce’s Irish defence; he cautions the readers through a play on sound (the colonial influence, or the symbolic voice of a symbolic father) and silence (perhaps as a reference to the silencing of the voice of dissent during Irish nationalist revival; and also as a muting measure geared towards limiting his creative impulses; hence his exile, allowing the question ‘do you belong’, the question that anchored all his writings to his motherland in one way or the other):
Behove this sound of Irish sense. Really? Here English might be seen. Royally? One sovereign punned to petery pence. Regally? The silence speaks the scene. Fake!
So This Is Dyoublong?
Hush! Caution! Echoland! (FW 12.36–13.5) (emphasis mine)
The world must be sensed through the senses, to feel what is immanent, not to be reduced by a Cartesian ‘cogito’ in attaching itself to what is affirmed by a transcendental, irreducible, truth. It is not only about integritas (wholeness) and consonantia (symmetry) but also about claritas (radiance) that is the intrinsic quality of a Joycean epiphany, the beauty of truth, almost like Christ’s revelation to the Magi. In Joyce’s collected notebook of ‘epiphanies’, his Catholic affiliation seems to have been betrayed only to pave the way for his phenomenological interests, to record odd everyday fragments, “a scene that Joyce has witnessed or a conversation he overheard” (Bulson 58), involving the senses: both sight and sound:
The Young Lady - (drawling discreetly) ... O, yes ... I was ... at the .... cha ...pel ... The Young Gentleman - (inaudible) ... I ... (again inaudibly) ... I ...
The Young Lady - (softly) ... O ... but you’re ... ve ... ry ... wick ...ed ...
(Stephen Hero 217)
Wake celebrates the processes of the real world, keen to record the truth of it in a way that required coalescing into it many moments from distant past and unknown futures, superimposing one sense upon the other, injecting words into words, sensing an array of sensations, bombarding realities with realities, infusing realizations with further realizations. Too much of claritas (radiance) has only caused physical blindness in Joyce; he now sees through the eyes of his mind. Sight turns into vision; sound into music. Sense oozes out of this absence: sense which was never out there is invented. In later Joyce, soundsense therefore becomes a human condition.
The Wake does not arise out of any single voice at any point in time, a storyteller, a reliable liar often garbed as an unreliable narrator, but only a relay of constant murmurs and resonances of references from the past, from the history of the world, of letters, parodied and, at times, loosely accommodated. Readers read and thereby listen to the Wakean sounds to discover meanings in what Joyce was inventing. Proof and discovery require a rationale, invention requires realization, a sense beyond understanding, beyond listening, heard in the inner of inner ears: “your innereer'd heerdly heer he " (FW 485.27–28). Wake is perhaps meant to be invented while one hears the words aloud, not to be discovered while listening to it for certain meanings, identities, or features, assumed to be present. The presence in Wake is felt in the absence of it, in its abstraction, in its obfuscation. A sense is brewed out of this condition as the Wakean experience moves beyond the symbolic to a realm beyond language only to be sensed, and, moreover, to be revealed to those who have got an ear for it.
The Wakean word-matter revolves around, if this can at all be said in keeping with its novelistic tendencies, the Earwicker family, a pun upon the Dublin slang ‘earwigging’: earwigger (who eavesdrops or listens to private conversations), and the rumours spread about HCE, Haveth Childers Earwicker. It centres on a kind of scandal in Phoenix Park, involving his being caught by two soldiers spying on two women micturating in the bushes. Ulysses seems to have paved the way for Joyce to further his auditory experimentation in his later years, in which one might note how the scatological details are used as ontological metaphors—body is both the source of urine and the recipient of the sound vibrations the act of micturition results into:
Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that. It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is. Tinkling. Empty vessels make most noise. Because the acoustics, the resonance changes according as the weight of the water is equal to the law of falling water. Like those rhapsodies of Liszt’s, Hungarian, gipsyeyed. Pearls. Drops. Rain. Diddleiddle addleaddle ooddleooddle. Hissss. (U 11.979–85)
This does not require one’s imagination to be stretched too far to see how the excretory flow of urine can be read as a hint towards what it gives way to: a bodily speaking— “Listen, listen! I am doing it” (FW 571.24)—the fluid nature of the words originating in the body of mother-river ALP, the gossip spreading, flowing, resonating, disseminating: “tuck up your sleeves and loosen your talktapes” (196.08–9). The private act of voyeurism is thus made public in Anna Livia attempting to exculpate his sluggish and insensible husband: “scorching my hand and starving my famine to make his private linen public” (196.16). Ulysses abounds in such naturalistic moulds of language the sense of which resides only it its sound, for instance, when Stephen need to urinate while walking the beach:
Listen: a fourworded wavespeech : seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling. (U 3.456–60)
A dialogue between the linguistic and the natural is what Joyce’s exercise eventually becomes. One may note how his poor eyesight during his later years is compensated by his programmatic sharpening of his other senses, especially the aural, thus making this discussion toward an ontology of listening more relevant: the murmurs of gossiping washerwomen giving way to the babble of Liffey, the riverine feminine principle of the Wakean lifeworld. The sense of river flowing, the musicality of it, is imbibed and given shape in the materiality of the words by the wordsmith that Joyce is. It makes visible this indication by means of logical and sensible abstraction: “babbling, bubbling, chattering to herself, deloothering the fields on their elbows leaning with the sloothering slide of her, giddy-gaddy, grannyma, gossipaceous Anna Livia” (FW 195.1–4). This clearly hints at the reality of language, materiality of its sounds, the ways in which it is organized by the syntax. Language provides an environ for the emerging subject. Anna Livia is surrounded by the inertia of word-matter, moving, fluid, sonorous. The gait that the consciousness achieves is an affectation brought about by the lures of signification. In having a sense of that fluidity, the speed of the flow, the palpability of consciousness created by a texture of alliterative consonants witnesses the existence of Anna Livia come to the fore. What surfaces is neither a thing, nor a consciousness, but a fluid fleshless sense. Anna Livia is not to be explained or understood. It is to be experienced and lived as an event not as a character, as an archetype not as a novelistic ephemera, to get a sense of the psychological imprint that those words leave, hinting at their distant origin in the female body:
O
tell me all about
Anna Livia! I want to hear all
about Anna Livia. (FW 196.1–4) (emphasis mine)
Encountering the Wake without a compendium for the first time hinders this process of reading, though, notably, the book begins with a sentence already in motion just like Liffey flows apparently outwards towards the sea, but, of course, in a cyclical way, that ruptures any definitive sense of from and towards. Looking at the words alone does not yield satisfactory meaning; it only negotiates with this movement, this flow— “from swerve of shore to bend of bay . . . back to Howth Castle and Environs” (FW 3.1–3)—this capricious arrangement. The jerks in the eye muscles reflect this semantic and syntactic vacillation. Letter, phrases, and their arrangements are, more often than not, only seen and felt as sensations, as unfathomable signifying units. Curiosity and determination would not help much beyond a certain point; only a handful of puns, portmanteaux, and allusions get revealed without scholarly engagement. It is, to borrow Seamus Deane’s expression, “in an important sense, unreadable.” (Deane vii) The readers can only look at the pages and feel the embalmed darkness, the mazy motion of the words, that envelops the seductive charms of legibility. Obscurity covers the pages with an ominous presentiment; Finnegans Wake is declaredly the book of the night as Ulysses is of the day.
Even in the total absence of light, what we understand as darkness, the optic nerve and the retina remain active. Even when no stimulation of the eyes is there, some of the residue of neural activity reaches the brain. Surprisingly, an “absence of stimulation can serve as data for perception” (Gregory 70). It is difficult for the brain to arrive at a decision whether to consider or ignore those random signals that interfere with the events outside, often problematizing the sensitivity of the organ. These randomness in the sensory is marked by an absence of Free Will; the neural activity is often understood as voluntary, reflexive, and without any volition, thereby problematizing the very process of reading itself that is premised on an agency of the reader, competent or otherwise, to make sense of the textual matter, to get a sense of what it is all about: “lead us seek, lote us see, light us find, let us missnot Maidadate, Mimosa Multimimetica, the maymeaminning of maimoomeining!” (FW 267.1–3)
The Wake urges us to “lift we our ears, eyes of the darkness” (FW 14.29). Both cornea and cochlea are extremely sensitive where lies a mosaic of sensitive receptors. The brain cannot read human language; it can only make sense of the patterns of light and sound energies – chains of electrical impulses. The eyes are in continuous movement, moving from one object to the other, often without any purpose. Blinking, though seemingly happens at regular intervals, is devoid of any definite rhythm or schedule; it is supplemented by continuous tremors of high frequency and jerks during the movement of the eyeballs searching for something. Reading requires a movement of the eyeballs, in a linear fashion, in space, from one word to the other, systematically. This assumes understanding as pre-requisite. Carla Marengo Vaglio in her article “Cinematic Joyce: Mediterranean Joyce” reiterates this connection between vision and imagination, between the eye and the mind: “As in Ulysses where “The eye sees all flat. . . . Brain thinks. Near: far” (U 15.3629–30), the passivity of the eye is replaced by the mobility of the gaze” (232–33).
The acoustic and the visual experience of the Wake go hand in hand; the acoustic possibility of language has been explored in creating an embodied sound-sense: “so long as the obseen draws theirs which hear not so long till allearth’s dumbnation shall the blind lead the deaf ” (FW 68.34–5); “sound seemetary” (FW 17.35–6); “Is now all seenheard then forgotten?” (FW 61.29); “the blink pitch” (FW 93.4); “His hearing is indoubting just as my seeing is onbelieving” (FW 468.15–16); “the doom of the balk of the deaf but that the height of his life from a bride’s eye stammpunct” (FW 309.3–4); “I hereby hear by ear from by seeless socks” (FW 468.24–5); “learned to speak from hand to mouth till he could talk earish with his eyes shut” (FW 130.18–19).
Hearing the text yields to one interpretation; seeing it, another. “The mar of murmury mermers to the mind's ear” (FW 254.18). Eugene Jolas in “The Revolution of Language and James Joyce” explains the Wakean mechanics:
James Joyce gives his words odours and sounds that the conventional standard does not know. In his super-temporal composition, language is being born anew before our eyes. . . . Those who have heard Mr. Joyce read aloud from work in Progress know the immense rhythmic beauty of his technique. It has musical flow that flatters the ear, that has the organic structure of works of nature, that transmits painstakingly every vowel and consonant formed by his ear. (89)
Understanding this as a form of participation, intimacy, or, at times, alterity, it can be concluded that the textual space built by fluid semantic and sonic successions becomes a pressure-point between ontology and the Joycean “cognisances” (Wake 575.30)—flickering dazzle of lightning and the thunderous revelation—“where flash becomes word and silents selfloud” (167.16–17). To borrow Beckett’s words in conclusion, Finnegans Wake is “not written at all. Is not to be read – or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to” (Beckett, Exagmination 14).
Note:
As is the convention in Joyce studies, all references to Finnegans Wake will be to page and line number, so that (FW 374.32), for example, refers to Finnegans Wake (to be abbreviated as FW in parenthetical citations) page 374, line 32. And quotations from Ulysses (abbreviated as U) are cited by episode and line number.
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