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  • Imagining Joyce and Derrida: Between Finnegans Wake and Glas
  • Tim Conley
Peter Mahon. Imagining Joyce and Derrida: Between Finnegans Wake and Glas. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. 405 pp.

Intrigued by Coleridge’s distinction between fancy and imagination, James Joyce reckoned he did not have the latter. Heidegger later effectively blended what were for Coleridge two faculties—conception and intuitive arrangement—for his definition of “imagination,” and Jacques Derrida was in his turn compelled to wonder whether or not he was by these lights imaginative. Yet waiting to be written, a capacious history of the imagination, of how the imagination has itself been imagined, would surely give no little attention to these writers and thinkers.

The reader of Peter Mahon’s long and dense book might well puzzle over the word “between” in the subtitle. What is between these texts? A suitably Derridian answer: nothing. In fact, we can profitably look at different possible meanings of saying there is nothing between Finnegans Wake and Glas as a scheme for reviewing this book and a way of seeing if nothing will indeed come of nothing.

There is nothing between them because there is nothing inside them. Mahon’s central argument is that Joyce’s book “can be read as a text that disrupts and reinscribes the philosophical understanding of the process of mimesis” (3). The nuance, the trepidation in that sentence gives one pause: it isn’t simply that Finnegans Wake imitates nothing—which in itself is not a particularly novel claim, but a recurrent point of interest and anxiety within Joyce scholarship with which Mahon does not seem terribly familiar1—but rather that it “can be read” as imitating nothing. [End Page 207] (Talk about hedging one’s bets.)2 Accordingly, Mahon reads the Wake for its echoes of Derrida’s thinking and does so not without discoveries and rewards, although it needs to be considered that an ornithologist can read the same book for rare birds and find them. The “nothing” represented in the book is, apparently, not a lack of representation per se, since Mahon invariably writes of the book as a narrative with identifiable characters, actions, and plot.

There is nothing between them in so far as there is no history between them. Or, more precisely, there are only traces of epistemologies; no material history, no palpable trace of the thirty-five years between their publications, or between Hegel and Genet, for that matter.3 The circumstances, the context in which Glas and the Wake were written are given no notice here, despite a stated interest in “Vico’s productive method” (that is, the concept of a method) and the “textual body” (again, the idea of a body and nothing material or tangible). This absence—this imposed nothing—at least partly accounts for the book’s glaring unawareness of a considered historical understanding of modernism as a crisis of meaning.

There is nothing between them because they are one and the same. Treating the Wake as a comprehensible, comprehensive philosophical system strikes me as a pretty odd thing to do, not because it has no philosophical dimensions (it contains multitudes) but because the methods by which Joyce composed the Wake (loosely referred to but never seriously grounded with so much as a mention of the mass of textual criticism and genetic material available to show how this or that passage of text took shape) reveal a perpetual refusal of orderly or even comprehensible systems, a rejection of the “oversystematization” that Joyce confessed to Beckett troubled him about Ulysses.

Of all of the absences in this book—in this instance, those epistemologically “between” Joyce and Derrida—two of the most striking in this [End Page 208] regard are Flaubert and Blanchot. The first, whose longing to write a book “about nothing” is well-known, gets frequent nods in the Wake, such as this one:

With best apolojigs and merrymoney thanks to self for all the clerricals and again begs guerdon for bistrispissing on your bunificence. Well wiggywiggywagtail, and how are you, yaggy? With a capital Tea for Thirst. From here Buvard to dear Picuchet. Blott.

(fw 302.04–10)

Mahon reproduces a much longer...

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