Romantic Poetry and the Fragmentary Imperative: Schlegel, Byron, Joyce, Blanchot

4. Narrative and Its Discontents; or,The Novel as Fragmentary Work: Joyce at the Limits of Romantic Poetry

4 Narrative and Its Discontents; or, The Novel as Fragmentary Work: Joyce at the Limits of Romantic Poetry —Are you going to write it? Mr Best asked. You ought to make it a dialogue, don’t you know, like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote. —James Joyce Twenty years ago, in the Introduction to the ‘Origin of Geometry’ . . . at the very centre of the book, I compared the strategies of Husserl and Joyce: two great models, two paradigms with respect to thought, but also with respect to a certain ‘operation’ of the relationship between language and history. Both try to grasp a pure historicity. To do this, Husserl proposes to render language as transparent as possible. . . . The other great paradigm would be the Joyce of Finnegans Wake. He repeats and mobilizes and babelizes the (asymptotic) totality of the equivocal, he makes this his theme and his operation. . . . —Jacques Derrida Of all the works in the modernist literary canon, Joyce’s Ulysses best embodies the fragmentary work Schlegel calls romantische Poesie. However , such an observation immediately leads one away from one of the most long-standing and deeply entrenched assumptions about Joyce’s mature works: that the narrative structure of Ulysses—and to a lesser extent, Finnegans Wake—is based upon the foundation of epic poetry, especially Homer’s Odyssey.1 This assumption originates with the essay, “Ulysses, Order and Myth” (1923), in which T. S. Eliot famously argues  105  that Joyce’s use of Homer opens up artistic space that comes to be known as modernism.2 In fact, Joyce himself invited this assumption when he furnished his friend Stuart Gilbert with a map of Homeric parallels to use in the authorized study of his book.3 No doubt the Odyssey plays a large role in setting the agenda for both the structure and themes of the novel. Nonetheless, compelling reasons remain for reading Joyce’s mature works in terms of a genealogy of writing based upon the example of Socratic dialogue, especially the forms of parody and satire Bakhtin associates with “the prehistory of novelistic discourse ” (DI 41–83). These reasons certainly begin, but are by no means exhausted by, Joyce’s placement of a farcical, satirical, and selfparodying dialogue concerning Hamlet at precisely the structural center of the novel, the discussion at the National Library in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode. This episode is the pivot on which the entire dialogic structure, and the two-headed theme, of the novel turns. However, much evidence suggests Joyce questions even the Greek origins of romantic poetry and novelistic discourse by making the novel’s hero a middle-aged Jewish no-one-in-particular who makes himself at home, when he can, in the gaping maw of the Irish metropolis .4 Here, Joyce extends a thought that informs much of the work of Schlegel and Byron: that fragmentary forms often entail not only a formal experimentation leading to what one might call indeterminacy or openness, but that such forms also embody a quasi-ethical imperative: that to think and to write in such a way is to remain responsive to what remains unthought in thinking, is to be responsive to what remains hidden or tacit in the mainline narratives in which we live, to what these narratives, by themselves, cannot contain.5 This is a concern that has frequently animated the work of the philosopher Jacques Derrida. Derrida speaks warmly of his first encounter with Joyce’s writings in 1956–1957 at Harvard University, especially Ulysses, an encounter that left an indelible imprint on his thinking.6 More specifically, at the end of “Violence and Metaphysics,” a long and difficult early essay devoted to the thought of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida raises the question of the possibility of an encounter between Greek and Hebrew forms of life: Are we Greeks? Are we Jews? But who, we? Are we (not a chronological , but a pre-logical question) first Jews or first Greeks? And does the strange dialogue between the Jew and the Greek, peace itself, have the form of the absolute, speculative logic of Hegel, the living logic which rec106  Romantic Poetry and the Fragmentary Imperative onciles formal tautology and empirical heterology after having thought prophetic discourse in the preface to the Phenomenology of the Mind? Or, on the contrary, does this peace have the form of infinite separation and of the unthinkable, unsayable transcendence of...