Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts

The Night Watch

87 The Night Watch1 (over “the book of himself”) translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas “Aha! I know you, Grammer!”2 —James Joyce, Ulysses Mallarmé . . . about Hamlet. He says: il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même, don’t you know, reading the book of himself. —James Joyce, Ulysses, cited by Jacques Trilling3 Chapter 11, which takes place in the dwelling of the Sirens, reproduces a fugue per canonem, complete with trills, semibreve, staccato, presto, glissando, martellato, fortamento, pizzicati. —Jean Paris, James Joyce par lui-même, cited by Jacques Trilling . . . to read the effects of the text in a sort of polyphony, in multiple registers . . . —Jacques Trilling, James Joyce ou l’écriture matricide In a word, in brief, as befits a preface, I will speculate about a working hypothesis, one that will remain for me, to be sure, the object of a risky choice. It is a deliberate selection that I intend to sign, a boldly assumed sorting out, a tri, I might even say an essay, a trial run, an experimental attempt, a try4 (a word that apparently has the same etymology as tri). To what hypothesis am I referring? The author of this book, so well known and so well-versed in literature, psychoanalysis, music, and a few other arts, here proposes, he too, he first of all, to sort things out, to trier. My own tri would thus raise the stakes or speculate upon his own. For 88 DerrIDA AND JOYCe Jacques Trilling would have proposed a tri or sorting out between the mother and maternity. To distinguish between the mother and maternity, to sort them out [trier], to draw an infinitely fine but indivisible line between them, even when the thing seems undecidable—that, I would say, is Trilling’s decisive gesture, his critical operation, his krinein. And this operation takes place at the very moment he reminds us of the inevitability or fatality for the one who writes, and par excellence for Joyce, of a certain matricide. But here is the aporia that never fails to appear—and far from paralyzing the matricidal desire this aporia actually exacerbates it, begins by motivating it, and opens the way for it: if one distinguishes between [trier] the mother and maternity, it follows that one can dream of doing away with the mother, some particular mother, though one will never be done with the maternity of the mother. “One can always murder the mother,” says Trilling, “but one will not for all that have done away with maternity. . . .”5 One can always attempt (or try6 ) to kill the mother, but the best one can do is succeed in murdering some particular mother or figure of the mother , while maternity itself, maternity in its phantasm, survives. And it—or she—watches [elle veille], the night watcher or night vigil, the nightlight or vigil light [veilleuse]. She—or it—survives [survit] and surveys [surveille]. Funeral vigil [veillée funèbre]. Wake.7 Maternity goes on, and will always go on, defying the matricide. One can kill the mother, yes, but one will never be done trying to be done with maternity, which, as a result, is never over and done with (an interminable analysis, therefore, since “one is never done killing off mourning”8 ). Maternity or the hounding of matricide. By chasing after matricide, by giving chase with such perseverance, one chases it away, deferring it and attempting to exclude it. Maternity is that which will never be done calling for and escaping impossible matricide. And thus impossible mourning. And it will never be done provoking writing. Watching over it and surveying it, like a specter that never sleeps. The key witnesses here: Ulysses, Joyce, and a few others. Calling them to the witness stand, Trilling is able to get them to talk. In their own language. He interprets them in all their languages, and there are so many. This tri or sorting out between the mother and maternity is at once inevitable and impossible. It condemns the matricide to impotence but also to the repetition of the murder, to the attempted murder in writing. We are given a demonstration of this in the course of an exercise whose musical virtuosity, to mention only this among its many virtues, consists most often in an oscillation, a beat, or, better, an accelerated vibration between adjacent but distinct notes. It is enough to have heard, as I once had the chance to do, Jacques Trilling play...