Derrida, Joyce, & the Nightmare of History

BOOK REVIEWS almost infinite number of powerful images. I'll just choose one among many. When commenting on a curious parenthesis in the Wake 416.12—"(ichnehmon diagelegenaitoikon)"—Schork notes that Joyce uses the image of the parasitic fly called ichneumon to suggest how Nature can "laugh at generation" and he remarks that the entry on "Economic Entomology" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica is followed by the entry on "Economics" that begins precisely with a discussion of oikos (house) the root of economy. This "cannot be a coincidence," the providential bug that feeds on other insects can lead us to biology as well as to economics . No wonder that on the day Joyce died, he had a Greek lexicon open on his table. Jean-Michel Rabaté __________________ University of Pennsylvania Derrida, Joyce, & the Nightmare of History Alan Roughley. Reading Derrida, Reading Joyce. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. xxi + 133 pp. $44.95 EXAMINING JOYCE from an interdisciplinary perspective, the Florida James Joyce Series' more recent studies, for example, have focused on Joyce's work within the context of Greek and Hellenic culture, advertising and commodity culture, and music, to name a few. As part of this series, Roughley's study, however, is a step removed from a close examination of Joyce's texts as it explores how Derrida's philosophy was influenced by Joyce's texts, especially Finnegans Wake. He begins by acknowledging that even though deconstruction is passé, with Joyce studies having "moved on" or "'progressed'" to analyzing Joyce within the context of cultural studies, his book will attempt to elucidate the centrality of Joyce in Derrida's philosophy on history, language, and literature, and also, in some small measure, to reclaim Derrida's influence on literary theory. But, unfortunately, this book appears to be written in a vacuum ; it ignores not only the many deconstructionist readings of Joyce's texts in its heyday of the 1980s but also fails to cite various critics' interpretations of Derrida's work. Roughley also fails to consider the many perspectives and directions that Joyce studies have taken: feminist studies, and, in the 1990s, post-colonial and queer theory, which have, to some extent, built on Derrida and deconstruction. Roughley's idea of investigating how Joyce has influenced Derrida is thought-provoking, given his influence on Joyce studies. Not only does Derrida claim that Joyce's ghost "haunts" him, but both he and Joyce 367 ELT 43 : 3 2000 seem to inhabit the "same aesthetic textual topoi." Roughley begins his study by examining how Joyce influenced Derrida when he was investigating Husserl's ideas on language and history at the beginning of his career. At opposite ends of the spectrum, Joyce "collaps[es] history into the synchronic equivocal forms of writing" while Husserl's theories of language appeal to the "imperatives of univocity, or the unity of a single voice and signifier." Drawing on Stephen's declaration in Ulysses of history as "a nightmare from which [he] is trying to awake," Derrida suggests that Joyce "moves in the direction of the Hegelian ideal, encyclopedic and universal containing form" by collapsing the chronological distance between specific historic events, myths, and narratives; on the other hand, Husserl's antihistoricism moves in the "direction of the pure, univocal ideal and original geometric form" by trying to return to the original ideal form. In the second section of his book, Roughley develops how Joyce's ghost "haunts" Derrida by focusing on specific texts by Derrida and his readings of 'Finnegans Wake. Derrida's notion of the structure of the book as an ideological structure founded on the notion of unity was greatly influenced by Finnegans Wake. Although Hegel dismisses the introductory preface as "superfluous" and "even inappropriate and misleading," Derrida sees the preface as a "summary and anticipation" to the body of the text. He "re-mark [s]" Hegel's and Joyce's achievements by elaborating how the "ideological structure of the book restrictively determines and limits the play of the writing it contains." Finnegans Wake's double structure, the fusing of its beginning and ending with the final sentence ending on the text's first page, forces the reader to rethink the traditional view of the beginning...