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COPYRIGHT 2005 Modern Humanities Research Association
Joyce, Bergson, and the Memory of Words by Justin Beplate
This article examines the implications of Bergson's dictum that the classical problem of mind-body relations centres upon the subject of memory--in particular, our memory of words--by applying the seminal insights of Matter and Memory to a close textual analysis of Joyce's writing. I argue that Joyce's language betrays a complex ambivalence towards memory in the context of his own aesthetic philosophy. It is an ambivalence manifested most strongly through the proxy of Stephen Dedalus, whose bookish imagination veers between the desire for independent authorship and the gravity of a loaded memory. I conclude that Joyce's literary method, through its highly self-conscious attention to the problematic relations between sound/sense and thought/action, powerfully enacts those psychic contradictions that Bergson could only adumbrate in his philosophical writings.
In Finnegans Wake, Shem the Penman writes with an obscene admixture of faeces and blood on 'every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history'. (1) His ongoing act of translation moves between his unheavenly body of inarticulate yearning and the yarning of those world-historical narratives that seize upon and acculturate the body: Shem the writer is, literally, written into being. The vestigial tatters of language clothing his baseness serve as a parodic reminder of the authentic rise of language in the grunts and groans 'gasped between kick-sheets' (p. 116) of the body's encounter with another. The Viconian rhythms of the Wake, in which the grand cycles of history roll through the 'doublin' dream-speech of washerwomen and publicans, signal a forced night-time remembering of the 'dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh' (p. 186); they are a literal refleshing of sensations felt and recorded on the body proper. And if the re-creations of Shem's night-time tales violate the infolded sanctity of bodies, it is because he effectively projects the private images secreted in memory's folds into the public spectacle of language.
The betrayal of language in the Wake, then, is a double one: it turns away from the site of its own fundament and denies the immediacy of bodily functioning, yet in the same movement it opens the way for guilt and shame by articulating the body within a moral, linguistic frame. It is in this sense that the 'allvoyous, demivoyelles' (FW, p. 116) sworn under the breath between kicksheets make their return, through the primary trope of language, as a form of voyeurism, absent-mindedly remembering the body's true form in hiding. 'If there is an origin,' Seamus Deane remarks of language in the Wake, 'it is the body' (FW, p. xlv).
In this sense, Joyce's night-time book continues the project embarked upon in Ulysses, anatomizing the intimate relations between linguistic form and bodily function. Joyce himself described Ulysses to Frank Budgen as, among other things, 'the epic of the human body':
In my book the body lives in and moves through space and is the home of a full human personality. The words I write are adapted to express first one of the functions then another. In Lestrygonians the stomach dominates and the rhythm of the episode is that of the peristaltic movement.
Budgen's protestations concerning the minds and thoughts of the characters were cut short: 'If they had no body [...] they would have no mind. It's all one.' (2) And yet while Joyce's comments seem to suggest a neat equivalence of body and mind, his apparent monism is in fact belied by the considerably more nuanced treatment of this theme in his writing. The body acts as a locus for thought; ultimately, however, it is in the failures of the characters' thought-speech (or interior monologues) seeking a return to the physicality of the body that one 'rereads' the countervailing narrative of estrangement between the two.
'Anyone who approaches [...] the classical problem of the relations of soul and body', writes Henri Bergson in Matter and Memory, 'will soon see this problem as centering upon the subject of memory, and even more particularly upon the memory of words [...].' (3) Bergson's insight provides one of the key formulations of this essay, for it positions memory as a mode of relation rather than a fixed term, a common denominator over which the res cogitans and the res extensa are able to enter into relations of exchange and transformation. In this sense, it is the common currency of memory--conscious or otherwise--that constitutes the true lingua franca in Joyce's dream of 'a language above all others', (4) functioning at the interface of those 'somatic' impulses which prime the body to act (and be acted upon) and the larger cultural formations that inform our habits of thought and speech.
While there is no reason to doubt Budgen's comment that Joyce 'prized memory above all human faculties' (p. 53), it is equally clear that Joyce's writing betrays a deep-seated ambivalence towards the uses and abuses of memory for art. From A Portrait of the Artist to Finnegans Wake, Joyce's characters negotiate the crooked strait that lies between twin perils: on the one hand, the mechanical artifice of a monolithic memory habit complacently echoing the received phrases of a literary and personal past; on the other, the vortex of a wind-woven rhetoric in which the unwary, carried away by the flow of fine-sounding phrases devoid of sense, succumb to the kind of empty nostalgia and piss-and-wind philosophizing diagnosed in Joyce's pathology of the Irish mind. Stephen Dedalus braves these waters in the 'Scylla and Charybdis' chapter of Ulysses, musing at one point that it is memory alone which preserves him from the Heraclitean flux of 'everchanging forms'. Yet the price he must pay for this sense of self-durability is the persistent memory of his debt to others (in this case, the IOU of one guinea owed to A.E.). Here, his playful piece of self-serving sophistry--in which the 'I' now is apparently not bound by the borrowings of an 'other I' then--is pressed into the service of comic relief; elsewhere in Joyce's writing, however, the tension between memory and more onerous forms of obligation does not dissolve in ironic laughter. If, to use Joyce's pithy phrase, 'In the particular is contained the universal' then Stephen Dedalus's problematic memory of words, his unresolved ambivalence towards those memorable phrases that time after time seduce the mind and betray the blood, is a particularized instance of the wider philosophical conflicts framing the mind-body problem as a whole.
In a notebook entry describing the language of A la recherche du temps perdu, Joyce notes somewhat tersely: 'Proust, analytic still life. Reader ends sentence before him.' (6) The comment suggests an implied critique of not only Proust's style but also his concept of 'involuntary memory': an accidental obliteration of time in which one is restored to the pure essence of a past experience or sensation. Clive Hart makes the point that neither Joyce nor Budgen, who was a painter, 'had much patience with abstract art; neither of them was interested in automatic creativity which short-circuits the connection between spirit and hand'. (7) Part of the project undertaken in Ulysses (and, indeed, in all of Joyce's novels) is to register this connection between spirit and hand through a language carefully adapted to express the material effects of remembering. Joyce's craft achieves its effect by self-consciously resisting the 'analytic still life' conception of art, forcing the reader to abandon the synchronic perspectives of the eye and attend...
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