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By Root 1448 0

of pure artistic creation from nothing (ex nihilo), something completely fresh and new, requires a pristine and univocal language: And yet everywhere, language equivocates. In the same conversation with the dean of studies, Stephen calls attention to this problem, using as his example the various connotations of the word “detain”; and confirming his worst fears, the dean misunderstands Stephen’s point initially because his own usage is loose and sloppy. In Alice in Wonderland (a text that enthralled Joyce, as Finnegans Wake clearly evidences), Humpty Dumpty insists to Alice that “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean”; like Humpty Dumpty, Stephen would like to exert complete mastery over language and meaning, but his experience consistently brings home the fact that none of us has such power. He may complain, in Ulysses, that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” but he realizes that he must do so in a language conditioned by that very history.

The inherently equivocal structure of language (and to be clear, this is the structure of all human languages, not just English)—language’s consistent difference from itself—has both this historical dimension and another, ahistorical component. The words upon which Stephen muses while talking with the dean of studies, “home,” “Christ,” “ale,” and “master,” all resonate differently for Stephen owing to the history of colonial subjection of Ireland by Great Britain; for the ambiguity of these words, to quote the Englishman Haines in Ulysses, “it seems history is to blame.” But even if this history could be factored out, language is always at odds with itself. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida has termed this frustrating and elusive structure of language différence; it means that the momentum of writing is always centrifugal, always toward what Derrida calls the “dissemination” of meaning, rather than its consolidation, as the idealized will of its author, in a text. In his best-known example, Derrida examines the way that the word “supplement” (which he comes across in a passage from Jean-Jacques Rousseau) means both “surplus” and “remedy for a deficit”: The supplement is the surplus that (inadvertently) betrays a lack. Such, according to Derrida, is the fundamental structure of all human language.

Though no linguist, Joyce seems intuitively to have had a sense of this dynamic; this principle is observable on both the level of the individual word, and on the larger level of phrases, sentences, and narrative units, in all of Joyce’s writing. (In an early example, Joyce punningly titled his first volume of poems Chamber Music, betraying both the poems’ delicate beauty and invoking the sound of urine in a chamber-pot.) The truth of language’s inherent slipperiness is first made manifest to Stephen Dedalus just a couple of pages into Portrait. Stephen, cold while playing football in the fall air,

kept his hands in the side pockets of his belted grey suit. That was a belt round his pocket. And belt was also to give a fellow a belt. One day a fellow had said to Cantwell:

-I’d give you such a belt in a second (p. 6).

Belt as security, belt as violence: “belt,” it would seem, is an especially paradoxical word, something like its own antonym. In truth, however, as Stephen soon discovers, language is full of similarly slippery terms: In quick succession he is given to contemplating the mystery of words like “suck,” “queer,” and most famously of all, “smugging.” Indeed at the very close of the novel, which the diary-entry form suggests that Stephen himself has written, the final formulation of his artistic credo is undermined by just such a slippage: “Welcome, 0 life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (p. 225). “Forge,” like the good old English word “cleave,” is its own antonym. Using the metaphor of a blacksmith working metal, Stephen promises to “forge ... the uncreated conscience of his race,” by heating and hammering the red-hot metal