Spectres of Sovereignty, by Louis Armand

LOUIS ARMAND

SPECTRES OF SOVEREIGNTY: (AN)NOTATIONS ON THE COLONIAL SUBJECT IN JOYCE'S PORTRAIT

"Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes" (Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII, 188)

In an often cited passage of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a classic moment in the linguistic double-bind of the colonial subject is played out. This is the infamous "disquisition on the tundish by the dean of studies"; a passage in Joyce's text whose complexity is often overlooked by critics who seek in it a straightforward narrative of colonial disempowerment and injustice. <1>

Part of the complexity of this passage is masked by an element of the burlesque. The dean of studies, an embodiment of linguistic as well as British colonial authority, is depicted as condescending, literal, and ignorant, whilst Stephen Dedalus (the young Irish student) is placed in the apparently hopeless position of the colonial subject who is ultimately required to instruct the coloniser in the use of his own language, without, however, possessing the cultural authority to do so. What is as stake, as it always is in such encounters, is symbolic authority over a certain type of knowledge, or rather of a discourse of knowledge-as Levinas suggests: "to have recourse to the articles of the code, to establish institutions, recourse to the letter as that which allows the just to be separated from the unjust,"<2> etc.; an authority which implies a particular notion of sovereignty (over language), at the same time as it succumbs to the irony of linguistic indifference to any such assumption of sovereignty.

The "disquisition on the tundish" follows directly from a discussion of aesthetics in which Stephen Dedalus employs a subtle rhetorical manoeuvre to introduce the metaphor of the lamp-a common metaphor for illumination or enlightenment. He begins with a metonymy: "For my purpose, I can work at present by the light of one or two ideas of Aristotle or Aquinas." Joyce extends this into a pun: "I see," replies the dean. "I quite see your point." Stephen continues: "I need them only for my own use and guidance until I have done something for myself by their light," at which point he substitutes the metaphor of the lamp: "If the lamp smokes or smells I shall try to trim it. If it does not give light enough I shall sell it and buy another" (P 187).<3>

Subtly, then, Stephen Dedalus is proposing the relative expediency of cultural authority: the names of Aquinas or Aristotle designate a system of ideas that are considered valuable only insofar as they are useful, and in particular useful in arriving at a certain 'independence of mind.' Moreover, these names/ideas (linked by metonymy) are exchangeable, and are of no more inherent value than a commercial item, like a lamp (and here, too, is the basis for Joyce's critique of the fetishisation and 'commodification' of authority and authenticity-viz. the name of the father, the principles of geometry, the categorical imperative, the words integritas, consonantia, claritas, etc-elaborated later in Stephen's discussion of aesthetic apprehension [P 204ff]).

The dean of studies, however, misinterprets Stephen's argument, focusing upon the lamp as an allegorical object and missing the significance of Stephen's trope. The dean begins to discuss the lamp of the philosopher, and in particular the lamp of the ascetic Epectitus, which "was sold for a fancy price after his death. It was the lamp he wrote his philosophical dissertations by." Stephen remarks that Epectitus was "an old gentleman, who said that the soul was very like a bucket of water" (and it is perhaps appropriate that this ascetic is not only depicted as somewhat crude of thought, but that he was rather literal minded as well, 'confusing' the discipline of philosophy with the beard that symbolised its profession, and which he refused to shave off to avoid Domitian's prohibition). Moreover, the anecdote of Epectitus and the lamp suggests how the market for cultural artefacts displaces or devalues the cultural discourse itself, which such items as Epectitus' lamp would be supposed to denote (but which it also commodifies and 'debases.')<4>

This emptying-out of symbolic value is itself depicted in the person of the dean of studies, who is presented as a custodian of knowledge and enlightenment, but whose face "seemed like an unlit lamp or a reflector hung in a false focus" (P 187). Significantly, the figure of the dean is gradually replaced by a series of fragmentary metaphors: "the dean's candle butts," "the jingle of the words," "the priest's voice," "the priest's face," etc. For Stephen, the dean himself has become an object of "aesthetic" speculation, embodying the paradoxical relationship between essence and proprium. Beyond the crude "jingling" of the priest's exterior, Stephen wonders what "lay beyond, or within": "A dull torpor of the soul or the dullness of the thundercloud, charged with intellection and capable of the gloom of God?" (P 187)

1

"One difficulty [...] in esthetic discussion," Stephen suggests ironically, "is to know whether words are being used according to the literary tradition or according to the tradition of the marketplace" (P 188). This question of language, or more precisely of mimesis, provides one of the many subtexts of the passages cited so far.<5> Moreover, it brings us to the fundamental issue of authority over cultural discourse, which is to say, authority over language, and the ways in which meaning is subordinated to those contexts determined by various traditions of use, what Derrida has called the "law of genre."<6>

On this point, Joyce employs a contextual pun to demonstrate the argument being put forth by Stephen Dedalus, focusing upon the word "detain" (tain/tenir). Stephen suggests two examples: "a sentence of [Cardinal] Newman's in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained in the full company of the saints"; and the common phrase, "I hope that I am not detaining you" (to which the dean's literal response: "Not in the least"). But we can also understand "detain" as referring to the impossibility of confining significatory play within a field of rigid denomination, or within a particular context.

Among other things, this point is particulary relevant to the question of aesthetic categories, and to the concept of essences, and of the eidos, or pure idea, of mimesis. What is at stake for Stephen, and which is perhaps the real cause of his disavowal of the Church on, is the very concept of a metaphysical absolute, something which would invest language with the possibility of unambiguous and direct meaning; the logos of God, for instance. What emerges, however, is that this relationship between language and meaning is seen as normative; that no context is overly determined enough to prevent other significations from taking place; and that contexts themselves are often outcomes of what amounts to a type of authoritarianism-in this case the Church, the system of Jesuit education in which Stephen was brought up, and the British colonial apparatus to which he is subject.

2

In Ulysses, Stephen makes the observation that Ireland serves two masters, England and the Roman Church. In the dean of studies, both of these institutions are embodied, and on both counts give rise to a particular critique, which is alternately rhetorically and etymologically encoded:

To return to the lamp, he said, the feeding of it is also a nice problem. You must choose the pure oil and you must be careful when you pour it in not to overflow it, not to pour in more than the funnel can hold. [P 188]

The image of the funnel here can be seen to serve several purposes, implying, among other things, the figure of the dean himself and the tradition of knowledge and authority he represents as priest and pedagogue, which is to say, as a species of funnel. It also presents Stephen with an opportune linguistic anomaly (a pose perhaps, but also illustrative of the dean's very point). "What funnel?" asks Stephen, precociously:

--The funnel through which you pour oil into the lamp. -That? said Stephen. Is that called a funnel? Is it not a tundish?

To which the dean responds: "Is that called a tundish in Ireland? [...] I never heard the word in my life" (P 188).

This apparent irony masks a deeper movement of displacement and substitution, commencing with the insistence that "tundish" is not some quirk of Hiberno-English, but is in fact Anglo-Saxon, whilst "funnel" is instead derived from the Old French founil, from the Latin infundibulum. As Hugh Kenner has pointed out, "tundish, like any Saxon word beside a Romance synonym, sounds picturesque and low."<7> That is to say, it has the sound of a provincial or colonial usage, which is not the true King's English. In this instance, "picturesque and low" mean 'Irish.' The situation would be parodic if it were not for the personal and political significance Stephen attributes to it:

The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his sensitiveness against his courteous and vigilant foe. He felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought:

-The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or excepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. [P 189]

In his recent book addressing "the monolinguism of the other," Jacques Derrida suggests that this apparent crisis in the 'colonial subject' can be posed in the seemingly contradictory statement: "I only have one language; it is not mine." Moreover, this monolinguism "is impassable, indisputable: I cannot challenge it except by testifying to its omnipresence in me."<8>

The question again is one of ownership and authority, not only of the language which is spoken, but of the 'I' which is permitted to speak it, or the pronoun 'I' which one is compelled to assume, as the signifier of self, in order to speak (the apparent sovereignty of the I). But the crisis that arises as a result of linguistic colonisation is not simply one of perpetual disenfranchisement by virtue of being internally 'foreign' or 'other.' Rather it is the determination of 'foreignness' or 'otherness' by the exercise, on the part of the coloniser, of arbitrary authority over the relationship between the colonial subject and language, and in particular of the right to determine meaning. (That is to say, the right to name a thing, or oneself, as in the Penal days when the Irish were supposed to have been forbidden to mention their nationality, for instance.)<9>

This relationship, however, can also be read within the closer confines of a notion of paternity and paternalism-describing, perhaps, a moment in the Hegelian dialectic of self-knowing coming to the figure of the father through the 'sacrifice' of the son. The priest/pseudo-father, in this instance, re-echoes the theme of the absent, hidden, or hypostatised paternal-father in two texts from Dubliners, 'Araby' and 'The Sisters.' In A Portrait this theme is expanded in a constellation of related ideas-from the figure of British colonialism and the Jesuit order, to questions of Irish nationality and language, to the role of the artist and nature of aesthetic apprehension, to the role of the proper name-in particular the ghostly name of the father-and to the subject of duty, service, and ethical or moral responsibility.

According to Levinas:

Paternity is the relationship with a stranger who, entirely while being Other, is myself, the relationship of the ego with a myself who is none the less a stranger to me. The son, in effect, is not simply my work, like a poem or an artefact, neither is he my property. Neither the categories of power nor those of having can indicate the relationship with the child [...]. Then again, the son is not any event whatsoever that happens to me-for example, my sadness, my ordeal, my suffering. The son is an ego, a person. Lastly, the alterity of the son is not that of an alter ego. Paternity is not a sympathy through which I can put myself in my son's place. It is through my being, not through sympathy, that I am my son. The return of the ego to itself that begins with hypostasis is thus not without remission, thanks to the perspective of the future opened by eros. Instead of obtaining this remission through the impossible dissolution of hypostasis, one accomplishes it through the son.<10>

This notion of paternity as the remission of the ego's return to itself also describes a kind of spectrality, a haunting of the paternal will exercised in absentia, or in effegie, as in the theme of Hamlet in Ulysses and the figure of Dedalus in A Portrait.

Significantly, Levinas's reading of paternity assumes the position of the father in order to imagine and project the ethical undermining and enlargement of the 'paternal self.' But as Luce Iragaray has pointed out, such a preoccupation with (male) paternity is always vulnerable to the charge that it may be a means for the masculine ego of restituting itself, to itself, through the mediatory figure of woman-reduced to a tropic interval in the circuit of paternalistic egoism. According to Iragaray: "The aspect of fecundity that is only witnessed in the son obliterates the secret of difference. As the lover's means of return to himself outside himself, the son closes the circle. The path of a solitary ethics that will have encountered for its own need, without nuptial fulfilment, the irresponsible woman, the loved one."<11>

3

The structural thematic of the father-son 'dialectic,' which pervades A Portrait, nevertheless accords with this reading by Iragaray-particularly in relation to Stephen Dedalus's attempts at interpreting the aesthetic theories of Aquinas, and most notably in the treatment of female characters in general (of Emma Cleary, the Blessed Virgin, the bird-girl, Dante, the prostitute, et al). But it also draws attention to a strange omission in the depiction of a 'creative principle,' and in the projection of terms like "home" which orientate Stephen's unrootedness, particularly in regards to his fascination with the condition of his soul and his disquietude over the mysteries of the human body (his own above all):

But he, apart from them and in silence, remembered in what dread he stood of the mystery of his own body. -Stephanos Dedalos! Bous Stephanoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos! Their banter was not new to him and now it flattered his mild proud sovereignty. Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy. [P 168]

Stephen's epiphany regarding the prophetic nature of his "strange name" occurs at a critical juncture in the book, and immediately precedes an encounter, at a distance, between Stephen and a girl wading in the Liffey estuary (P 171)-the so-called 'bird girl' who, with her thighs bared almost to the hips, nevertheless appears to Stephen as a symbol of both physical transcendence and mortal beauty: "Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh," etc. Stephen is transported: "Her eyes had called to him and his soul had leaped to the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!" (172).

The sublimation of the female figure returns Stephen to the dialectical theme of the preceding pages:

Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it mean? Was it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being? [...] He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable. [P168-170]

But here also is a central paradox of Joyce's text. The desire of Stephen to serve and yet not to serve, to fulfil and yet to overcome a destiny which in some way binds him to the maternal figure (of Ireland, the Church) and the paternal ghost. The seductions of a destiny and the nightmarish hauntings of a "history from which [he] is trying to escape" are the two poles that limit Stephen's conception of the artist as ascetic or decadent, prodigal or parodic, servile or sovereign, and so on. At the same time, however, he is caught in an ethical double-bind: to respond to the "call" of the artist's destiny, to "serve," to sacrifice himself in the service of creation, and yet to espouse the motto "non serviam": "When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets" (P 203).

4

In her essay 'Joyce and the (R)use of Writing,' H�lene Cixous draws attention to the problem of the relation of Joyce's writing to a "mother tongue."<12> According to Cixous, English, for Joyce, is "too much" a mother tongue, which had to be made to stumble. At the same time Cixous draws our attention to the role of a 'paternal' tongue, the tongue of the priest 'playing dead' in 'The Sisters'-the paralytic tongue & the dead language of the catechism; the jingling language of the marketplace: "every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shrivelled up sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language" (P 178). In Ulysses, Stephen refuses to pray beside his mother's deathbed and is haunted thereafter by the spectre of her decaying body. In 'The Sisters' the protagonist dreams of the disembodied head of the dead priest, palsied and desiring to confess. The symbolic castration of the priest, and the imminence of this threat, belies the authority of the priest as custodian of knowledge and of the divine mysteries. At the moment of correspondence, or consummation, of the father-son dialectic, the figure of the 'castrative mother' interposes as lacuna, lapsus or lack: a failure in the trans-substatiation of the word. Cixous:

Between Daedalus and Icarus: Ulysses. And: "My will: his will that fronts me. Seas between" (U 217). From father unto son, via the mother, always, begun again. This delayed birth constitutes the movement of a work which playfully undermines gestation, the play inscribing itself in the various falls, losses, repeated and unexpected exiles, which are all the more astounding in that the goal seems accessible, is named, puts itself forward, fascinates, is not hidden but rather pointed out (I, the Artist, the Word), is not forbidden but rather promised, and in that the subject, held in suspense, pursues it with [...] the weapons of the self (silence, exile, cunning), marking out its passage with theories, incorporated hypotheses of formalisation: one or two ideas of Aristotle, a pinch of St. Thomas; a chapter on poetics and literary history; several chapters on the problems of autobiography; and, in a pre-Freudian context, an implicit theory of the authorial unconscious, and of the textual unconscious, in a blasphemous analogy with the Arian heresy, showing in the Trinity the three-sided, divinely ordered production that allows the Father to see through the Son's eyes, where the Holy Spirit would be like that chain lining the Name of the Father to the Name of the Son, the scriptor to writing: the breath of the unconscious on the text.<13>

It is at this point that Stephen assumes the dispassionate stance of the analyst, in which hybris is concealed in the ritual of "confession or auto-critique." <14> This ceremony, ritual-of the actor who inhabits a certain role, of the analyst, as Derrida says, who "must also maintain a certain critical position. And in a certain manner, an 'objectifying' position. Even if this activity is often close to passivity, if not passion, the participant goes on to critical and criteriological acts: a vigilant discrimination is required from whoever, in one capacity or another, becomes an interested party in the ritual process"<15>-also describes a movement of sublimation, of abstraction: a warding off of the threat of castration, of the maternal spectre. Citing Aquinas, Stephen translates the maternal figure into a figure of rhetoric. Recalling the trinity and dialectics, his theory moves from woman, to the hypotenuse of the Venus of Praxiteles, to the geometrical figure of a right-angle triangle, to Platonism, to the neo-Aristotelean, Aquinian dictum: Ad pulcritudinem tria requiruntur integritas, consonantia, claritas (P 207-211). This recapitulation of Stephen's earlier discussion of aesthetics with the dean of studies (pulcra sunt qua visa placent) also draws attention to the question of language, and to the question of how knowledge is codified and ritualised in the act of translating from a language which is both dead and yet universalised, a 'lingua-franca' which is no longer a 'mother tongue.'

5

It is against such a play of languages that there unfolds the ironic pseudo-drama, which is also a critique of linguistic colonialism, scripted in the "disquisition on the tundish." By implicitly evoking the etymologies of the words "tundish" and "funnel," Joyce suggests ways in which language preserves a memory of remote cultural transactions that are not always manifest at the level of usage. One inference is that the dean himself is enacting a legacy of former colonisations, recalling the displacement of Anglo-Saxon language and culture by that of the Norman invaders.<16> With the colonial situation reversed, the English dean speaks in the language over whose memory, or cultural archive, he bears symbolic authority; that is, censorial authority. In this way we might think of Stephen, speaking as colonial subject or 'other,' as symbolising for the dean a 'return of the repressed.' The word "tundish" is downgraded, rejected, denied; its etymology concealed, or cancelled (what Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, calls "the abnihilisation of the etym" [FW 353.22]). It takes on an appearance of otherness, as something unfamiliar or uncanny. Recalling Freud's term unheimlich, denoting 'uncanny' or 'un-homely' (whose significance in psychoanalytic is anchored in the threat of castration), it is possible to detect a further significance when Stephen says: "How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech." The Anglo-Saxon word spoken on his lips is doubly foreign, and it returns unrecognised to haunt the linguistic consciousness of the coloniser. At this point it is worth recalling a comment by Heidegger that: "Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells."<17> The position of the colonial subject, however, might seem to contradict this. For instance, not only is Ireland 'not at home' in its own culture or language, from which it had effectively been dispossessed by the English, but even the idea of 'home' (a pervasive theme in A Portrait) is rendered foreign, just as the word "home" (itself an Anglo-Saxon word of Germanic origin) sounds foreign on Stephen's lips. This apparent contradiction, though, subsequently resolves itself if we pursue Joyce's etymological concerns further into the historical domain. In this way we might identify a radical decentring at the point at which English emerges as an 'autonomous' language, and which is preserved as a type of linguistic unconscious of which the substitution of "funnel" for "tundish" (and the later substitution of both of these terms for an aspect of the female body) may be taken as a symptom. Further, such a possible decentring raises doubts about asserting any straight-forward relationship of a 'subject' to language, in which this subject is considered a 'colonial subject,' and whose situation cannot also be shown to be that of the 'colonising' language itself.

CODA

The transition from Anglo-Saxon to English followed fairly predictable lines, organised around the Norman presence in Britain after 1066:

The conquerors spoke French; the vanquished, Anglo-Saxon, which lost the dignity of an official and of a literary language. French became the language of the court, the schools and the law courts, and alternatively with Latin, of the Church and of Science.18

Through various stages, Anglo-Saxon became impoverished. Deprived of an official or literary function, and everywhere exposed to the colonising influence of the language of the conquerors, it gradually became denuded, particularly in those regions which bordered directly upon the political, religious and educational centres of London, Oxford, Cambridge and Canterbury. Significantly, it was the dialect of these particular regions, the Midlands dialect, which eventually comprised Middle English,19 with French and Latin ultimately conceding to a hybrid language which borrowed many of the words imported from Normandy, in particular scientific and legal language, and abstract and technical terms ("funnel," for example). Hence those terms in Middle (and subsequently Modern) English which relate to knowledge and cultural authority were often either "words of French origin or words based, in imitation of French, on Latin or Greek."20

The designation of 'King's English,' it would seem, is curiously ironic, considering the colonial, or post-colonial context in which Midlands dialect developed into the Middle English of Chaucer. One notable feature of this dialect is the extent of its degradation (more than any other Anglo-Saxon dialect), to the point where we could almost speak of it as a dead language; certainly as a language dispossessed of its identity, including most of its original grammatical features. It would be difficult, indeed, to speak of this language as properly 'belonging' to anyone, let alone being a sovereign language (in the sense implied above).21

Joyce himself was frequently pre-occupied with such examples of historical and cultural nominalism, particularly in Finnegans Wake and in his reading of Vico's Principi di Scienza Nuova. More importantly, Joyce was concerned with the way in which history articulates itself in language, preserving a socio-linguistic archive which exists apart from, or despite, the arche of an historical or colonial project. As an exemplary language, English can be seen in this way as being purely normative in its relation to sovereignty. Its denigration and renascence, an intense period of literary translation and borrowing, opened it at its 'origin' to a counter-colonising movement which has operated throughout its history and which ultimately works to deconstruct any assumption of sovereignty over it.

We might see, then, that the subtextual relationship between the words "funnel" and "tundish" informs a certain irony at work in the dynamics of colonisation, although this too would be dependent upon a particular historical context. Indeed, towards the end of A Portrait the narrative register shifts from the third to the first person in the form of a series of personal diary entries.22 This private historical register directs the bildungsroman towards the direct testament of the subject as scriptor, miming the apparent sovereignty of the I. It is at this point, on the book's penultimate page, that the word "tundish" reappears:

April 13. That tundish has been on my mind for a long time. I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his own language or learn it from us. Damn him one way of the other! (P 252)

In the guise of a spectre, this return of the tundish (a second time) seems to have lost the mystery of its previous appearance. It is made to speak: it has light cast upon it, is explained, is restored to its 'proper place.' In the absence of the priest-father Stephen's irony gives way to (impotent) frustration. At the moment the subject asserts itself, it undergoes a slippage: from first person singular to first person plural. "I go to encounter for the millionth time more or less the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race" (P 253).

Forger, artificer: "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead." In his father's stead, in the figure of the putative I/us, the assumption of cultural or linguistic sovereignty is seen to exhaust itself, bastardised in its very genealogy-an exhaustion which plays itself out in the precarious space of translation between a French and an Anglo-Saxon word; a movement of assimilation which fails to bring about a rapprochement with the pure idea, and so remains, like the dean of studies, as giving body to a certain after-effect of spectrality: "a tardy spirit" (P 189), an accessory, as it were, after the fact.

NOTES

* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual IASIL (International Association for the Study of Irish Literature) Annual Conference, July 26-30, 1999, University of Barcelona, Spain.

1 Cf. Alan Roughley, Reading Joyce Reading Derrida (Miami: University Press of Florida, 1999), 101.

2 Cited in A. Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 286.

3 All references are to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Chester G. Anderson (New York: Viking Press, 1968).

4 This theme is further played out in another account of Epectitus's lamp by the dean of studies, in which it is argued that an earthen lamp casts as good a light as an iron one, but is less appealing to a thief. However, the dean's analogical borrowing here is simply for the purpose of moral instruction, and the enlightening value of the allegory itself is lessened by the quality of the 'vessel' of the dean.

5 I.e. the 'idea' is substituted through metonymy, then through the metaphor of the lamp, and then the allegorical function of the lamp, its literal, symbolic and, ultimately, anagogic function. One possible subtext here is a critique of Platonic and Aristotelean mimesis, to which the passage constantly refers through the formal displacement of the initial idea, but also through the dominant themes of illuminatio, purity of perception and aletheia.

6 Jacques Derrida, "The Law of Genre," in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 221-52.

7 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era: The Age of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 98

8 Jacques Derrida, Monolinguism of the Other: or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1.

9 Cf. Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 21.

10 Emmanuel Levinas, "Time and the Other," in The Levinas Reader, ed. Se�n Hand (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 52.

11 Luce Iragaray, "The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity section IV, B, 'The Phenomenology of Eros,'" trans. Carolyn Burke, in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 245.

12 H�lene Cixous, "Joyce: The (r)use of writing," trans. Judith Still, in Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, eds. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

13 Cixous, "Joyce: The (r)use of writing," 13

14 Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. David Wood, J.P. Leavey, and Iain McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 13.

15 Derrida, On the Name, 4

16 A further anti-colonialist significance of the French displacement of Anglo-Saxon is hinted at throughout the 'Telemachus' episode of Ulysses, with references to the ill-fated efforts of the French during the Napoleonic wars to assist the Irish revolution.

17 Martin Heidegger, "The Letter on Humanism," trans. F. Capuzzi and G. Gray in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, revised edition (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 193.

18 �mile Legouis, A History of English Literature: Vol. I. The Middle Ages and the Renascence (650-1660) (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1926), 48.

19 After the Normans lost their continental territories in 1204 and were confined to Britain.

20 Legouis, A History of English Literature, 47. This modified dialect, styled as 'King's English,' finally replaced French in the schools in 1350, the courts in 1362, and was first spoken in parliament by Henry IV in 1399. Notably it was also the dialect chosen by the author of The Canterbury Tales to compose the first major literary work of a language that would, after some further evolution, also accommodate the Irishman James Joyce.

21 Moreover, the historical period that culminated in the decline of Anglo-Norman and the commencement of the English renascence itself followed from a more or less continuous process of colonisation in Britain from East and West, commencing with the decline of Rome whence the Saxon period had its origins. Notably, this colonising process included the sixth-century settlement of Northumbria by Irish missionaries, in whose monastery at Jarrow the great Latinist Bede spent his entire adult life and in which he wrote The Ecclesiastical History of the Angles, a text which places Anglo-Saxon history at the point of intersection between the Irish and Roman Churches, and which later became one of the chief works of Alfred the Great's cultural restoration after 878. Interestingly enough, it was another Irish-educated Northumbrian, the cleric Alcuin, who collaborated with Charlemagne from 790 to restore literate culture in a France which had also "relapsed into barbarism." Legouis, A History of English Literature, 7.

22 Written by Stephen in anticipation of his imminent 'flight' from Ireland. From third to first person as Stephen approaches the destiny implied in his name: embodiment of the name of the father-Icarus-Dedalus.

(c) LOUIS ARMAND, 2000.

Louis Armand is a senior lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies, Charles University, Prague, and a lecturer in art history at the University of New York, Prague.