…with the reader caught completely off-guard by a sentence that is happening, or perhaps already happened and is also happening, or perhaps neither, or both. Especially when the first two paragraphs bring forth words and phrases like penisolate, tauftauf thuart peatrick and sosie sesthers. There’s no dictionary or easy translation tool to uncover the meanings behind these awkwardly constructed, mismashed black and white characters – for, what else are these “words” without meaning but a series of random letters shunted together to form what seems like a real word?
It only gets worse. The third paragraph begins with “The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!)…” (Theall 1).
But all is not lost for the literary world, it seems, for the novel (or non-novel, non-narrative, non-nothing) has propelled, in part, the very theory I am using to talk about it (talk about a cyclic relationship!)
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in their essay “Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature” reference the language (or non-language) used in the novel for it “the utilization of English and of every language… never stops operating by exhilaration and overdetermination and brings about all sorts of worldwide reterritorialization” (1454). Critics have noted that not only is the author using traditional English words and insane, fabricated constructs of letters, but also words from a number of other languages, in order to better stir in ambiguity to the book. Language, as Deleuze and Guattari explain, isn’t a perfect system for things always can mean something else. They compare language to nature, pointing out that “in nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one” (Deleuze 1456). The author of the particular novel in question can “accurately [be] described as having ‘multiple roots,’ [shattering] the linear unity of the word, even of language, only to posit a cyclic unity of the sentence, text, or knowledge” (Deleuze 1457).
And anyone attempting to read this particular book can easily see that the cyclic nature as described above works from start to finish. The novel starts off in the middle of a sentence and ends with the beginning of the sentence, in a sense, starting where it began. But no questions are answered. In fact, there seems to be the situation that both a LOT of questions are raised and yet no basis for the questions exist. The argument goes that there is no discernible plot, no identifiable characters, and all the typical structure of a novel is thrown out in favor of eccentric rambling and headache-inducing twists and turns of language. Again, Deleuze and Guattari note this in “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia” as they describe the plateau being “a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end” (Deleuze 1459). How can a novel truly end when it never truly began? How can a narrative solve the issues the characters have that arise during the plot when those things may not exist within the framework of the cover?
Jacques Derrida, who was greatly influenced by the author, is said to have written to his Japanese translator that “the question of deconstruction is also through and through the question of translation” (Leitch 1680). I posit that this particular book is a perfect example of a truly postmodern novel, for there is no true translation possible. When words are constructed as to make them ambiguous, foreign or unintelligible to logical minds, when there is no dictionary or repository of information in which to find “meaning” of the words – when even the words themselves can be described as complete and utter nonsense – what hope does a reader have in finding the “truth” in the text? This novel should be celebrated as an inspiration to all experimental, postmodern writers, encouraging those who are afraid to step out of the rigid confines of conventional academic study in order to express themselves. Words are nothing more than symbolic representations of ideas, so why not create new ones? In fact, with that in mind, who is to say that the title of this very blog post doesn’t make “sense”? Who can say those words don’t “mean” anything?
Which brings us to the end (or the beginning):
Finnegan’s Wake starts off in media res…
(709)
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.” The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism, 2nd. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. 1454-1462. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. “Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature” The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism, 2nd. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. 1451- 1454. Print.
Leitch, Vincent B. Introduction. Of Grammatology. By Jacques Derrida. 2010. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. 1680-1688. Print.
Theall, Donald. Finnegans Web. Trent University, 2002. Web. 02 May 2011.
< http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/jjoyce/>
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