Derrida and Joyce by Derrida & Joyce (SUNY 2013)

Author:Derrida & Joyce (SUNY, 2013)
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438446400
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2013-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

The Anti-Postal Shaun the Post

In Finnegans Wake, the postality provoked by Derrida is despised by Shaun the Post whose pained efforts to avoid it reveal the various contexts in which it operates. Shaun himself is not so much a character as a textual effect of the Wake.5 Traditionally, and perhaps in a somewhat caricatured way, the word “character” refers to a fixed essence that maintains itself across the varieties of literary experience. This is not to say that literary characters do not change in that they can certainly become whom they are intended to be or fail to live up to their potential, but, in either case, the same underlying character suffers the events: the I who can claim that it is not the same as it was before. The “characters” of the Wake, however, do not underlie anything; they are found right there at the words on the page.6

Setting the word “character” off in quotation marks in an attempt to postpone the postal effect unfortunately only serves to multiply the characters upon the page. As an effect of distance, postality cannot be put off in this manner, but the inability of these quotation marks to accomplish their assigned task is instructive. They would return order to the text, provide assurance, and allow us to admit our fears of applying an inappropriate term, while proclaiming our fearlessness of such impropriety. The quotation marks are able to function regardless of content. They carry their term, providing a prima facie assurance that they, at least, are not involved in the affairs that they mention.

To bear a message and establish order: these are the roles of Shaun the Post, and he is those quotation marks. Their problem is his problem. Each attempts to contain postality and yet maintain separation, to envelope it and limit the extent of its effect. Insofar as character designates a steady presence persisting throughout the book, Shaun is not a character; he has already been torn apart by his message and surrendered to possibilities of nonreturn, misrecognition, and disconfiguration. Shaun's Commission Throughout the text and especially in book III, Shaun is a mediator:7 he is a postman charged with delivering a letter, a medium at a séance channeling the voice of hce, Christ bearing God's message and “in reality … only” a barrel rolling down the Liffey.8 He is a receptacle, the vehicle for another. The meaning that he bears is the meaning that defines him, and it is not his own. He himself is “unwordy” (FW 408.10). To be true to his post, he must deliver a letter that would thereby arrive, but we have already seen that the constant arrival of what has been sent uproots any sense of a final destination and institutes a reign of appropriation and belonging.

Shaun, however, for all his injunctions to work, is unwilling to commit to this work of appropriation. He considers himself impotent in regard to the letter: “since it came into my hands I am hopeless off course to be doing anything concerning” (FW 410.

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