Waste by Viney William.;

Author:Viney, William.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Figure 5.1 Typescript of James Joyce, The Joyce Papers 2002. National Library of Ireland. MS 36,639. II.ii.1: 1. Image 07–001

Keep in mind the large quantities of discarded material on this beach and the differences between the three versions of this line reveal some subtle shifts in meaning. In the NLI draft ‘all’ language sits ‘on’ the sand; language is a heap that is separate from the sand itself. In the Buffalo and Rosenbach versions, the sands are more explicitly equated with language; indeed, the sands and language become one and the same object. In addition to this, the NLI version suggests that language has ‘silted up’, whereas later versions maintain a more continual process. In addition to describing the condition of language as it slowly accretes meaning over time, an ongoing palimpsest of layering and sedimentation, this image also provides a way of appreciating the slow accretion of meaning that Joyce achieves through his revisions. As Sam Slote eloquently puts it, ‘Stephen’s description of silting language is thus an apt metaphor for the linguistic changes made between the drafts of a work in progress. Between drafts, a new text comes that silts up and over the language of the preceding, receding draft […] In other words, and with other words, the epiphany is silted’.39 For Slote, the analogue between textual beach and compositional revision is one of erasure, the language silts over the previous version. Yet the deliberate erasure of ‘which’ in the NLI draft and ‘that’ in the Buffalo is mutely registered in the awkward syntactic arrangement Joyce’s published text achieves, ‘These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here’. By losing the relative pronoun the line becomes converted into regular iambs, the reading of which operates in contradiction to the line’s embedded subclause. This grammatical and rhythmic tension becomes compounded by the carefully divided sentences that precede and follow this one, encouraging an impulse to read through rather than across/over the clause and resist the line’s fluent rhythm. The effect is to expose a lack, an absence of punctuation or preposition. Joyce adopts this technique in a more emphatic way throughout ‘Penelope’. Molly’s monologue progresses with constant interruption; despite its lack of formal punctuation the reader is aware of the marks and measures inherent in the text and how this reading supplements the presence of a textual absence.40 In a similar manner, our genetic analysis of ‘Proteus’ confirms the peculiar existence and persistence of waste; past versions of the text do not ‘disappear’ but are retained, held in suspended animation. What remains in the Rosenbach version is a syntactic trace of a textual absence, not an absence as such. In this manner, Joyce draws attention to words and textual marks that have not silted there, to a tracery of textual detritus that forms the necessary condition of his work in progress. By signifying absent words, words that no longer function in the text but maintain their ghostly demarcations, Ulysses contests the teleological boundaries of the singular edition.

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