#errancy

The newspaper points in "Ulysses" to a mysterious textual economy whose purpose is to process detritus into meaning, and meaning into detritus. Seen in this way, the newspaper is not the textual adversary of the novel, but its secret model.This textual economy is one played out materially and linguistically; newspapers and other pieces of written ephemera provide a way of signifying the residues of language and the remnants that give it shape. This is an analogue the novel amplifies in two distinct ways. The first of these comes about through Joyce’s replication of the date-function that we have just used to characterise the temporality of newsprint. This date-function occurs in two principle forms. Firstly, the novel presents the events of a single day, an act of inscription made plain by Miss Dunne as she “clicked on the keyboard: ­— 16 June 1904” (U 10.376; UP 294). This novel is undeniably marked by a date, branded with signature that announces news that has already past. Secondly, and at a more general level, Ulysses closes its account of things by underlining the period of its production “Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921” (U 18.161–1611; UP 933). Together, these dates mark the time being represented and the period taken for this representation to be realised. For Karen R. Lawrence this date-function renders the novel “a souvenir of a time and place passing and gone. The city is arrested, dated, in its premodern phase. The spatial and temporal distance between the city and its novelistic image, between ‘home’ and Joyce, is captured in Joyce’s signature at the end of the novel”.[9] Ulysses represents a time apart, a time that is always ‘after’. Whilst newspapers are always falling or have already fallen into the informational obsolescence by which they take their meaning, Ulysses takes its meaning by already being obsolete, by being a souvenir of a time that can only be felt at a greater and greater distance. By dating his fiction in this way Joyce captures the dialectical movement between the writing of time and the time of writing; meaning is attributed to time through writing whilst time makes the process of writing meaningful. But these prominent dates, which appear to order our sense of time in Ulysses, are by no means fixed; they are subject to a kind of elastic tension. The action of the novel spills into 17th June 1904 and the progressive composition of Ulysses has continued long after 1921. Although the date-function of newspapers and handbills secures or even hastens their passage into a state of waste, the double dating of Ulysses places a disjunction between the times of use and the time by which that use can become obsolete. The second reason that newspapers and handbills provide a model rather than an adversary for Ulysses is that the transience of newspapers and handbills, what we might call ‘disposable writing’, structures and participates within the composition and decomposition of the narrative. In ‘Lotus-eaters’ a famous misunderstanding occurs that rests upon the disposability of Bloom’s Freeman and the name of a horse called ‘Throwaway’ that would later win the Gold Cup. Bantam Lyons is eager to see Bloom’s copy of the Freeman to scan its form guide and Bloom tells him twice that he can keep the paper as he was “going to throw it away” (U 5.534; UP 106). Bantam takes this to be a betting tip and scurries off, leaving Bloom with his throwaway but without the knowledge with which to convert its financial reward.  It is a misunderstanding that we only come to realise has occurred in ‘Lestrygonians’ when Bantam Lyons announces that Bloom gave him a tip and that he intends to place five bob on it (U 8.1016; UP 228). Even at this stage we cannot be entirely sure what has gone on until, in ‘Cyclops’, Lenehan provides the missing information– Bloom gave Bantam Lyons the winner of the Gold Cup, Throwaway, the “rank outsider” (U 12.1219; UP 422).  As Tony Thwaites documents, the evolution of this textual puzzle occurs over hundreds of pages and to even begin the process of resolving the riddle one must read and reread the novel several times.[10] The reader’s work of reconstruction is not aided by the appearance of another ‘throwaway’, another textual puzzle that issues from a disposable form of writing. At the beginning of ‘Wandering Rocks’ Bloom meets a “sombre Y.M.C.A. young man” – described later as the “distributor of throwaways” (UP 17.1490; U 855) – who places “a throwaway in the hand of Mr Bloom” (U 8.6; UP 190).  The handbill announces, “Elijah is coming. Dr Alexander Dowie, restorer of the church in Zion, is coming” (UP 8.13–14; U 190). As he walks, Bloom reads the handbill in his typically elliptical, interrupted and tangential manner. When he comes to O’Connell Bridge he looks down to the Liffey below, observing barges and swooping gulls. Bloom cuts short his wandering thoughts to fulfil the inherent disposability of this handbill: “He threw down among them a crumpled paper ball. Elijah thirtytwo feet per sec is com. Not a bit. The ball bobbed unheeded on the wake of swells, floated under by the bridgepiers” (U 57–59; UP 192). In stark opposition to the two Banbury cakes that Bloom also throws down to the gulls, which are swiftly taken, “Every morsel” (U 8.77; UP 192), the paper ball bobs and drifts upon the water’s surface. The afterlife of this writing flows through the novel as a remainder, changing its appearance and its levels of signification with its geographical position, given according to the bridges, buildings and other landmarks it passes along its way: A skiff, a crumpled throwaway, Elijah is coming, rode lightly down the Liffey, under Loopline bridge, shooting the rapids where water chafed around the bridgepiers, sailing eastwards past hulls and anchorchains, between the Customhouse old dock and George’s quay. (U 10.294–297; UP 291) North wall and sir John Rogerson’s quay, with hulls and anchorchains, sailing wesward, sailed by a skiff, a crumpled throwaway, rocked on the ferrywash, Elijah is coming. (U 10.752–754; UP 308) Elijah, skiff, light crumpled throwaway, sailed eastward by flanks of ships and trawlers, amid an archipelago of corks, beyond new Wapping street past Benson’s ferry, and by the threemasted schooner Rosevean from Bridgewater with bricks. (U 10.1096–1099; UP 321) This is a kind of waste writing that is made to reverberate through the text. The throwaway takes on an ambiguous, intensely enigmatic role within the episode, replicating the passage of human bodies as they pass into Joyce’s textual labyrinth. Again, we meet with the paradox of writing that becomes waste, as an object to interpret its importance seems to become intensified because its original use, as reading material, has passed. We will soon see how the same is true of the manuscript drafts that record the composition of this usefulness, this legibility. For Maud Ellmann this ball of paper signals Joyce’s “throwaway economy of writing­ – Joyce wastes words.”[11] But the words that have become waste do not and cannot disappear from the text, they become puzzles and enigmas that the reader is invited to unravel. Richard Ellmann draws out a Homeric parallel, the skiff successfully passes through the labyrinth and “floats down like the Argo between the two Symplegadean banks, as between the North and South walls of the Liffey, and out to sea.”[12]  Between these observations lies an obvious tension; between annihilation and survival, disappearance and endurance, the throwaway seems to be an object of lowly value and an object of singular importance. The condition of written waste is the uneasy synthesis of these extremes. Jacques Derrida has given an elaborate discussion of the Elijah figure, suggesting that the prophet orders and mediates communication, overseeing rites of circumcision and, thus, the expansion and legitimation of community. But, Derrida writes, whatever he might represent, Elijah serves as “a synecdoche of Ulyssean narration, at once smaller and greater than the whole.”[13] Although Derrida does not say as much we might carry this observation into our discussion of waste, not least because Elijah’s arrival is announced on a throwaway handbill, a disposable form of writing. The throwaway, like the newspaper, has a direct material relationship to the condition of the novel; they are material manifestations of language that have entered the temporal structures of use and waste.  What Ulysses demonstrates by taking these objects and narrating their passage into the outhouse, onto the beach, or along the surface of the river, is that the category of waste is a category full of false endings and illusory disappearances. Moreover, the passage of writing into a category of waste does not mean that this writing loses or has lost meaning.  In Joyce at least, the opposite is true.

How bountiful the Dream —

errancy

Damascus