Diaphane/Adiaphane
It seems that almost anyone reading Ulysses will eventually reach their breaking point, the moment at which they throw the book across the room and swear off Joyce forever. When I took the Ulysses seminar at the University of Houston, every few weeks, before Dr. Backus would arrive at the classroom, one of my fellow students would confess that they had finally “thrown the book.” This phenomenon occurred at random and unpredictable intervals; for one it was as early as “Scylla and Charybdis”: “the whole Hamlet thing. I just can’t…I don’t…well, get it.” For another it was the unwavering interrogation of “Ithaca.” We responded with shock and encouragement: “but you’re so close to the end!”
It didn’t matter. “No,” said the shaking head.
Despite having read the novel before, my throw-the-book moment occurred in “Oxen of the Sun.” Again. This time I was at the weekly reading group held in Dr. Backus’ dining room. As we went around the room, each reading two or three pages at a time, I felt a growing sense of frustration, anxiety, even panic. I tried making frequent trips to the bathroom, splashing cold water on my face. I tried to think of excuses to escape, skip town, and never return again. No one else seemed to share my distress. Finally, about a page and a half into my third or fourth turn, I couldn’t take it and cried out: “I don’t even know what I’m reading!”
Sure, I recognized that there were words in front of me, maybe even strung together to form sentences. I recognized the familiar shape of paragraphs. But please God, no one ask me to summarize or paraphrase anything I’ve read. Dr. Backus kindly took a moment to explain the plot of the chapter. The other students smiled sympathetically and nodded their heads. A complete nervous and intellectual breakdown avoided, I continued reading, haltingly, stuttering word after barely recognizable word. When it wasn’t my turn, I sat quietly and sipped my raspberry tea.
What does it say about me that I was comforted by that mastery?
If the students in my earlier Joyce seminar at the University of Kansas experienced throw-the-book-across-the-room moments, no one brought it up. It’s possible that as Masters students, they were preoccupied by mastery: mastering this holy-grail of difficult texts, mastering that certain brand of academic-theory-speak I have never been able to (under)stand. Mostly I felt like a kid with a thyroid problem mistakenly seated at the grown-ups’ table: I looked like I was in the right place, but if I dared to open my mouth, everyone would quickly realize I did not belong.
For example: in a discussion of the meta-fictional elements of Joyce’s work, I chimed in to say that maybe we should think of Joyce as meta-meta.
Blank stares.
When discussing the orthological play in the Joycean algebra of Stephen’s “I, I and I.” I asked what algebra has to do with birds.
Mostly my fellow students observed a few moments of silence before resuming their conversation. When it came time to workshop our papers, the most constructive criticism I got was that maybe I should glance every once in a while at an MLA style guide.
The environment was cruel, cut-throat and competitive. But what were we competing for? I don’t think any prizes were awarded at the end. I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t get one, anyway.
What made that seminar so much different from the one in Houston? I wonder if it could be something so simple as Dr. Backus saying at the beginning of the semester that she was not going to pretend she knew all the answers when it came to Joyce. Translation: we’re all figuring this out together.
Perhaps the difference was that this time the point wasn’t mastery.
And yet, the context (namely, Academia) in which we encounter these difficult texts—Joyce, Derrida—asks us to master precisely this impossible task, as if in some kind of (sadistic) initiation ritual. As undergraduates we are graded on our mastery in multiple-choice and essay exams. If we have ambitions of going to graduate school, we must prove our mastery by passing the GRE Subject Test in Literature (in which there are a preponderance of questions on Joyce and Derrida, by the way). And once in graduate school, we demonstrate mastery at the end of each semester by assimilating primary texts, criticism and theory to produce a piece of original scholarship of potentially publishable quality for each of the three courses we are enrolled in, while also grading fifty-plus student papers for the two courses we teach, and somehow finding time to eat and shower and sleep. We are awarded Master’s degrees. If we possess the appropriate blend of ambition and self-loathing, we go on to pursue PhDs, where we may or may not eventually take and pass our comprehensive exams, and if we have the energy left over to write and defend a dissertation, we are deemed worthy of joining the Great Conversation, which is maybe a fancy way of saying we can sit at the grown-ups’ table. Maybe we’ll even get something to eat.
One question keeps nagging at me through all of this: what would happen if we ceased to privilege mastery? Even if we do it in theory, as well as in our critical practice, initiation into the discourse of the human sciences still upholds the binary, constructing mastery as both unified and superior to whatever other possible ways of reading there may be.
I don’t mean to suggest we should stop reading; nor should we give up “doing” readings. But perhaps we should take a cue from Leopold Bloom and delight in the impossibility of really “doing” anything at all.
Perhaps we could accept there is no such thing as mastery when it comes to meaning.
Or to use Gertrude Stein’s phrase, “there is no there there.” There is no there that isn’t meaning. There is no there that is.
Or precisely because a reading already holds within it all that is and isn’t meaning, the only thing about which I can be absolutely certain when it comes to reading anything is that the only possibly viable reading I could “do” must acknowledge that any one reading is always already flawed.
Or precisely because a reading already holds within it all that is and isn’t a possibility of meaning, but/and also do I.
Meaning: centerless.
©2008 Dr. Lacy M. Johnson All Rights Reserved.