Missexuality: Where Come I Play?1
Then, (while the machine of all trades – of history, (hi)stories, machines and the typewriter of all the lost texts of all peoples – carries on with its analyses, helixtrolyses and other operations in poetic physiochemistry; and the structural synthesis of the whole of culture in general linguistic equivocity; without forgetting to programme the etceteras; in a parenthesis).
(and while Jones Shaun, as a professor, asks himself answers)
(and while, as young women and researchers, Finnegans Wake scatters itself on all the free benches of a public lecture theatre registered what's more in Vincennes)
it is a question – (while, as much male as father, the war between the huns and the hothers, the men and the shems [les hommes et les hombres], unfolds its new perversion) on the ring where Burrus and Caseous occupy for the time being – for a few pages, if not the first place, at least a remarkable place; it is a question perhaps, then, of History or rather of one of those (hi)stories which History strings together into one of the bad dreams which insist to the point of producing its (non-)sense, that is its nonsense.
No more, however, after all, than of Dairy – of electronic churn – of machinery capable of dissociating language into its atoms, milk into its by-products – or of sublimation.
Nor less than of a geometry, of an orchidecture [cf. FW 165.9], of a plioscene geology [cf. FW 165.26] with sedimentation and obscene implication, of a putting into text [mise en texte] not of a machination
a double, analyticosynthetic programme of the spiritual products of the world of culture, of natural products –
(While writing crosses all the cultural systems with the help of several languages, in the hope of striving to gather to its thread [fil] and group together within its alphabet all the energies which circulate through all the spaces of production.)
whereas someone from Shaun holds forth ad usum delphini, himself his own mentor, liar [menteur] and tutor – protracting a ‘unified talk, concealing the difficulties, filling the lacunae, casting a veil over the doubts – and all this in order to make you believe in all conscience that you have learnt something new’ (as Freud would say)
(for the use of which delphinus [dauphin]?) – finding it corps-rect and decent to call things by all possible names.
Then, – (pure perversity or overexcitation of the text as a lecherer's [con férencier] audience?) a lack makes itself felt in the writing which was hitherto pure male full of grace, something like a cut – on the side of homozeroticism – which cannot be kept away any longer, a slice of language, which wants to be told, which grows between the M – ales, a feeling of unpleasant pleasure which threatens to engross [engrosser] the combatants, whereupon it is in their interest to have a letter made to them in the text by itself [à se laisser faire une lettre dans le texte par elle-même]. A necessity, M begets itself and presents itself among them. It grows fast: no sooner M than Margareen already.
No (hi)story without M. Without it, without Marge, no room for the men's scene/stage [scène]. No room, no place, no père-text at all for history, neither as future nor as narrative. No Middle, then, and no Mis(s)tory.
Since she must, so let her be. And she springs up. From the cup and from the – edge. From the croup and from the bottom. Bang in the Middle [Milieux] places – the ‘undistributed middle between males’ [FW 164.6] – between males and meals, of a corporeal space, below the belt of the text which can do nothing about it, and makes a bit out of a tit and out of the male tit another titbit [et fait d'une scène un sein et du sein mâle une autre cène]. Equidistantly from both ends of the alphallbit [alphallebête]. Ah! Merge! In relation with the in-between two senses . . .; with pulsion; with the sediments, the buryings in the ground [enfouissements], repressions and origins; with the regions, the good and bad regions of repression; with di(s)-simulation; with bisexuality; with the conjunction-disjunction of virile combinations with 2 or 3 elements; with magnetisation and binding.
– because it is his hour: ‘the bablling point of platinism’ [cf. FW 164.11]. The boiling point of the text, of platinum (the point of absolute motionlessness), the ‘absolute zero’ [FW 164.1], the prehistoric hour, before any counting – the hour of babel/babble [babelle]
– Thus has the state of the text – the text-state – decided. If the necessity of its (hi)story did not come, everything would remain at a standstill.
Who? M. ‘A pale face surrounded by heavy odorous furs . . .’ [Giacomo Joyce]2 Giacomarge. A face, a letter, a pressure at the level of the page's abdomen. M . . . i, M . . . e, an M . . . waiting for a series of letters with which a living being can be composed, perhaps a tendency which has just made a hasty entrance into the textual salon under the sweet-and-sour gaze [regard miss-figue mi raison] of the ‘custodian’ himself, delegated by Father-Conscience to the control of these little repressed ones who come back suddenly and rush preconsciously without perviously asking for permission – And for good reason! Young missives from the unconscious of Finnegans Wake, they are in the habit and mania of sexpediting themselves to their (re)senders.
Miss M's emission, at repeated intervals throughout Finnegans Wake, is related to the process of the text's own circulation by itself on the mode of projection (secretion, excretion, operation of reappearances) of a saMe wrenching itself from the matrix like the first missive saved from shit by the original hen (FW, III), the still motherborn [mère-née] hen, made to lay and hatch letter-eggs, and propagate – the space always already space where language inscribes itself for reading.
M . . . arge, not the primordial mother, not this matrix which tends ‘to expense herself as sphere as possible’ [cf. FW 298.28–29] as ‘paradismic perimutter’ [FW 298.29], not the chaotic soundbag with the infinitely plastic perimeter, but a young wild provocative M who as a missage is never there, and as soon as she arrives is no longer there. The letter of Ersatz par sexcellence.
‘and looking wantingly around our undistributed middle between males we feel we must waistfully woent a female to focus and on this stage there pleasantly appears the cowrymaid M. whom we shall often meet below who introduces herself upon us at some precise hour which we shall again agree to call absolute zero or the babbling pumpt of platinism.’ [FW 164.5–11]
Letter and cowrie, a sign of exchanges to start with, initial shell/misprint [coquille], the wager of a still hidden vocable, and a little later ‘cleopatrician in her own right’ [FW 166.34–35], at once intruder, anonymous and the queen, the stranger without whom the proper would have no middle in which it could exteriorise itself in order to come back to itself, the M which allows the half-kings/mirrors [mi-rois] to admire themselves while reflecting themselves, and which, being median, tells the letterbeads [articule le chapelettre]. An advent, therefore, which causes more or less greasious, phonic and graphic precipitations, and affects the turn of events in the minidramas in which the Wake's men ceaselessly fall back.
M's immediate effect on these milking condensates which the masculine representatives then named Burrus and Caseous are, is excreamly stimulating: it makes the substance come. They cream with love for her [cf. FW 164.19]. For her are their screams, their matters, their po-M's, Butter, dream, pooh, writing, scream, secrepture [sécréture], unconscious: they are pressed, compelled to pay homage to her. Their presents for her – or rather thanks to her, thanks to the M . . . without which they run dry. Source and strength of which they discover, because it is suddenly present, that it is never far from the textual or corporeal space which they strive to occupy, share and appropriate. Their better thirds [moitiers].
The M which perverts their good ears as it subordinates space, that is to sing the aria, to the time factor, which introduces the area of the Aria, (ave m,aria or p,aria(h)? or, in the labyrinth of their ears, the Ariad,ne?) while injecting masculine fantasies into the circuit, the sketch of a scene of refellation cut off in expremis(s). As incantatrix she exercises a charm over mouths and over holes in general, over (s)exits, the suddenly solicited glottises of verginal troubadours. The attemptatrix [cf. FW 79.18].
‘O! to cluse her eyes and aiopen her oath and see what spice I may send her. How? Cease thee, cantatrickee! I fain would be solo. Arouse thee, my valour! And save for e'er my true Bdur!’ (FW 165).
one more line and he would have spissed [épiçait]!
She arouses desires of introjection, while inviting to the production of artistic objects, accelerating the process of transformation, displacement and sublimation.
Her arrival triggers off crystallisations of relationships, of chain-linkings of systems of figures: figures of transformation, figures of culture, of fabulation, a whole work in which political economy, libidinal economy and biological economy meet and interrogate one another, and trade places. A question of regulations [régimes], therefore.
Desired, feared, unavoidable; this added M, in excess and marginal, is not allowed to get away with it like that. Which cannot be done without, Love M [qu'on M], after all.
Hence the attempt at reappropriation of the young girl through Erinnerung, Representation, Pictorial Reclusion.
Into which frame(work)s can the one who entered by herself be set? A triggering off of paradoxes: how can one make ‘within’ the within? [faire ‘entrer’ l'entre], the margin? – Jones's answers: by entering within. By demarginalising. By making her ‘portrait’, ‘touring’ her, exploring her parts.
To analyse M., to reduce and incorporate her, such is the professor's démarge; which is necessary too, on the model of the relation of doctor Jones to the ‘subject’ of his biographical venture: none else than Freud.
To make the portrait of the Pa(t)ter(n) [Patron], to master the master, the M, the letter that leads: a project common to all the Jones, in and out of the Wake, Joyce never plying far off the Freudian waters, always ready to grasp what, from this other scene in which Freud himself is placed at the centre of the seducing machine, inducing transference in fallout, echoes and marginal news, could not fail to interest him.
It is as a spatialist of calculus in space that Jones – Shaun's lieu-tenant that day – undertakes to ‘comprehend’ the incomprehensible, and first of all to ‘summon’ [‘traduire’] it within geometrical language (as one summons before a court of law [comme on traduit en justice] – and reduces to an equation) with a method à la Margelle Duchamp. This is more or less what happens:
In order to make her portrait, cut up Marge into small pieces – of rhombs and trapezes,
toss her up in butter and cheese, add to the choice virgin morsels mental spices of the same wild species: frozen conger eel, etc. originating from the ‘black continent’ and, simultaneously in another frame, dress her with piled hatboxes, on which B and C will be able to test their capacity for virile erections and congestions. Frame and title: Portrait as Any Body of a Woman Without Lack
(‘The Very Picture of a Needlesswoman’ [FW 165.15–16])
To assasign her – To penetrate delicately into the quick of the mat(t) er. Hymen!
One would then get the secret of her ‘boîte à surprises’ [FW 165.29–30].
A lecture [Exposé] in which it is (not) taught that all operations of mastery, however ‘gratuitous’ and distant they may appear to be painting as representation – capture – retaliation – of the model of literary criticism as dissexion – are in a way the punitive expositions, the acts of devouring and of destruction in which the amorous approximations of espicetemophilia, or the love of word peppering [épicetesmotsphilie], are accomplished.
And that any subject of curiosity finds itself doomed to be at the place of the Subject of Curiosity through the play of substitutions, not to wit [à ne pas savoir]: the young virgin girl.
One can understand that Professor Jones is able to affirm that, after such an intervention, he has doubtless examined the subject from the inside. He has sized her up [Ses mesures, il les a prises]: he is therefore in a better position than anybuddy [quicon] to flunk Marge's presentation in three paragraphs (FW 166–7).
Which he does not fail to pull off with trio:
A magisterial description at first, which then becomes increasingly hesitant, uncertain and less and less masterful, to the point of the object of discourse getting the upper hand and taking power, taking over motion [le pouvoir, le mouvoir], and even the text, once again to the end, to the top, on the edge of the abyss, which imposes its law: to the Tarpeian rock [cf. FW 167.18] which promises to any king at once his erection and his fall.
Where it is proved in the père formative Professor Jones seeks to – define M – to economise on her.
That she is herself what arouses the desire of economisation –
Or more exactly the proof of masculine econhomy [econhommie].
Of all the economies. As Margin. As what completes, allows, forbids, extends beyond what happens between B and C plus the Other [l'Autre] in the structure.
– First paragraph (FW 166). No question of asking the question: Where is (the) Marge when she is only a ‘demilitery young female’ [FW 166.4–5], when she is reduced to occupying the maid's place.
A question which maliciously opens an uncanny scene, as if it came straight out of the minitheatre of Freud's social milieu and was regrafted there, with its restless nannies, seeds of prime hysteria, (phantasmatic satisfaction of young au-pair girls, romance of public park benches, those repressed by the family machine . . .) where M. is at the place of the one who gets the master with his back to the wall, and makes his head spin with her little game [manège]. Petty anxieties and petty pleasures of the master who is always made a little too pereplex by his hysterics. If the accompassed professor, endowed with his accurate eye [armé de son compas dans l’œil], claims to attain the perimastery of his subject of exasperation, exintrinsically, he is conversely, through a portraitured reflexion, himself caught up within the chain of identifications in which M walks her forenames. And while he boasts doing her, Marge does him in.
The well-ordered Jones behaves econhomically with his ‘discovery’, like one of those exnurslings especialising in anal eroticism, who derive a supplementary gain from defecation. Part of his pulsions is ‘sublimated’, part of his excitation is put between brackets, another one is sent on a cul-tural mission into M's erogenous regions.
The attempt at M's detention-‘comprehension’ takes place within the codes classically devised in order to tell the famous mystery of femininity, as much as to lock up the missteric, within stereotypes which annihilate her: codes-of-seduction, modesty, fashion organise the eternal space-of-the-veil in which she is kept secretly confined. As a secret . . .
But M, unruly already, hystericises her analysis everywhere at once: a merrily Joycean inscription of analysteria. A digest of cultural clichés, of mini-studies on hysteria, together with the text which is supposed to pass through Jones's mouth, but crosses Joyce knows how many other erogenous zones of the same (m)ilk, hystericises itself . . . and in its/his burgeoning of bisexual infantasies, the analyst cannot but be his own missterisk.
Where is Marge When she is not on all the free benches of a public garden or at the movies? Neverywhere [Nullepartoute] all at once. |
moving from the park – reserve and representation of the feminine sex – space with ‘free’ elements – to the film theatre, still in search of Him, of Id, her eyes fixed upon the Other. |
Defined, coded, identifiable according to three ‘modes’ or practices of the feminine signifier (fashion, seduction, modesty).
I have got the size of that |
Marge, in several copies, is always in several places at once and even in all of them, in a pudic park, a demilitteral young female a bit on the military side. |
ostentatiously ovidently |
Showing – stealthily disrobing [dérobant], ostensible under classical signs subverted while sexcusing – a hem always shows – to reveal between her little more or less of chemiss, at a pinch [à la limite] – her pinch of chic [sa limite chic], – her little luxury hymen, her thing trimmed with a natural fur. Her ruses: to read in order to look sideways. One gesture hiding another. |
at the movies swallowing sobs |
At the flicks to eat, swallow, nibble, feed on her own affects, see a Chaplin movie in order to weep, so that she can ingest what she emits. |
In tears, cherishing her sorrows at the latest Chaplin.
But above all she is not weaponless, and has the one weapon which he would like to make the instrument of his little economy: she holds a hostage: ‘or on the verge of the gutter with’, on the edge of the pavement, as on the verge of prostitution, on the feminine misculine verge
‘some bobbedhair brieffrocked babyma's toddler, held’
nobody less than – held far near – HIM!
‘hostage at armslength, teaching His Infant Majesty’
his majesty mummy's little boy, a male child whom she teaches – as the master's mistress –
‘how to make waters worse’ [FW 166.15–16, 18–19]
waters worse [le pipire]; as a sexual seducatrix, what she inculcates in him passes through piss. How to make his sexcretions a wee worse [empipirer]? By exchanging liquids and solids, matter – maternal matter with male jets. How to worsen the flow? Learning the benefits of substitution. Piss me your little things – thus goes the world.
Marge holds the strange power of being from the edge: she holds Him above the chasm with which he is in a dangerous relation. Mastering the techniques and places of jouissance: who knows whether she is not endowed a little more than others (in knowledge, in jouissance, in the thing [du chose])? (To find out the answer, apply to Tiresias. Of the ten parts of jouissance, she has nine . . . at least).
Whereas Professor Jones does not take his eyes off her, for he is a specialised researcher: does he not have regions to look beneath, seeing as she uses ‘Master Pules’ [FW 166.2; Master Piauleur] to conceal her mascular personality? Piling up maskles, and parading and flourishing her umbrawly [parapiauleur], flat out [toutes voiles dehors], but inside . . .? Disquieting all-woman, ‘totamulier’ [FW 166.26], who introduces into his structure additional elements, and from elsewhere! She plays at joining and disjoining.
As a result, Jones, as HIM, sees himself in a position of rivalry – surveillance – in relation to ‘her “little man”’ [FW 166.21], who?
Himself the child, her little-man – hers, her clitoris.
Quivering of sexual difference, bisexuality at its tits’ end [qui ne sait plus à quels seins se vouer], at the end of its muscles and masks the better to dissimusculate itself. And under the analyst's troubled, ‘suspecting’ eyes
– because he himself has reagions [raigions] to look/for looking beneath, from bottom to top and under cover of education, one detexts the ambiguous use of the tiny tot as presext [poupon prête-sexe]. The work of the undies.
And conversely she exhibits a flood of female signifier swissshing over some male signifier, as if to diffeminate the fact that her internal layout would have in store less feminine surprises than one would father [paparierait].
A slip-parade of underwear: any slip refers to another slip, naturally: a slip of the tongue, a slip of a girl.3
To be her little one, the (s)only requisite at bottom is to be toplessturvy [il faut et il suffils d’être sans dessous-dessus]. March on the bisexual revolution!
(Just as one will get the missage once more, specifically in FW, p. 239, history and all its stories would cease going under the same old phallocratic crotches the day ‘when the new Clitorines have taken their own powers and have amanticipated’.4)
But things go a bit too fast [tout tourne un peu trop virte] when, in the exchange of good lessons, Jones happens to allude to his ‘solotions’ [FW 166.27], which must be suspended . . . from the moment he tackles this awkward chick the right way [cf. FW 166.28–29].
My ‘solotions’: What are the solotions of the pettyholder [petitulaire] of the chair ‘for the proper parturience of matres’ [FW 166.26] (– mater, matter – materia)5
Mater [Mère] – matter [merde] – partition: the mother ‘makes’ the child.
Miction-mite-(child) [cf. FW 166.28]: the child ‘makes’ water. His solotions are kept. His masculine solotions do not enter the circuit of disjunction. ‘Totamulier’
– ‘Verumvirum’ [FW 166.26] –seducente infanta: intervention of the Latin (let-in?) language, a dead Romance language, which injects a set of supplementary notations into this fundamental question: revival [relance] of History (Brutus-Cassius), of good linguistic-neurotic use, the language of law, of the Church, which also have a few words to say [leurs mots à dire] in the text when matter – materia, the very flesh of all language – is allowed to (be) work(ed on) [quand il s'agit de (laisser) travailler la matière].
An example of this infinite combination of levels, domains and regions which join and interpenetrate one another, work on one another [se travaillent] within this kind of ‘fundamental language’, as Freud would say, which ceaselessly emits new versions of needs, interests and affects deposited and inscribed in its matricial body – symptom traces, cultural refashionings – produced in it by each individual story together with all the stories and History, reworked, distorted and revived [relancés] by it, in a transunconscious network. Language: matter and form(s) the matter – which – is made to be worked – at work.
If ‘the matter of which a thing is made is like its maternal contribution’, to separate from one's matter is to give birth to the maternal in oneself. The educacation of the young would have to be rethought from another angle.
Jones's suspense – as the master of matter(s).
And Marge comes back to us on a completely different stage, no longer from the depths of an unconscious, but from Asia, from where she propels herself at last, as a supplement to B and C. After being looked at – sideways – in her ‘typical’ passivity, she appears no longer as the one who waits for Him, waits for love and feeds on dreams, but as the active one who is waited for, the one who arrives and transforms everything, the one who loves, touches, seduces – and frustrates: by giving them her riddle. Enter the Cleopatrician.
As Marge she strangely constrains the apex-sick [en mal de tête] triangular figure made up by B and C into completing and closing itself. She thus triangulates them with some other, but this other [autre], – A, is not her: it is below A, with A in complicity with Antonius, that she secures the binding and enables the sublation of the ‘talis qualis older’ [cf. FW 167.5]. It takes no fewer than three pieces of men [trois bouts d'homme], as we saw already, for a bit of man to manage to rise.
She binds men together – it takes three sons to make a father. Or two plus A. She complicates /B/C/A/, implicates, mutates with A, her same self in marginality. And it is she, as Cleopatra, who has the key-of-thepater [clé-du-père]. When M is Margareena, she thus leads all the operations which she renders simultaneous.
It is complicated! The text endlessly says it itself about itself – let us talk about it:
the way in which the text works is an original mixture of compilation, programming and emulsion. Just as one feeds one's computer, it eats and gives you back [rend] its matter.
Margarine: at once a synthetic and vegetable product, she is more ‘matter’ than Butter and Cheese, the products of lactation which situates them on the side of animality and humanity. She unites. On the contrary, they constitute themselves by losing part of their original substance. This is how masculine economy is managed. From milk to buttermilk [basbleurre].
‘Margareena she's very fond of Burrus’ [FW 166.3]. Margareena is the very base [fond] of melting [fondant] Butter. Again a masculine solid Butter – liquid tea opposition. a/lick a/lack [cf. FW 166.3], she licks, she lax [lâche], ‘she velly fond of chee’ – Influence of the ‘eastasian import’ [FW 166.31, 32]. She touches on the tongue as the organ of taste and by causing phonic mutations upon it, as well as dissociations and transformations. The cheese breaks up and part of it becomes tea: ‘chee’ – the Chinese way; or else spirit (chi).
Anti-Butter, supplement, other kind of food. Comparative, equivalent emul(a)sions, complicated signifiers in whose substance the influences and metaphors which organise History cross and substitute one another.
(Who eats them? In whose mouth do they melt? Do they not melt?) Absoprtion-Digestion. Excretion. History itself is the inscription of a digestion, its narrative and its excrement: Res Digestae.
What is the relation between the animal and the plant, B and C, and M? As we have known since the first pages of FW, the father falls the mother carries on [poursuit]. Father time and mother space [cf. FW 600.2–3]. Motherly products, B and C are brought back to the farther [plus père] than ever when they try to make Margerine's mistery speak. Their will-to-know works through pseudo-fat and substitute emulsion. The mother ‘makes’, the marge displaces and brings back somewhere else. Femininity: what exceeds history.
She complicates it with Antonius and introduces, in between the signifiers of a same masculinert paradigm, the additional signifier of uncanny desire. – Marge (not the mother) or femininity as History's margin, which makes His-story vacillate and oscillate between its poles, vivifies and neutralises through the same plural play the opposition between sexual opposition and difference; plays hide and smash [cache-casse] with the myths with which the unconscious plays during History's long sleep.
She exceeds and carries [déborde et déporte] History as events and History's narratives off course: after all, interpretations depend on it. If one lets oneself be carried away by M, one ends up on the side of the unconscious of History's agents. Nothing new here. History repeats nothing but the sup(p)er-session [remise-en-cène] of a femm-ilial quarrel. Which takes place on the table or below, according to the gender [genre] of appetites.
But she does not explain – how she disjoins and conjoins the elements from several (hi)stories, how, as margarine, herself a synthesis of oils, she recomposes.
Thus it is for Burrus and Caseus, who we learn contend for mastery – of her ‘misstery’ [cf. FW 166.36]: what is her misstery made up of? The secret of imperial power is in the margin between Miss and to miss.
The young girl’s missexuality is also the failure [échec], the very name of the limit which sends the emissire back to himself. She is the masters’ mis(s)tress.
‘A cleopatrician in her own right she at once’ [FW 166.34–35]
Her imperial feminine power mastering seduction ‘complicates the position while [BC] are contending for her misstery
by implicating herself with an elusive Antonius’ [FW 166.35–167.1] miss
mastery
mystery
master-risk
‘a wop who would appear to hug’ (a mediterranean immigrant landing in the USA in 1916) ‘a personal interest in refined chees of all chades’ [FW 167.1–2]
she's |
shades |
teas |
trades |
Our cleopatrician suddenly complicates the situation while B and C fight over her misstery by implicating herself with an elusive Antonius, a ‘wop’, a bit of a polygamist, as boorish as a Boer [cf. FW 167.3], who ‘wags an antomine art’ [FW 167.3]. A and M are ambivalent simulators, half-bred, half-baked texts [métèque, métextes], with several natures, origins and behaviours. Thus, through her, the cleopatrician, enters Antonius, a composite being, coming like her from somewhere other – ‘the somewhere other’ of Westerners – and also having an artistic ‘nature’. He takes after her. A mixture of contraries, a mine of identifications, a set [ensemble] of appearances, other-in-itself, he mimes to complete the econhomy of nonmen [l’économie des nonhommes]. He is himself the masculine semblance of being [pareêtre]. An addition to the addition that she is. A part of her ‘misstery’.
Check miss [Échec et miss]? But, like any mistress, she is also the maid: that is her misstery – her masculinity, her mysteria – – which incites letters [lettres] to write, and beings [les êtres] to produce for ever symbolic substitutions, who ceaselessly recharges with a new energy. Masculine, ‘hyperchemical [hypèrechimique] economantarchy’ [FW 167.6] (a blend of noone, noman, manteia, or: how (no)one has the power). Because of her, fats to her [graisse à elle], in order to flee from her, to capture her, to take the one which is part of each and everyone, which crosses and exceeds every pseudoall and infinitises it, any subject of her law, even the most simple [simplet] one, the one who cannot read, nor tell a b from a p – bliss from piss [un benis d'un penis] or ‘a bomb from a painapple’ [pomme; FW 167.15], desperately tries to see what is being written above his head – milky way – in the margin of grace –
In order to try and want to see light in this matter, they all agree. In order to be exceeded [débordés] by her mystery.
How can one stop Marge's march?
Answer: Misstery –
She has and is her Misstery, is the only one capable of being what she is, self-sufficient, needless.6 Keeping herself.
Always already farther, she provokes the milky males to the transferences which are History; she is the riddle of their will-to-see: all visual signs, not in words. Jones speaks; she seems. She does not symbolise, she is herself the contradictory structure of sexual clothings and leanings [vêtements et versements sexuels].
M leads us to put Marge's status in relation with the text's operation in general: between margin and the fact that it is not possible to stop polysemy in ‘misstery’ (the fact that the spilling-out of mysstery, of marge into m, of m in general, cannot be mastered), there is an affinity: what M and her remainders [restes], sequels and excesses say is also the text – not a specular or mimetological withdrawal, not a mere abyssal miming [mise en abyme, en amime]. But it is the text, like M, as what one cannot make the economy of. And that is femininity. The text's femininity in FW, the riddle text as femininity. The impregnable. Over which every Jones hides his skull [se cache la tête] in his attempt to describe and circumscribe it.
Margarine, or any signifier capable of misstifying [mystifiller] the master, is another name for the gyneral mystery of FW, of the text which asks – to whom? – Where come I play [Où jouis-je?]? Let us not privilege marge, mystery, but rather let us see the text's incessant work spilling over in cuttings, replanting itself and doing its mimost to reflower [refleurissant à qui mimieux].
A writing which in addition says its very same self [elle même, elle m'm], as what undoes economy.
What Joyce wants to ‘show’, if there is a demonstration, is that, between all these (hi)stories – Family (hi)stories and histories of the family, of culture, of symbolic systems, including psychoanalysis – and this spilling-out, there is an essential relation:
If a text like this text could not be written like that, these (hi)stories . . . could not be written: that is because things like that take place in language that these (hi)stories happen.
Missemination does not represent family (hi)stories: it is the same thing. The saMe [La Même].
First the same language is used to communicate ideasires [idésirs] and to convoke sexual partners; it sensues [sensuite] simultaneously that it bears the same interest with a difference on cultural work which is the equivalent of, and substitute for, sexual activity. Sounds, m's, words get detached from a signification in order to attach themselves to another missignification, to detach and come back with a vengeance [et revenir en remettre] . . . in a shuttle which one cannot make head or tail of.
As if it was being written so that textual emulsion could set [prenne] but also so it could . . . go sour. Not to be set upon/caught [Ne pas être pris]: to be never more here than there, farther. Far from here, here is the ‘end’ [cf. FW 628.13], the goal of the Joycean movement. It must set without one (Joyce) ever being caught (at) [pris] being anybody else than . . .
Translated by Laurent Milesi
Notes
1. |
All annotations given in square brackets have been added by the translator. Quotations from Finnegans Wake (FW), giving page and line reference to the standard Faber edition (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), have been silently emended to match the original wherever necessary; cf. indicates more specifically a textual allusion or near-quotation. In the case of intricate wordplay in Cixous’ original essays, we have occasionally resorted to providing alternatives followed by the French original italicised in square brackets, in bold type if already italicised in the French [tr.]. When this text was republished in Cixous’ 1986 collection of essays Entre l’écriture, where it is followed by her ‘The Pleasure Reinciple’, as it is in the present volume, it was preceded by a page presenting the two as an ensemble on Joyce's Finnegans Wake in these terms: ‘La mise à n’œuf des genres dans le Finnegans Wake de James Joyce ou comment Joyce nous fait (t)ordre de lire. Suivent Deux Lectures Pour S'amuser Nonsans Quelque Serreyeux’ [Re egg-gendering in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, or How Joyce makes us (s) cream with laughter. What Follows are Two Readings For a Lark in Ear-Nest] (Hélène Cixous, Entre l’écriture (Paris: Des femmes, 1986), p. 71). |
2. |
Giacomo Joyce, With an Introduction and Notes by Richard Ellmann (London: Faber, 1968), p. 1 [tr.]. |
3. |
Both in English in the original, with French translations [tr.]. |
4. |
The original is a French rendering loosely based on FW 239.20–21: ‘when all us romance catholeens shall have ones for all amanseprated’ [tr.]. |
5. |
Followed by a gloss/translation, not reproduced here [tr.]. |
6. |
In English in the text [tr.]. |