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themselves. The meaning is not within the story itself. The meaning lies, at least in Joyce's case, in the individuality of each word. The meaning lies, at least in Beckett's case, in the very nothing that is being written about. The purposelessness that brings the words together in the books of both Joyce and Beckett provides one of an infinite pivots upon which interpretation can be based.
Their words aren't ordered into any pattern of particular significance. Their works aren't stories built upon paragraphs, sentences and passages. There is no hierarchy within their books, within their language. They fashion together loose words with no peak or trough. Their words fly out from the page omni-directionally. Joyce is pure movement. Beckett is pure stagnation. Beckett builds piles one achingly slow word at a time, then moves an entire environment with one passage. Conversely, Finnegans Wake is in the perpetual process of being moved – in the perpetual state of moving a pile. The well-read pile mover may skip over the Pile Diagnostics chapter in this book and simply read Finnegans Wake and garner the same information. The first four pages of Finnegans Wake are a much more detailed description of pile movement via telepathy than we could ever hope to generate. We, of course, have never been able to read Finnegans Wake, so that's why we had to write the Pile Diagnostics chapter. Sorry. At this juncture we are opting out of a more in-depth analysis of the works of James Joyce. It is our opinion, however, that as of May 2006 there had already been far too many words |
wasted analyzing the two-dimensional manifestations of this one man's mental landscape. To paraphrase ourselves out of context, “James Joyce has hi-jacked our words.” Campus libraries are full of interchangeable volumes trying to confer meaning to his art. It's a business unto itself. The great thing, for Joyce scholars, is that Joyce's books are so ambiguous they can be interpreted howsoever the reader enjoys. However, Joyce's books valiantly defy any attempt at a concrete crystallization of meaning. In this manner they closely resemble piles and contrast the desperate attempts of capitalism to create order.
We're off track. Our words are falling out of order. To redirect the discourse slightly, let's examine the novels Watt and Molloy by Samuel Beckett. Both books are patience-testing rambles about the insignificant twiddlings of the Irish landscape. Like all the books (that we've read) written by Beckett, the primary character in each of these books is an incompetent in search of a merciful nothing to diffuse the meaning of an ultra-phenomenal world. This interpretation, and the following ones, are strictly our own and withhold all their rights to being completely false. It is the words and language that Beckett uses to frame the inconsequential wanderings of his characters that make his books enjoyable to read. It is the shifts in stagnation and passionate ambiguity within his words that correlate with pile migration. Simple formatting decisions, casual comma dispersement and complex interior environmental shifts of context all interbreed in these two books to take the shape of an idea pile. |
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