Abstract
The ‘Penelope’ episode of Ulysses and the concluding pages of How It Is—two texts bereft of punctuation—are peppered with yeses. In ‘Penelope’, these yeses take the force of punctuation by suggesting logical and syntactic connections between the fragmentary phrases they interpose upon. Through the weight of their accumulation they also suggest—as per Derrida’s argument in ‘Ulysses gramophone’—an affirmation of the very possibility of affirmation. However, such affirmation of affirmation necessarily includes a negative moment. In this, ‘Penelope’ is very close to The Unnamable in that both texts present us with multiple, incommensurable fragments of ratiocination that asymptotically tend towards a silence that never quite comes within the interval of speaking. My essay will argue how the yeses that conclude How It Is ambiguate or intertwine the categories of affirmation and negation and show how affirmation becomes coterminous with denial.
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- 1.
See also Slote (2013: 107–126).
- 2.
See Derrida (2013: 79–80).
- 3.
Compounding this sense of Bloom’s lapsed Judaism, in ‘Nausicaa’ he confuses the mezuzah with tephilim, small boxes containing parchments of scripture, that are affixed to leather straps and worn during prayer: ‘And the tephilim no what’s this they call it poor papa’s father had on his door to touch’ (Joyce 1993: 310).
- 4.
The phrase ‘I can’t go on’ was added for the English translation and was retroactively added into the French text for the 1971 reprinting (Van Hulle and Weller 2014: 76).
- 5.
The Unnamable phrases this problem of having always already begun in his typically paradoxical manner: ‘The best would be not to begin. But I have to begin. That is to say I have to go on’ (Un 2).
- 6.
Likewise, ‘question old question if yes or no’ (HII 32).
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Slote, S. (2018). Beckett and Joyce: Two Nattering Nabobs of Negativity. In: Beloborodova, O., Van Hulle, D., Verhulst, P. (eds) Beckett and Modernism. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70374-9_5
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