LIST, LIST, O LIST!

In Part I, we explored narrational and institutional modes of traduction, whereby a literary ‘thing’ in which language showed or performed itself as a non-representable event is exchanged for – recited as – a (fraudulent or ‘freudful’) scene of full legibility and readerly pleasure. In Chapter 4, we saw how Shakespearean tragedy had already staged the traumatic reversal of this exchange, its unspeakable or unquotable characters – above all, the ‘demi-devil’ Iago – embodying a movement of language itself beyond the representable or accountable: the thing showing forth in an act as ‘a suspension of constituted reality,’ in Slavoj Žižek's formula. If Joyce's engagement with Shakespeare sought above all to re-ignite the explosive charge of that intraductible literary thing, to render anew the disruptive force of its apparition, we have seen that this formed part of a broader desire to produce a ‘quadrivial’ language – to move, that is, beyond the beauty of a ‘polished period’ or formal masterpiece, into the realm of mathesis, of a non-metaphorical bodying-forth of the aesthetic thing ‘in idself’ (FW 611.21).