proposal paper

R E A D I N G E V E N T S I N J A M E S J O Y C E ’ S ‘ ‘ A N E N C O U N T E R ’ ’

La vérité survient (e-venit) comme ce qui n’est pas à sa place. 1

A T H E O R Y O F T H E E V E N T informs Lyotard’s works from Discours, Figure (1971)

to his last (unfinished) book on Augustine (1998). Indeed, it can be argued

that his concept of the figural cannot be understood if not in relation to this

concern of his, which resurfaces in different contexts such as the theory of the

differend (D), of infancy (LE, E) or of the inhuman (In), to name just a few.

For instance, as ‘‘the other of discourse and intelligibility’’ (‘‘l’autre du dis-

cours et de l’intelligibilité’’; DF, p. 271), the figure-matrice cannot be resolved

into a ‘‘good form’’ (‘‘bonne forme’’) – such as the representation of figure-

image or the Gestalt of figure-forme (DF, p. 271). It manifests itself as the event of

untranslatability that disturbs the discursive order from within. As to the

differend, it may be construed as the event of a complaint that cannot be

settled according to existing rules – and hence calls for a set of rules to come to

terms with it – and that remains, therefore, as affect or silence.

A constant feature of Lyotard’s philosophy in fact – as a longer list of examples

would show – is its mistrust of fixed, and in the long run normative, thought

systems, which are blamed for privileging opposition over difference, thus erasing

the event to restore the good, meaningful form instead of opening up to ‘‘the

unknown, the foreign, the uncanny’’ (‘‘le méconnu, l’étranger, l’angoissant’’; DF,

p. 136). An event is accordingly defined implicitly as everything that comes in

excess of any regulated set of oppositions – briefly put, any articulate language –

and that doesn’t have the form of a recognisable, identifiable truth, but emerges

as something, or rather some thing, that is not in its right place – i.e. as differ-

ence. The philosophical or critical task, then, must be attuned to what is always

already out of tune. This Lyotard calls welcoming the event, or testifying to

or attesting the differend (‘‘témoigner du différend’’), the irreconcilable (in

G. Bennington and R. Bowlby’s translation for l’inaccordable – also, alternatively,

‘‘the untunable’’).

A concept so recurrent as that of the event, it must be stressed, is hardly ever

defined explicitly but is every so often called upon to define positively other key

notions, like those mentioned above. This of course bespeaks its important

function of underlining the tension between order and disorder, norm and

transgression that pervades Lyotard’s critical vision. His reader is then faced

with the paradox of a concept defined in relation to what it helps to define.

Appraising this paradox would lead us far beyond the scope of this paper and

undeniably further than my competence in the field could reach, but I would like

to take it as a working hypothesis that this paradox, far from disabling Lyotard’s

Forum for Modern Language Studies Vol. 42 No. 1 doi:10.1093/fmls/cqi036 # The Author (2005). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

theory, illustrates the challenge inherent in phrasing/interpreting the event. In

other words, it is the figure the philosopher allows in his discourse to ‘‘lighten and

fluidify his theory’’ (Sfez, p. 39). As such, it inhabits his discourse – as a force –

while being at the same time outside of it – as an object.

One can begin to see that Lyotard’s comprehension of the event does not

rest easily on the classical inside/outside or surface/depth dichotomies of

structuralism. In this perspective, the philosopher’s so-called ‘‘linguistic turn’’

can be considered as an attempt to refine and complicate his theory in order

to move away from a philosophical phrasing of the event as (mere) disruption.

Admittedly, close reading of Discours, figure would reveal a metaphorical debt to a

vision of the event as break, set in tension with a rather more intricate decon-

struction of binary structures. Indeed, if Lyotard’s reading of the affect aims at

examining the unconscious ‘‘in terms of phrase’’ (E, p. 65), and if Discours, figure is

too directly indebted to the Freudian unconscious (P, p. 30), then the theory

evolving from Le Différend (1983), in the company of Wittgenstein, is a similar

revision of the works leading up to it, to find a way ‘‘to articulate in an intelligible

manner about what remains beneath articulation’’ (‘‘articuler de façon intelli-

gible au sujet de l’en-deçà de l’articulable’’; ‘‘Emma’’, p. 60). Talking of the

unphrasable in terms of phrase means that events which defy articulation or

representation – feelings, affects, slips of the tongue, parapraxis or silence, for

example – are nevertheless conceived of as phrases,2 although inarticulate ones.

More importantly, they call for phrasing: the differend is thus defined as the

unstable moment of language when ‘‘something that ought to be possible to

phrase cannot be phrased yet’’ (‘‘quelque chose qui doit pouvoir être mis en

phrases ne peut pas l’être encore’’; D, x22). The combination of necessity and (im)possibility – best expressed in the French where the two modals are yoked

together in one (‘‘quelque chose qui doit pouvoir’’) – is surely a defining feature of

the event and all related concepts in Lyotard.

It is therefore always misleading, though unavoidable, to regard the event as

disruption or interruption (crack, hiatus, fissure, lull . . .). All this signals rather than constitutes the event itself – of a disagreement/differend between two

phrases or sets of phrases. Inarticulation, in the sense that it is a call for articu-

lation, must not be confounded with dislocation (‘‘désarticulation’’, in French).

The event, in other words, does not exist before the dislocation: it is the event of

an impossible and necessary encounter between an inarticulate and an articulate

phrase.

In Gérard Sfez’s words, the event gives a signal (‘‘fait signe’’) that both calls for

a phrase and appeals to a phrase, as one would to a court (‘‘en appelle à la

phrase’’; Sfez, p. 102). The French idiom, ‘‘faire signe’’, deserves comment.

The absence of the indefinite article (as found in the English translation into

‘‘make a sign’’ or ‘‘give a signal’’) allows one to hear an echo of ‘‘faire sens’’

(‘‘make sense’’). The implication is that the two processes – of making signs

and making sense – are to be differentiated, that there is a differend to be

acknowledged and welcomed between them. If the event then creates signs, it

2 R I C H A R D P E D O T

can only be in absentia, to bespeak the failure of phrasing. Hence, a semantics or a

semiotics of the event would be a contradiction in terms.

In vindication of such claims, I would like now to ponder what is at stake in

any ‘‘encounter’’ with Joyce’s short story that cannot be accounted for by relying

blindly on the traditional tools of narratology. The latter cannot – and indeed

must not – be dispensed with, but one must constantly be aware that they are

bound to miss the textual event in phrasing it, inscribing it in a structure that

turns difference into opposition. This is true for instance of the concept of

diegesis, which, for one thing, is a chronological and causal linkage, whereas

difference, as Lyotard argues, ‘‘can be grasped in the temporal order as the

non-temporality that this order aims at reducing’’ (‘‘peut être saisie dans l’ordre

du temporel comme la non-temporalité que cet ordre vise à réduire’’; DF, p. 154).

The same obtains with the notion of character which, as a ‘‘rigid token of iden-

tity’’ (P, p. 54), belies the dispossession of the self which defines the event

(E, pp. 86–9; In, p. 70) – all the more so since identity implies fixity in time.

This could be put to the test of more dramatic texts – like, say, Dr Jekyll and

Mr Hyde – but the very uneventfulness of ‘‘An Encounter’’ will, I hope, make

the paradoxical nature of the concept of event, as applied to literature, clearer.

‘‘An Encounter’’, the second story in Dubliners, would, at first sight, be best

defined by its negation of drama. In this, it is comparable to almost any story in

the collection, being pervaded by the famous paralysis affecting Dublin in Joyce’s

eyes. ‘‘Eveline’’ would be another good case in point, because of the thwarted

hope of witnessing the heroine’s planned elopement to Buenos Aires with Frank,

her lover, which will never take place because of her unexplained refusal to go at

the very last minute. But it is as if the unexpected retreat before the expected

event were the story’s event. In point of fact, this interpretation is still misleading

because, as we will see shortly, of a confusion between adventure and event. As it

is, however, it points out the paradox that the text’s event – events in/of the text –

may have to be linked with the story’s apparent blandness, at least to modern

eyes,3 and that it is more to do with equivocation and feeling than with a straight-

forward unfolding of narrative.

Similarly, ‘‘An Encounter’’ is devoid of events, although, echoing boys’ stories,

it begins with expectations of adventure. Two schoolboys – in fact, three minus

one who chickens out at the last minute – play truant one afternoon, shortly

before the summer holidays, looking for a thrill, an escape from the tedium both

of study and of ‘‘the mimic warfare of the evening’’ – the Indian battles they

arrange in emulation of the Wild West. But nothing on that large scale will

happen, the only incident being an encounter with an old man who behaves

oddly. Even so, what is odd in the man’s behaviour is not so easily understood,

Joyce both drawing the reader’s attention to it and withdrawing crucial informa-

tion about the nature of the offence: both stressing and denying its importance.

One can sense the irony of the title pointing out as the narrative’s core an episode

of apparent insignificance. The irony is reinforced by the contrast between the

boys’ thirst for adventure – ‘‘I wanted real adventures to happen to myself ’’ (p. 12)

R E A D I N G J A M E S J O Y C E ’ S ‘ ‘ A N E N C O U N T E R ’ ’ 3

is the narrator’s justification for running off from school – and the total absence

of events of the kind one commonly associates with adventure.

Although the two terms, ‘‘adventure’’ and ‘‘event’’, in modern usage tend

to overlap to a great extent, there are significant etymological differences.

‘‘Adventure’’ (Lat. adventura) was originally close to the idea of destiny or

fortune – a meaning still extant in the French ‘‘diseuse de bonne aventure’’

(fortune-teller). Indeed the word was formed on the future participle of advenire

(to arrive), which is to be opposed to ‘‘event’’, based on a past form, the supine

of evenire (to come out, to occur, to have an outcome), with the meaning of

occurrence – i.e. what happens or has happened. In the present discussion, we

will, then, differentiate between adventure, which is relevant to the order of

representation (Vorstellung) and linkage – destiny as the narrative of a life – and

what is pure, unphrasable presentation (Darstellung). This goes further than the

ironic portrait of (Irish) boys’ dreams, to come to bear upon the differend

between articulate and inarticulate phrases.

Due to the differential – i.e. not oppositional – relation between adventure and

event, the situation is of an interesting intricacy. The phrase of adventure – the

narratives whose heroes the children dream of becoming – is meant initially as

resistance to the phrase of adulthood – the prescriptions of school life or, more

specifically, of Dublin life. To be more precise, it is an attempt to phrase the

boys’ desire (of escape). Only it is too successful in this and must not be taken for

the inarticulate phrase of infancy. In this, adventure stories, like myths, have an

equivocal function in the sense that they both bear a trace of the primary process,

of the vagaries of desire, and represent its suture, their function being to ‘‘cica-

trise difference and transmute it into opposition’’ (‘‘cicatriser la différence et la

muer en opposition’’; DF, p. 151).

It is obvious from the very start that the boys’ desires are (re-)shaped,

(re-)articulated by ‘‘the literature of the Wild West’’ (p. 11) found in magazines

like The Union Jack, Pluck and The Halfpenny Marvel – the way Little Chandler’s

dreams of literary fame are moulded by the Celtic revival phraseology in

the press (‘‘A Little Cloud’’). Predictably, the sight of the ships in the harbour –

one of the boys’ destinations – triggers fancies of escape: ‘‘Mahony said it

would be right skit to run away to sea on one of those big ships’’ (p. 15).

The Norwegian three-master similarly appeals to the narrator’s imagination as

a legend full of strange or foreign beings would: ‘‘I [. . .] tried to decipher the legend upon it but, failing to do so, I came back and examined the foreign

sailors to see had any of them green eyes for I had some confused notion’’

(p. 15; italics mine).

Far from welcoming the singularity and inarticulation of the event, adventure

is all a matter of plot and plotting, of linking on from one phrase to the other. In

the boys’ eyes it involves a fair amount of preparation, as shown in the summary

of their strategy: there is money to be saved, excuses to be sent to school, a route

to be decided upon, until ‘‘the first stage of the plot [is brought] to an end’’

(p. 13). Planning ‘‘a day’s miching’’ (p. 13) indeed is part of the thrill of

4 R I C H A R D P E D O T

adventure: ‘‘When we were making the last arrangements on the eve we were all

vaguely excited’’ (p. 13). The text’s punctilious topography might also be shown

to betray the influence on the boys’ imagination of the pattern of adventure – as

a genre of phrase – complete with skirmishes with opponents, in the episode of

the ragged girls and the ragged boys, and a crossing of the water (the Liffey)

on a ferry.

In fact, the magazine stories are, as it were, at a double remove from the boys’

desires, which they phrase twice because the said magazines already rephrase

with a moral and educational purpose less suitable ‘‘sensational trash’’ (p. 245,

n2) – which can be considered as the first, cruder attempt at articulating the

inarticulate phrase of desire. The latter’s disruptiveness still shows in the conflict

with the adult phrase, ‘‘the restraining influence of the school’’, when ‘‘clumsy

Leo Dillon’’ (p. 12), the intended third in the projected trip, is caught perusing a

copy of The Halfpenny Marvel instead of listening to the four pages of Roman

History being read out in class. However censured then, adventure retains a

seductive force and the capacity to re-awaken in the boy reader a hunger ‘‘for

wild sensations’’ (p. 12) that the influence of school and home tends to repress.

But paradoxically, it succeeds in testifying to the event only in so far as it fails to

represent it in a chain of phrases.

Nothing turns out as expected in the boys’ expedition. Being two instead of

three – which ruins their project of ‘‘arranging a siege’’ at the Smoothing Iron, a

well-known bathing place at the time – they fail to decipher the promise of

strange lands in the legend on the Norwegian ship or to find the green-eyed

men of their imaginings, and soon grow tired, first of the sight of the big

ships, then of the whole expedition when the prospect of returning home

looms large. As a matter of fact, everything begins to peter out the moment

the adventurers are face to face with what from the other side of the quay looked

like adventure ‘‘signall[ing] from far away’’ (p. 15) – the three-master being dis-

charged. From then on, the exultant mood gives way to tiredness – the adjective

tired is used three times in quick succession (pp. 15–16) – and images of failure or

waning, like the sun going in behind the clouds, leaving the boys ‘‘to [their] jaded

thoughts and the crumbs of [their] provisions’’ (p. 16; italics mine), as if it had

begun to set on their Union Jack dreams of conquest.

It is at that moment, when the two protagonists are gloomily resigning them-

selves to their fate, that the old man unobtrusively enters the stage. His entrance

hardly registers as an event in the boys’ view, taking rather the form of a boring

monologue mutely listened to, and yet in the end the narrator will feel an urge to

flee in fear. Events, Lyotard insists, are not always remarkable occurrences; they

can be almost imperceptible:

One may be tempted to see the event as an encounter with nothingness. A facing death.

But things are not that simple. Many events occur that we cannot stare at. The nothing-

ness they conceal does not manifest itself, it remains imperceptible. [. . .] To perceive them as events, one must be able to listen to a peculiar tone of their own, underneath their

silence and their noise. One must be passible to the ‘‘it happens’’ rather than to ‘‘what

R E A D I N G J A M E S J O Y C E ’ S ‘ ‘ A N E N C O U N T E R ’ ’ 5

happens’’. And this eventually requires much subtlety in the perception of little

differences.

Il est tentant de se représenter un événement comme un face-à-face avec le néant. Une

sorte de présence à la mort. Mais les choses ne sont pas si simples. Beaucoup d’événements

arrivent sans qu’on puisse les dévisager. Le néant qu’ils recèlent ne se manifeste pas, reste

imperceptible. [. . .] Pour être sensible à leur qualité d’événements, il faut pouvoir écouter un timbre singulier qu’ils ont, en deçà de leur silence et de leur bruit. Il faut être passible

au ‘‘il arrive’’ plutôt qu’à ‘‘ce qui arrive’’. Et cela demande, à la fin, beaucoup de finesse

dans la perception des petites différences. (P, p. 41)

It is to some such little textual discrepancies that we must now pay attention.

To begin with, even if there is nothing spectacular about it, the narrator’s

response to the old man’s speech and behaviour, culminating in a ‘‘paltry’’

show of ‘‘forced bravery’’ (p. 20), seems faintly at odds with the actual situation.

We are led to see in this the manifestation of an event because of the presence of

affect which, in Lyotard’s view, manifests an impossibility to phrase and obeys

‘‘the pure tautology of the event: it happens’’ (‘‘la pure tautologie de l’événement:

il arrive’’; E, p. 57). In the same way, the narrator’s silence as he listens to the

‘‘queer old josser’’ (p. 18), his inability to make head or tail of the monologue,

may be regarded as an illustration of a differend between two regimens of phrase.

At stake is not only the conundrum of sexuality – ‘‘the mystery’’ the narrator is

‘‘led through’’ (p. 20) – but by the same token the consistency of the adult phrase

of authority when an old man tries to share his passion for whipping boys: that is,

when authority and the law are perverted in the pursuit of one’s leanings.

Another signal is the stratagem of changing names – the decision to be known

to the man as Murphy and Smith – if we consider the affect, with Lyotard, as the

event of a ‘‘dépropriation’’ (E, p. 87). This, roughly paraphrased, is a disposses-

sion of what defines you as a singular entity, of your most distinctive possession,

‘‘making one incapable of taking possession and control of what one is’’

(‘‘L’événement rend le soi incapable de prendre possession et contrôle de ce

qu’il est’’; LE, p. 70). Dread of appropriation/seizure – the boy’s ‘‘fear that he

would seize me by the ankles’’ (p. 20) – leads to a deprivation of one’s most

private property, one’s own name and self, and leaves one helpless.

The boy’s helplessness, his limited grasp of what is going on, can be inter-

preted in terms of Lyotard’s theory of the affect and of infancy, as evolved from

his reading of Emma’s case history in Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology.

According to Freud, Emma’s anguish before entering a shop can be traced

back to a childhood incident in a sweetshop when she had to undergo fondling

by the owner. For Lyotard, this amounts to a differend between infancy – infantia:

the state of being mute – and the gendered adult phrase. The assault is a violent

imposition of sexual difference upon a polymorphous universe that cannot recog-

nise let alone articulate it. The differend cannot be settled: the encounter

between a polarised universe and one that is not and cannot be polarised

being always a missed encounter; it remains as affect (‘‘stationne comme affect’’),

outside representation. Like Emma, the narrator of Joyce’s story can be said to

6 R I C H A R D P E D O T

suffer from an ‘‘ill-assured command of articulate language’’ (‘‘malassurance du

langage articulé’’; E, p. 87). His encounter with the ‘‘old josser’’ exceeds his

phrasing capacity, but at the same time he is drawn to his ‘‘mysterious’’ mono-

logue, both shocked and fascinated by it. ‘‘The encounter between phônè and lexis

[a rough equivalent to the infancy/articulate phrase pair] is thus inevitably trau-

matic, seductive’’ (‘‘La rencontre de la phônè avec la lexis est donc inévitablement

traumatisante, séductrice’’; LE, p. 138; italics mine in translation).

The boy’s helplessness thus signals a differend, the originary differend of sexu-

ality which, as one Lyotard commentator rightly suggests, goes in Freud’s theory

under the name of Hilflösigkeit (Prado, p. 67). But what it is that is inevitably

traumatic and seductive is less easy to define, as it challenges appropriation in

discourse. On the other hand, it is undeniably something to do with sexuality,

‘‘the event of sexual difference, which is without location, representation, and

engenders the least controllable anguish’’ (‘‘l’événement de la différence sexuelle,

qui n’a pas de site, pas de représentation, qui engendre l’angoisse la moins

maı̂trisable’’; LE, p. 31). The man’s speech indeed rambles from ‘‘strangely lib-

eral’’ (p. 17) considerations on girls to strong views on the necessity – and

pleasure – of whipping boys who have any commerce with girls. The presentation

of two irreconcilable sides at the same time is in itself disturbing. Not only are

liberalism and repression or suppression of desire surprisingly intertwined, but the

man’s monologue both confirms and invalidates sexual difference by first extolling

heterosexual exchanges, the better to condemn them in what appears as a homo-

sexual and paedophile fantasy that unsettles the gendered barriers of identity.

This unutterable something seems to be the ‘‘something secret’’ (p. 18), the

‘‘mystery’’ – a recurrent term in the narrator’s account – which apparently binds

adult and child – the man lowering his voice not to be overheard (p. 18), or insidi-

ously, ‘‘almost affectionate[ly]’’ pleading that the boy ‘‘should understand him’’

(p. 20). It is as if, in reporting the man’s speech, the boy’s mind were similarly

‘‘circling round and round in the same orbit’’ (p. 18), ‘‘slowly round and round’’

(p. 19) an enigmatic centre, being equally ‘‘magnetised’’ by his own words.

This means that the encounter, the event as encounter, does not happen (only)

between man and boy – any strict location of the event would in fact miss it – but

within each as well, in the (missed) encounter, within man and boy, between

articulation and inarticulation.4 The adult phrase, in other words, is never pure,

never entirely impervious to the event of infancy or affect. There is always

something in/about it that remains irreducible to phrasing. It is crucial to

observe here that in Lyotard’s argument infancy is not a chance word referring

to a stage in life; it is, rather, something that never passes but forever haunts

man’s discourse. It is the state of language before language when, to recall Lyo-

tard’s definition of the differend, something ‘‘that ought to be possible to phrase

cannot be phrased yet’’. In Tomiche’s comment, infancy ‘‘is that which adult-

hood (that is, discourse, signification, reason) cannot reconcile or appropriate.

The infant is, within the adult, that which the adult, the subject of reason, cannot

reduce’’ (Tomiche, p. 48).

R E A D I N G J A M E S J O Y C E ’ S ‘ ‘ A N E N C O U N T E R ’ ’ 7

The inconsistencies in the old man’s speech – reverberated in those of the

narrator’s account of it and in the child’s bewilderment as showing through

the older narrator’s view – testify to the persistence of infancy. There are gaps

between equivocal statements as there are gaps in his mouth between his yellow

teeth, but they may be less noticeable where formal aspects are involved. Among

the most striking are the numerous repetitions: ‘‘He repeated his phrases over

and over again, varying them and surrounding them with his monotonous voice’’

(p. 18). Not surprisingly, the most frequent word is ‘‘whip’’, as an echo gone wild.

The repetition also concerns phrase structures, in the emphatic mode: variants of

‘‘there was nothing in this world he would like so well’’ (p. 19); nominal groups

with two adjectives, the first reinforcing the second – ‘‘her nice white hands’’

(p. 18), ‘‘a good sound whipping’’ (p. 19); replication of the same word after

‘‘and’’ – ‘‘whipped and well whipped’’, ‘‘whip him and whip him’’; not to

mention the heavy recourse to intensifiers like ‘‘so’’, ‘‘such’’ and ‘‘how’’. Unques-

tionably, the old man intends to ‘‘express [his] sentiments’’ (p. 17), forcing his

affect on his silent (infant) audience. Each repetition, then, signals the event of the

pure, singular occurrence of affect, the affect forever presenting itself each time

as what cannot be represented, the irreconcilable.

The monotony with which the man ‘‘surrounds’’ ‘‘his phrases’’ can scarcely

deaden the strength of the affect oozing from his discourse. If anything it makes

the latter more disturbing, because of the differend between its emotional force

and its dullness of voice. What is more, the old man can occasionally trip himself

up over an ambiguous phrase. Consider the allusion to chastising a boy like

Mahony, the narrator’s companion: ‘‘what he wanted was to get a nice warm

whipping’’ (p. 19). In addition to the suggestion of seeking pleasure in pain, with

‘‘whipping’’ used where one would rather read ‘‘cup of tea’’ or ‘‘evening by the

fire’’, free indirect speech casts doubts about the pronoun’s referent: for all we

know the man might be talking about himself, which gives an even more dis-

quieting ring to his plea to be understood.

No wonder, then, if the boy is ‘‘surprised at this sentiment’’ (p. 19), so much so

that he ‘‘involuntarily glance[s] up at [the man’s] face’’. He has been affected

by the affect haunting the old josser’s phrase. His muteness, then, is not indif-

ference but bewilderment and helplessness. Ironically, the eyes he furtively

meets are of the kind he had been looking for previously – ‘‘bottle-green

eyes’’. So, it is implied, the unease is not only something in or about the

man’s statement which makes his listener instinctively look up, it is as if it had

been fleetingly translated into a no less disturbing figure that haunts the boy’s

narrative as the other of meaning, the something about green that remains

unspecified and somehow out of tune. We have already mentioned the boy’s

strange notion about green eyes and adventure. It must, furthermore, be

noted that the colour itself returns frequently in his descriptions, not only as

that of the man’s coat (greenish-black) and eyes but also as the colour of the

stem the boy is chewing when he sees the man approaching – interestingly it is

said to be one of those ‘‘on which girls tell fortunes’’ (p. 16), green then connoting

8 R I C H A R D P E D O T

adventure doubly, foretelling a bright future in which girls will probably play a

great and unsettling part.

So in the end, the boy will have got what he has been in search of – ‘‘wild

sensations’’, ‘‘chronicles of disorder’’, ‘‘real adventures’’ happening to himself

(p. 12) – but never in the expected, well-phrased, appropriate form. Even the

bravery which may by implication validate his ‘‘adventure’’ is fake, ‘‘forced

bravery’’ (p. 20). This – the difference and the differend between adventure

and event – he does not want to, or cannot, acknowledge: on encountering

the man’s gaze, he immediately turns his own away again (p. 19). His narrative

is as replete with repetitions as the monologue he is listening to – which he

repeats uncomprehendingly, as a matter of fact, just as the affect, according to

Lyotard, repeats itself and re-presents itself, because it is forever irreconcilable to

representation.

In this respect, Joyce’s strategy is quite subtle, in its very equivocation –

understood as conflict of voices. If the narrator’s voice most of the time sounds

more educated and grown-up than would suit the age of the boy at the time of his

‘‘adventure’’, the puzzlement, the silence within the discourse, is of a child: it is

the inarticulate phrase of infancy. In this sense, to paraphrase Lyotard writing

about Benjamin and Adorno, we might say that Joyce’s story ‘‘does not describe

the events of infancy but seizes the infancy of the event, inscribing its unseizable

dimension’’ (‘‘ne décr[it] pas des événements de l’enfance, [elle] sais[it] l’enfance

de l’événement, [elle] inscr[it] son insaisissable’’;5 PM, p. 135). Therefore the

challenge faced by critical reading is ‘‘to testify to the only thing that matters,

the infancy of the encounter, the welcoming the miracle of the occurrence (of

something), the respect for the event’’ (‘‘témoigner de ce qui seul compte,

l’enfance de la rencontre, l’accueil fait à la merveille qu’il arrive (quelque

chose), le respect pour l’événement’’; PM, p. 143).

I am aware that my own phrasing of Joyce’s story falls short of the daunting

task just delineated, my aim, against the grain of my wonted practice, being more

on the side of theoretical justification.6 To do justice to the textual event, I would

have to be able (i.e. devoir pouvoir) to welcome in my own discourse the text’s intricate

discursive indecisions, its complex temporality or, linked to all that, its equivoca-

tions of identity. I would have to allow myself to be seduced – led astray – and

shocked by the encounter with the text, instead of settling early for a (theoretical)

adventure.

I can only mention here a few discrepancies that should be dealt with in a

longer study. We would have to begin with the infringements of articulation

which are the staple of free indirect speech, which gets special mention in

Lyotard’s article on Emma (‘‘Emma’’, p. 88). Among those, the commingling

of direct and indirect speech in one structure – ‘‘I came back [. . .] to see had any of them green eyes’’ (p. 15); ‘‘He [. . .] asked did he get whipped often at school’’ (p. 19) – illustrates a temporal confusion where past words actually seem to

re-present themselves and, besides, take the place of the boy’s own words, speak-

ing for themselves as if without his agency. Furthermore, free indirect speech, as

R E A D I N G J A M E S J O Y C E ’ S ‘ ‘ A N E N C O U N T E R ’ ’ 9

we have seen, is part of what disturbs the frontiers of identity, which affect

disregards (‘‘Emma’’, p. 88) and, as a consequence, queries the autonomy of

one’s discourse. Not only is the boy’s narration infiltrated by the old man’s

words and mannerisms, but the latter’s ‘‘magnetised’’ speech is often described

as if unfolding – and stopping – by itself: ‘‘his monologue paused’’ (p. 18), ‘‘his

monologue paused again’’ (p. 20). Narration in turn is split between the apparent

linguistic mastery of the older narrator – not averse to an occasional poetic turn,

such as alliteration: ‘‘Leo the idler held the loft of the stable while we tried to

carry it by storm’’ (p. 11) – and a far less assured voice which we associate with

childhood. The equivocation of Joyce’s story, then, its eventfulness, is disruptive

not only of identity but, by the same token, also of temporality, in a manner

reminiscent of Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit (deferred action).7

Indecision may also involve the narrative sequence and, to conclude, I would

like to focus on the reading encounter between interpreter and story, with one

puzzling episode for a critical hub, a blank in the diegetic chain of phrases: the

man’s short absence. It is a crucial, because defining, moment in the story, for it

is his behaviour during the brief time gap in which he leaves the boys to their

own devices while remaining in sight that earns the man his nickname of ‘‘queer

old josser’’. But as to ‘‘what he’s doing’’ (p. 18) to deserve such an epithet, nothing

is revealed. Everything will have been watched in silence and then, apart from

the suggestion to change names that closely follows the man’s ‘‘baptism’’ but with

the opposed intention of avoiding definition, ‘‘nothing further’’ (p. 18) will be

exchanged on that subject, either between the boys or with the reader. So the

‘‘what happens’’ remains in the background, in inarticulate silence outside rep-

resentation, to make room for the ‘‘it happens’’.

Such suspension8 in the phrase sequence calls for linkage. It is the decisive

moment, the time of judgement, of ‘‘the most enigmatic phrase, in Kant’s view,

an event-phrase par excellence’’ (‘‘la plus énigmatique des phrases, comme le

pensait Kant, phrase d’événement par excellence’’; PM, p. 75). To be equal to the

occasion requires an attitude akin to the analyst’s evenly suspended attention

(P, p. 42). It would not do, in other words, to read too much into the narrative’s

blank. It might be as well a Joycean red herring, along with the man in the

mackintosh popping out of nowhere in Ulysses. It is true that the sexual under-

tones of the monologues tend to corroborate the claim that the man might be, for

instance, a masturbator or a flasher, as his coat worn on a mild June afternoon

would indicate. That, surely, would be enough to frighten the boys out of their

names, as it were. And yet is it a failure of imagination that, despite the slight

evidence, we cannot think of any other, equally befuddling possibilities – as if we

could not dismiss our own version of the green eyes of foreign sailors?

There is nothing illegitimate in our seeing sexuality as the event at stake here,

in our temptation to phrase what the narrator, and the boy/infant within the

narrator, is unable to phrase, this inability strongly suggesting such stakes.

However, we must be aware of the implication that reading is a form of trans-

ference, in Lyotard’s definition of it as phônè ‘‘in the process of articulating itself’’

1 0 R I C H A R D P E D O T

(‘‘en train de s’articuler’’; LE, p. 144) – as its articulation in progress, in

suspension. To say things differently, the task of interpretation echoes the task

of literature – as an obligation to the irreconcilable of infancy, an obligation to

link on and phrase the event. Put very roughly, articulate language, Lyotard

claims, is always in debt to what comes in excess of it and remains (as the)

inarticulable, outside representation, existing only in the now of presence or

presentation. But literature, because of its ambiguities and more or less subtle

infringements of discursive rules, is one way to repay this debt.9

There is, however, an undeniable difference between the debt of literature and

the debt of criticism. The former does not represent the event to make amends in

its own idiom; it lets it come to the text, as infancy – the infancy of the event. In

Lyotard’s reading of it, Ulysses, for instance, does not bear witness to the affect

(anguish) by discoursing about it, for ‘‘it is not enough to turn the anguish

[caused by sexual difference] into an object of discourse (as I [Lyotard] am

doing just now), it is necessary in order to really testify to it, to worry language

to anguish’’ (‘‘il ne suffit pas de faire de l’angoisse [de l’événement de la différ-

ence sexuelle] l’objet d’un discours (comme je le fais ici), il faut, pour en

témoigner vraiment, angoisser la langue’’; LE, p. 31). Interpretation, being less

amenable to discursive breaches, will turn the affect into a concept in a logical

chain – however much it might be deconstructed by what it so excludes. In this

respect, literary criticism, as Lyotard’s parenthetical remark indicates, is philo-

sophy’s close companion. And this paper, then, as much of my critical labour

elsewhere, will have been heavily indebted to Lyotard’s passion and scrupulous

respect for the event of literature.

R I C H A R D P E D O T

Université Paris 10 92000 NANTERRE France

N O T E S

1 ‘‘Truth comes out (e-venit) as something out of place’’ (D, p. 135). (Here as elsewhere, my trans-

lation. The page references are to the French edition of Lyotard’s works, after the specific abbreviations – see Works Cited.)

2 A phrase is a unit defined as a ‘‘universe’’ consisting of four poles: referent, meaning, addressee and

addressor, corresponding respectively to the two axes of semantics and pragmatics. Any phrase is articulate which presents a universe in its four instances; an inarticulate phrase ‘‘lacks the instances which articulate a phrase universe’’ (E, p. 56).

3 As we know, the publication of the story was delayed out of moral prudishness.

4 I disagree here with Garry M. Leonard’s reading of ‘‘An Encounter’’ (Leonard, pp. 56–72) which,

although it similarly points out the conflict between the articulate phrase of Western adventures and the confusion of sexuality, eventually restricts it to the characters involved, in a reading that I find uncomfortably close to character psychoanalysis.

5 There is only one word in French (‘‘enfance’’) to refer to both childhood and infancy, but Lyotard’s

usage is always close to the Latin etymology, infantia, even where childhood is concerned. 6

This study originates in a paper given at an international conference on the place of theory in literary studies and was intended as a vindication of Lyotard’s importance in that field.

R E A D I N G J A M E S J O Y C E ’ S ‘ ‘ A N E N C O U N T E R ’ ’ 1 1

7 On temporality in Freud’s theory of affect, see in particular ‘‘Emma’’, pp. 68–86.

8 Suspension (suspens), for Sfez, is another key feature of the differend: the suspension ‘‘of a phrase

before it occurs and before any arbitration can be found between it and any other conflicting phrase’’ (Sfez, p. 100).

9 For an extensive discussion of the place of the concept throughout Lyotard’s works, see P. W. Prado

Jr., ‘‘La Dette d’affect’’.

W O R K S C I T E D

Freud, S., ‘‘Entwurf einer Psychologie’’, in: Gesammelte Werke: Nachtragsband: Texte aus den Jahren 1885–1938 (Frankfurt, 1987) (‘‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’’).

Joyce, J., Dubliners (1914; Harmondsworth, 1992).

Leonard, G. M., Reading ‘‘Dubliners’’ Again: A Lacanian Perspective (Syracuse, NY, 1993).

Lyotard, D., Milner, J.-C. & Sfez, G. (eds.), Jean-François Lyotard: L’Exercice du différend (Paris, 2001).

Lyotard, J.-F., Le Différend (Paris, 1983) (The Differend: Phrases in Dispute). References given in the text as D.

———, Discours, Figure (Paris, 1971). References given in the text as DF.

———, ‘‘Emma’’ (1989), in: Misère de la philosophie (Paris, 2000), pp. 57–95.

———, L’Inhumain: Causeries sur le temps (Paris, 1988) (The Inhuman). References given in the text as In.

———, Lectures d’enfance (Paris, 1990). References given in the text as LE.

———, Pérégrinations: Loi, forme, événement (Paris, 1990) (Peregrinations). References given in the text as P.

———, Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants: Correspondance 1982–1985 (Paris, 1988) (The Postmodern Explained to Children). References given in the text as PM.

Prado, P. W. Jr., ‘‘La Dette d’affect’’, in: Jean-François Lyotard, ed. D. Lyotard et al.

Sfez, G., Jean-François Lyotard: La Faculté d’une phrase (Paris, 2000).

Tomiche, A., ‘‘Rephrasing the Freudian Unconscious: Lyotard’s Affect-phrase’’, Diacritics 24:1 (1994), 43–62.

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