Finnegans Wake - Queen Mary, University of London

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eTransfers. A Postgraduate eJournal for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Issue 1 (2011) Before we see why this reading can be avoided, let us observe that with this rann we have encountered another way in which Dasein is fallen: its subjection to idle talk [Gerede]: Discourse, which belongs to the essential state of Dasein’s Being and has a share in constituting Dasein’s disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk. And when it does so, it serves not so much to keep Being-in-the-world open for us in an articulated understanding, as rather to close it off, and cover up the beings within the world. (BT 213) Discourse, as the logos, is the way in which we let something be shown, or articulated as the thing it is. As Being-in-the-world, Dasein pre-ontologically discloses beings as they are given by the world’s background nexus. This world-nexus can be articulated like joints (perhaps in a skeleton). Discourse can take the form of telling, in which one articulates, for example, a hammer as being ‘too heavy’, before reaching for another. “Telling is the articulation of intelligibility” (BT 204 f.). It need not be linguistic in character — for example, one can tellingly articulate the intelligibility of an escalator by using it, or can articulate the above proposition regarding the hammer by simply discarding it and reaching for another. However, when it speaks about something towards which it bears no comportment, Dasein has fallen into idle talk. Idle talk has become de-worlded and, as such, does not articulate the intelligibility of the world, but represents a detached, impoverished way of understanding. In short, idle talk passes over the phenomenon of the world, “clos[ing] it off, and cover[ing] up the beings within the world.” The groundlessness of idle talk is no obstacle to its becoming public; instead it encourages this. Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without previously making the thing one’s own. If this were done, idle talk would founder […]. Idle talk is something which anyone can rake up; it not only releases one from the task of genuinely understanding, but develops an undifferentiated kind of intelligibility, for which nothing is closed off any longer. (BT 213) Idle talk does not grant informed articulation but empty, de-worlded speculation. In idle talk, Dasein has not articulated a being in its world situation, ‘making the thing one’s own.’ Against analytical tradition, Heidegger holds that interpretation is impoverished when it is detached and observational as the merely observational ‘releases one from the task of genuinely understanding.’ The ‘present-to-hand’ of de- worlded objects, that is, is the province of the correct but not of truth. 12
eTransfers. A Postgraduate eJournal for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Issue 1 (2011) In Finnegans Wake, as we have seen, Joyce certainly seems to suggest that human beings suffer negative consequences from idle talk. After relentlessly heckling HCE over his alleged scandals, the customers at his inn announce that “you’ll read it tomorrow, marn, when the curds on the table” (FW 374). The scandal of Earwicker lacks any ground. It is confused, and those who partake in spreading it themselves merge into the accused. Yet nothing can prevent it being blared by tabloid headlines. Perhaps feeling that he has strayed too far from what Heidegger would term the public identity of how one is a gentleman, Earwicker scrambles to articulate a defence of himself, arguing that though he has surely done wrong in his life, “I like to think […] confessedly in my baron gentilhomme to the manhor bourne”(FW 365). That is, he considers himself a gentleman (or gentle homme) still, though even this defence is contaminated with “confess[ion]”, barrenness, and the unchaste image of ‘man whore’. The tension between idle talk and discourse thus gives rise to panic and guilt. In idle talk, the subtlety of the human being and its complexity is levelled into dismissive categorisation. One is ‘guilty’ because they say so. Propositional definitions have replaced (and obscured) discursive understanding. HCE is defeated, beaten and left to lie fallen on his bar room floor. III.Existential Guilt: Resolution or Redemption? Pressing our enquiry into these narratives we approach the issue of guilt. In the face of idle talk, the futility of Earwicker’s discourse reveals him in his guilt. Conversely, for Dasein, as we will see, guilt is what calls human being away from idle talk. In both instances guilt is a core structure of human being. In regards to their function as narratives, does guilt reveal in Being and Time and Finnegans Wake what might be called ‘resolute salvation’? In Being and Time, guilt is that which reveals Dasein as the being it is. Dasein is called to authenticity by its guilty conscience. “This call whose mood has been attuned by anxiety is what makes it possible first and foremost for Dasein to project itself upon its ownmost potentiality for being” (BT 322). This “ownmost possibility” is Dasein’s death. Only by embracing this revelation can Dasein comport itself 13
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Finnegans Wake - Queen Mary, University of London

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