‘sound sense’; or ‘tralala’ / ‘moocow’: Joyce and the anathema of writing

Abstract

How might a writer represent infancy? Given the fact that the infant – infans – by definition, is one who has not as yet entered language, there is a sense in which it is true to say that infancy is fundamentally inimical to writing, that infancy is writing's anathema. By extension, it would further follow that infancy would be inimical also to representation in language or even to representation as such. One further consequence of such a claim that infancy is inimical to writing is that infancy is defined as a condition which must equally be distanced from the basic attributes of writing, including the very faculty of understanding itself. How might we understand, then, a writing about childhood? Yet more important still for present purposes, how might the writer of an autobiographical text ‘understand’ herself or himself; and how might one write oneself into a life from the starting point of infancy? In short, how might one write one's own necessary distance from language; how might one begin A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ? The proposition regarding the distance between infancy and representation has a distinguished history as a problem for philosophy; Aristotle indicated the basic link between infancy and imitation in the Poetics .

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