ABSTRACT
The words of the Wake, says Clive Hart, inscribe purely formal motifs, and the task of reading is to trace the itineraries of these motifs as they circle and twine through or upon the text. One might imagine a reader of the Wake trying to repair Joyce's text, making it readable by rewriting it according to the model of the proposition, the narrative, or the signifying system. Husserl-like, Mikhail Bakhtin picks out the relation of word and thing; Joyce-like, he situates this relation within the otherness of "alien words": On all its various routes toward the object, in all its directions, the word encounters an alien word and cannot help encountering it in a living, tension-filled interaction. In What is Called Thinking?, Heidegger distinguishes between common speech and the speech of poetry and thinking. Renunciation, Heidegger says, means giving up language as logos, that is, as the power of framing representations.
