ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1, I will take up the relation between voice and writing by showing that Saussure is innocent of the charge of phonocentrism of which Derrida accuses him. The reason is a surprising one that takes us back to the origins of the term “interior monologue” in Victor Egger’s La parole intérieure (1881). Joyce uses the title of Egger’s still untranslated book—”the word within,” as I propose to translate it—when he inscribes a copy of Ulysses (1922) to Edouard Dujardin, a term Dujardin will convert to “interior monologue” in 1931, but which Joyce himself uses to describe far more accurately the technique of modern fiction with which we are familiar in Joyce himself, in Woolf, and in Faulkner. It represents mental functioning as a kind of psychical writing in which the mind is a language or narrative that it speaks to itself. Egger’s book vexed Saussure as a student in Paris. Its problems, chief among them the notion that language referred to a world outside itself, led him to the invention of the notion of the sign later on in his career. The notion of the sign did not require a belief in a world outside of signification, particularly the notion of the sign as a “sound image,” the notion in the Course in General Linguistics that, as I will show, does not, contra Derrida, require a belief that writing copies speech. Rather, speech, as I will show in brief detail, copies writing—the writing of the word within. The word within is the way the world without inscribes the psychological subject within the coils of social life, the life of the language of which a social community is made.
