"Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage."
Pas encore - not yet, still not, not quite, not as yet, not been, haven't even ·Pas en cor - not in heart, the heart is not yet in it.
Transcript of video:
Kimberly J Devlin in her "Wandering and Return in Finegans Wake" describes the Wake as an uncanny text, in the sense of its' being at once strange and familiar, positioning its' characters preeminently as Wanderers in the word, in language itself, and turns their psyches into sites of Relentless textual return. She says that Joyce's Night World suggests that selfhood is in essence Protean Inscription, a process of Perpetual figuration and refiguration which looks like a specific type of uncanny text, that being the ghost story. The Wake generates, she says, tales that turn the dreamer's present self into an elusive fantasm, but that conjure up simultaneously representations of his former selves, textual ghosts of sorts, that freely roam the night. Wandering out of identity in the dream allows for the Uncanny return of multiple earlier phases of being. And this ambivalence at the heart of repetition and return can be seen in a seemingly innocuous word on the first page of "Finegans Wake," that being "passencore". In its context it reads:"Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war..."In this lecture I would like to provide an in-depth gloss of this simple word "passencore" to show its relevance to "Finegans Wake" as an uncanny text dealing with the ambivalence at the heart of repetition and memory in creating the self.
Of the many possible underdetermined hermeneutical associations of the word "passencore" we have "passenger", ie- that one is a passenger to one's own journey, identity, and maladies. This message is at the very heart of the psychic libidinal journey through identity that is "Finnegans Wake". Confronting all sorts of anxieties complexes and impulses in the process.
Additionally, one could read that the Invader which Sir Tristram is here, invading from Over the short sea, who is the psychic 'other' of the dreamer, carries with him passengers, or multitudes, which threaten one from various angles. Thus "Finnegans Wake" is in part a persecution narrative, dealing with the psychological discomfort involved not only with facing against others, but facing the discontinuities within oneself. Which describes thus the ambivalent relationship of the self to its' own memory and iteration through time, leaving one often feeling at odds with oneself.
This reminds me of a William Burrow's quote in which he says, "Every Man Has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his Advantage." The ambiguity of this quote is very similar to the ambiguity of "passencore", so it's worth pointing out that on the one hand, this quote could mean that this parasitic being is acting not entirely, not completely, to one's Advantage, hence, some ambiguity. Or that it is acting not in any way whatsoever to one's advantage, that in fact it may be acting purposefully contrary to one's Advantage; hence the sense of a conscious passenger who is an 'other' at the very heart of oneself. It's a psychic discontinuity akin to Lacan's analysis of the mirror stage, which is a stage at which a young child recognizes themselves as a reflection in the mirror. This coincides with the ability to recognize oneself, the very necessity of identity in Hegel's "Master-Slave dialectic". Yet on the other hand, it ensures that one will be alienated from oneself, only able to discover oneself not as oneself, but as an 'other' in an eerie relationship to oneself.
The origin of subjectivity hence, coincides with alienation from the spectral or ideal "I", leaving one thrown into history and the social with all of its' ambiguities. As Lacan puts it, in his Ecrites, the first effect of the Imago that appears in human beings is that of the subject's alienation. That in the moment that leads man to an ever more adequate consciousness of himself, his freedom becomes bound up with the development of his servitude. And this servitude is not merely an outer boundary, but rather a line piercing the self at its' very heart, and hence, often appears as a threat.
Hence, one is constantly persecuted by not only an ambiguous multitude, but a dueling dualism at the heart of the narrative that is "Shem and Sean". Shem and Sean are warring brothers, representative of all the Warring Brothers of History, such as Cain and Abel, and are the sons of HCE. As such they act as emissaries of a number of HCE's psychic troubles, but also threaten HCE, since they have the youth that HCE wishes he has, that he sees waning in himself. Therefore, the Shem-Sean binary serves as a constituent dual principle of identity, or being, leading to the conflict at the very heart of the narrative, that we can see in "passencore". That it is a number of passengers passing us by, which nevertheless threaten us with their mere gaze or presence.
As such watching this dualism play out, the dream positions its' subject as a passive third person vehicle, a receptacle of psychic drama, that does not lead but rather follows. The 'other' within oneself becomes an active agent, wedded with the narrative mileau itself, since the conscious mind no longer operates to subdue desire.
Devin quotes a helpful passage from Lacan, in which he states that:"...we are beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world. That which makes us consciousness institutes us by the same token as speculum mundi... in the so-called waking state, there is an illusion of the gaze, and an elusion of the fact that not only does it look, it also shows. In the field of dream, on the other hand, what characterizes the images is that it shows... So much is [this insistence on showing] to the fore... that, in the final resort, our position in the dream is profoundly that of someone who does not see. The subject does not see where it is leading, he follows."As such, the passivity of the dreamer threatens him as a sense of weakness, that he could not lead even if he wanted to. Hence there is an ambiguity in "passencore" which is helpful when we bring in its' cross-linguistic associations. On the one hand, "passencore" could be the French "pas encore", not again, realized. That this is the last, or only time, that these events will occur exactly this way. That this time we read the book, we are going to get a unique literary experience that each time will change.
This seems to me very important for understanding the way "Finnegans Wake" works as a text on the individual. Every reading is a new reading, every day a new day, even if no matter has ever really been created or destroyed, only shifted or transmuted. Through the process of hermeneutic engagement, we change the text in a profound way, such that Finnegans Wake always presents itself in the Eerie mode of The Uncanny, as some sort of phantasmagoric medium, which presents itself with a number of deja vu like repetitions. And yet, they always feel different, as if we're getting something potentially new. That we have not again rearrived to exactly the same place, but that we have come to something genuinely new.
"Passencore" could also mean pas en core, not in heart; that his heart is not in it. That in part, he feels at a distance from his own concerns. That his life is something that he can't fully put stock in, because it feels alien or 'other' to him. It could also signal stress, unease, alienation, or more importantly that the exigence of this dream state is not internal, not in the heart, but external- embodied in the environment. That from an encounter with the fragmentary world, which is mirrored in the methods of structure and style in dream, we are presented with something indicative of the world, of the environment, and not merely a psychic internal battle, but itself representative of larger concerns of narrative myth and philosophy.
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