On Fragments: A Piece of Art and the “I” – or Not

so the odd time
out there
somewhere out there
like as if
as if
something
not life
necessarily

Example 1, Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce’s Ulysses

As Stephen Dedalus contemplates trying to evade paying his outstanding debts in James Joyce’s Ulysses, he has a flash of insight: “Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got pound” (9.205–06). As he reviews moments from his own history as past versions of himself, other Is, he rather elegantly express-es the conundrum in terms of punctuation: “I, I and I. I.” (9.212). The person who borrowed the money, that is, is not “I” any longer, as “I” am now other than he who borrowed, since he, the other I, exists “under everchanging forms.” By the time he says “I,” he is already other amid his “everchanging forms.”

But a certain consistency of forms remains if not constant at least stable, and hence recognizable, he continues, “But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by mem-ory because under everchanging forms.” What continuity exists between “I and I” or “I” and “I as other,” is a function of memory that appears inescapable since always present, but what if memory falters, fails for some reason as in some form of illness – amnesia, dementia or Alzheimer’s, say, disruptions of the body’s neural connections, all. The I and the no longer I, the not I, say, are linked by a fragile neural bridge of memory, which, while always part of the present, is not always available and retrievable, at least at will, what French novelist Marcel Proust would call – and Beckett would explore – “voluntary memory,” the ability to retrieve and so connect with the past at will.

Stephen’s memory returns him playfully to the money he owes to an Irish mysti-cal poet named George Russel, or to his pen name “Aeon.” He goes by and published under its shortened version of AE, and so Stephen recalls “AEIOU,” and so Stephen has, as Adam Piette phrases it, “the inability to forget” (Piette 1996: 146), as memory ties him to his past self, his other I that Stephen willfully tries to forget – his (and Ireland’s) inseparably bound history, which is written memory, in Stephen’s case per-sonal, familial, cultural and religious, but he fails to forget. That nexus of history is – as he tells his employer, the headmaster of the school that employs him, Mr Deasy in the “Proteus” chapter of Ulysses – “a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.”