Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Sources
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction: Cixousian Gambols
- 1 Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche (The ‘Uncanny’)
- 2 The Character of ‘Character’
- 3 Missexuality: Where Come I Play?
- 4 The Pleasure Reinciple or Paradox Lost
- 5 Reaching the Point of Wheat, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Maturing Woman
- 6 Letter to Zohra Drif
- 7 The Names of Oran
- 8 The Book as One of Its Own Characters
- 9 How Not to Speak of Algeria
- 10 The Oklahoma Nature Theater Is Recruiting
- 11 The Book I Don't Write
- 12 The Unforeseeable
- 13 Passion Michel Foucault
- 14 Promised Cities
- 15 Volleys of Humanity
- Acknowledgements
- Index
14 - Promised Cities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Sources
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction: Cixousian Gambols
- 1 Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche (The ‘Uncanny’)
- 2 The Character of ‘Character’
- 3 Missexuality: Where Come I Play?
- 4 The Pleasure Reinciple or Paradox Lost
- 5 Reaching the Point of Wheat, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Maturing Woman
- 6 Letter to Zohra Drif
- 7 The Names of Oran
- 8 The Book as One of Its Own Characters
- 9 How Not to Speak of Algeria
- 10 The Oklahoma Nature Theater Is Recruiting
- 11 The Book I Don't Write
- 12 The Unforeseeable
- 13 Passion Michel Foucault
- 14 Promised Cities
- 15 Volleys of Humanity
- Acknowledgements
- Index
Summary
In homage to the author from Dublin, who was both my hunter and my prey for so many years, I mean to the thief from Dublin to his translator, and his transhater, by way of epigraph I shall take my first steps in Cities via a small detour through Finnegans Wake where on p. 301 an air of nostalgia for Trieste awaits us. Trieste, the at least triple city where as a young man Joyce used to pass on languages [était passe-langue] at the Berlitz School.
Dear and he went on to scripple gentlemine born, milady bread, he would pen for her, he would pine for her, how he would patpun fun for all with his frolicky frowner so and his glumsome grinner otherso. And how are you, waggy? My animal his sorrafool! And trieste, ah trieste ate I my liver! Se non é vero son trovatore. O jerry! He was soso, harriot all! He was sadfellow, steifel! He was mistermysterion. Like a purate out of pensionee with a gouvernament job.
Whereupon I could stop my lecture, for everything is plurasaid [pluridit] in one go, how a city is like another one how a language always speaks more than another language, that Babel is not bababbeaten [babattue], and that there is always more than one animal wagging at the end of a tail, and how, as a dog I eat and gnaw at myself, my own bone, as both a vulture and Prometheus I tear my own liver to pieces.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Volleys of HumanityEssays 1972–2009, pp. 247 - 263Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011