notes that the text of “bliss” can lie awfully close to boredom. Writing
of Finnegans Wake, that ur-text of the modern avant-garde, Jeremy
Campbell notes that in trying to create more possible messages than
Jane Austen, Joyce created a great deal more confusion and uncertainty
instead:
The howsayto itishwatis hemust whom must worden schall. A darktongues,
kunning. O theoperil! Ethinop lore, the poor lie. He askit of the hoothed
fireshield but it was untergone into the matthued heaven.It’s hard to extract a meaningful message from a passage like the one
above because the reader is unsure what’s coming next. The lack of a
clear context makes it hard even to decipher individual words.
Randomness and noise have increased at the cost of intelligibility.
Consequently, reading is extremely difficult.
This “difficulty” is, of course, one of the hallmarks of modern liter-
ature, as Eliot noted in his seminal essay, “The Metaphysical Poets.”
Although it comes in many types, one major type of Modernist diffi-
culty results from breaking the rules and conventions that make mean-
ing possible. If grammar is an “anti-chance device” applied at the source
of a code, then when Modernist writers such as Gertrude Stein break
grammatical rules, the “noise” in their texts will increase at the expense
of meaning, as these lines from “Susie Asado” demonstrate:
A lean on the shoe this means slips slips hers.
When the ancient light grey is clean it is yellow, it is a silver seller.
This is a please this is a please there are the saids to jelly. These are
the wets these say the sets to leave a crown to Incy.
Incy is short for incubus.
A pot. A pot is a beginning of a rare bit of trees. Trees tremble. the
old vatsare in bobbles, bobbles which shade and shove and render
clean, render clean must.The poem’s appeal lies in its nursery rhyme rhythms and playful silli-
ness, so it should rightly be classified as nonsense verse. Its status as a
seminal text of avant-garde literature rests on the now-familiar gambit of
focusing reader attention on the “constructedness” of the poem’s lan-
guage. By sometimes ignoring their semantic meanings and choosing
words merely for their sounds and then placing them in ungrammatical
relations, the passage subverts reader attempts to find an emergent
The Enchanted Loom: A New Paradigm for Literature 161