Fischart ... Sancho ... Beckett ... Joyce; or, an essay in praise of babble

This chapter traces a tradition of incoherent and excessive speech, a form of the digressive we call "babble." Connected (by way of spurious etymology) to the biblical Tower of Babel and to the nonsense of pre-linguistic children's articulations, babble emerges as a (non)form of pure utterance that disrupts rule-determined forms of discourse such as narrative and philosophical argumentation. Starting with Johann Fischart's translation of Rabelais, this chapter examines the role of babbling in Cervantes, Beckett, and Joyce. The babblers in these writers' works do more than simply bombard us with nonsense; they perform a linguistic excess that affirms the ludic and creative power and potential of primal human articulation. In this way, digressive babble evokes Julia Kristeva's semiotic, pre-Oedipal language, while also suggesting the demonic, what Joyce calls "Bellsybabble." Like other forms of digression, babble is a force of multiplicity that resists being subsumed into received forms. As a "flowing" language of foolish abandon it disintegrates form, but thereby allows for the recognition of form (in its disintegration). As such it is a privileged site of the literary, visible in, though not necessarily identical with, the ruptures and inconsistencies of expression.