Introduction: Exploring Freedom through Language

Abstract

Jorge Luis Borges’s parable “Of Exactitude in Science” tells of an empire in which “the craft of cartography had attained such perfection” that maps increased in size until one finally covered the entire area it described (Universal 141). Joyce’s fiction unfolded a map of the operation of language that expanded so far that it went beyond the world it por-trayed or drew forth, adding perspectives to that world. Joyce here anticipated Jacques Lacan’s idea that the perceivable world, the only one we can ever know, is made of language (Écrits 344), an idea that Joyce may have influenced.¹ The Joycean world of language is one in which we can live and grow because of the teeming of its truths. To expand beyond what is known is to explore, and the idea of exploration is linked at the root to the idea of giving language to the unknown, for the Latin explorare literally means “to cry out” (plorare is “to cry or lament”). Language initiates itself as a cry of discovery.