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Besides the values of law and home, ... economy implies the idea of exchange, of circulation, of return. ... [T]he law of economy is the --circular--return to the point of departure, to the origin, also to the home. So one would have to follow the odyssean structure of the economic narrative. Oikonomia would always follow the path of Ulysses. The latter returns to the side of his loved ones or to himself; he goes away only in view of repatriating himself ... Now the gift, if there is any, would no doubt be related to economy. One cannot treat the gift ... without treating this relation to economy.... But is not the gift, if there is any, also that which interrupts economy? ... If there is gift, the given of the gift (that which one gives, that which is given, the gift as given thing or as act of donation) must not come back to the giving... It must not circulate, it must not be exchanged, it must not in any case be exhausted, as a gift, by the process of exchange, by the movement of circulation of the circle in the form of return to the point of departure. If the figure of the circle is essential to economics, the gift must remain aneconomic. (Derrida, Given Time 6-7) |
| Euryclea recognises the scar on the thigh of the stranger in front of her. A gratuitous event from one series closes the circle in another distant and unrelated series, like the stringing of the arc of the bow which will kill the suitors. Even the accidental conspires in this homecoming. |
The
imprevidibility of the future: once in the summer of 1898 he (Bloom)
had marked a florin (2/-) with three notches on the milled edge
and tendered it in payment of an account due to and received by
J. and T. Davy, family grocers, 1 Charlemont Mall, Grand Canal,
for circulation on the waters of civic finance, for possible, circuitous,
or direct return. (Uysses 17.979-88) In "Ithaca", that chapter of Joyce's Ulysses most concerned with homecoming, everything opens out into arcs rather than closes on itself into circles. Conversations are skew, addressing the other only obliquely. The chapter's symbol is the Comet, whose hyperbolic arc does not return. |
The gift is an effraction, but it is also what starts off the entire circular economy. One thinks, as Derrida points out, only on the basis of the impossible (10). Perhaps this is what is happening with Ulysses's invocation of the Odyssey: not parable or parallel, or the "symbolic synthesis of the theme 'Everyman'" that Auerbach suggests (544), but effracted circle
