In the beginning was the word

pp. 25-52

in: Alex Callinicos, Is there a future for Marxism?, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1982

Abstract

These words were written by Eugene Jolas in 1929 in an article entitled "The revolution of language and James Joyce". They are applicable to one of the most striking phenomena of western intellectual culture in this century — the manner in which language has somehow folded back onto itself, its nature defined, not by the relation between words and things, discourse and a reality that exists independently of and prior to it, but by its own inner structure. Language, in much of western philosophy and literature, has broken loose from reality and become an autonomous, self-referential process extending to infinity in all directions.