Arcadia

Bauserman 11 Owen is contemplating what it means to supposedly have a signified in a system of language. In history, the signified was supposedly present, but it has, inevitably, fallen, eroded, been corrupted to the point that any type of signified invoked by the naming of an intersection because of the landscape’s contours cannot be distinguished. Even if the well had not dried up and disappeared into the earth, its relation to the crossroads was poor at best.

So, even though the British soldier chooses to keep name intact, the traces of the old name cannot be avoided. The traces of the old name remain present, infiltrating the new British name, which does quite a lot to undercut the power supposedly available in the British renaming process. The two voices, British and Irish, force Yolland into a dialogic zone where the name by which he chooses to orient himself is literally from the mouths of the Irish people. Because it is from the mouths of the locals, the accents the people used when expressing their belief of what the word means is the means by which Yolland’s new expression of their word, in hopes of creating his own unitary language, must be dialogic in nature. Polyglossia is probably a more apt description, though, since Owen, the current local characters, and the Irish people of 150 years ago all have now entered a zone of contact in which Yolland cannot find any way of consolidating his usage into any sense of a neutral, unitary language. The continuous line of borrowing the phrase can only move into one new moment which is also one more step away from any centered meaning the word might have once had.

As a result, the name Tobair Vree continuously drifts further from the tangential relationship it once had with its signified namesake. As a result of the entropy of the system, the meaning became multiplied beyond its original capacities. The name of the intersection originally held only one meaning, but the energy available in such a locked meaning was too much for the name to bear, and the release of this energy brought on an expansion of the