LOUIS ARMAND SOME NOTES ON JOYCEAN HYPERTEXT: MACHINE-TRA(NS)VERSAL-ACROSTIC Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfast and great primer must once for omniboss step rubrickredd out of the wordpress else is there no virtue more in alcohoran. For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies. Fillstup. So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined ... [FW 20.07-16] 1. TEXTUAL MACHINES Anticipating the increased significance of hypertext in James Joyce scholarship, Jacques Derrida, in his essay on Finnegans Wake, invokes the term "Joyceware," suggesting that we might approach Joyce's writing as "a hypermnesiac machine," "capable of integrating all the variables, all the quantitative and qualitative factors," "because you can say nothing that is not programmed on this 1000th generation computer-Ulysses or Finnegans Wake."<1> Yet the question remains of what takes place between Joyce's text and Derrida's invocation, and again between "Ulysses or Finnegans Wake" and the metaphor of a "1000th generation computer." The question, in other words, of what it is that here solicits programming-and what it is which thus comprehends ahead of time the "nothing" which still allows itself to be said, to be repeated, to be chanced upon as the possibility of a communication, a kind of telepathy which is also a warning or a interdiction: "you can say nothing that is not programmed on this 1000th generation computer." Apart from Jacques Derrida, the idea of Joyce's text as a kind of machine has also been treated by Jean-Michel Rabaté.<2> In his essay entitled 'Lapsus ex machina,' Rabaté examines Finnegans Wake as a "system which can be described as a word machine, or a complex machination of meanings," a "perverse semic machine" which "has the ability to distort the classical semiological relation between 'production' and 'information,' by disarticulating the sequence of encoding and decoding."<3> Importantly, this perversion does not arise through a process of distortion or occultation of meaning, but rather arrises precisely at moments of "recurrence" in which similitude, rather than securing the closure of signifying play through a moment of identification, in fact constitutes a "moment of convergence" (what Blanchot calls "l'immédiat qui n'est jamais communiqué"<4>)-a moment of irreducibility or "lapsus" in the totalising movement of the book (here in terms of the Wake's paronomastic function). By disarticulating the received phonic-graphic binary ("[w]hat can't be coded can be decorded, if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for" [FW 482.34]), Joyce's paronomasian writing destabilises classical notions of meaning and comprehension, forcing the reader to attempt to (re-)assemble the semantic horizons of the text with whatever is near at hand. Among other things, this dis-articulation reveals that what remains necessary for meaning to arise is not a predetermined system of codes, but rather a network of internal textual (graphic and phonic) differences which participate in an other kind of code breaking. We could say that this process of "breaking" codes gives rise to an-other text, a text comprised of ruined sign structures and quasi-fragmentations (a decentred text which is also de-cord-ed). And when Rabaté relates the mechanical labour of the text to the Lévi-Straussian concept of bricolage, he is able to do so precisely because this labour would no longer distinguish writing from translation/mediation. The dis-articulation of sequences of encoding and decoding would thus inaugurate a type of archive, a text whose memory is suspended in the timelessness of its own present, in the absence of any code prior to those from which it is assembled & to which it is ultimately indifferent. As Geoffrey Bennington suggests: Such a machine would suspend reading in an open system, neither finite nor infinite, labyrinth-abyss ... and would thus also retain the memory of the traversals tried out ... by all its readers, these being so many texts to plug back into the general network ... But this machine is already in place, it is the "already" itself. We are inscribed in it in advance, promise of the hazardous memory in the monstrous to-come.<5> In Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari begin to identify such an apparatus in terms of a "transverse." They write: ... the whole itself is a product, produced as nothing more than a part alongside other parts, which it neither unifies nor totalises, though it has an effect on these other parts simply because it establishes aberrant paths of communication between noncommunicating vessels, transverse unities between elements within their own particular boundaries.<6> The concept of "transverse unities" is further elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari with reference to Proust's In Search of Lost Time which deals, in a way similar to Einsteinean relativity, with the point-of-view of a passenger inside a train compartment as it moves through the countryside: ... there is never a totality of what is seen nor a unity of the points of view, except along the traversal that the frantic passenger traces from one window to the other, "in order to draw together, in order to reweave intermittent and opposite fragments."<7> This transversal, by locating the passenger-reader within the encoding and decoding process-while at the same time disarticulating this process & reducing it to a set of shifting co-ordinates within a (collapsed) perspectival field which is no longer unified by a single point of view-brings about a rupture in the classical analytic scene and the objectivist methodology that belongs to it, thus opening analysis to the necessary possibility of the radically contingent in the orientation and structure of its gaze. A similar notion of transversal can be detected in Joyce's Ulysses in what is generally termed "stream of consciousness" (or "associative logic"), characterised by Derek Attridge as "the multiple coincidences of language, both within language and across languages."<8> These coincidences, remarked upon by Leopold Bloom early in the 'Lestrygonians' episode, signal a breakdown in the distinctions that we might otherwise wish to draw between intentionality and chance. Reflecting on this breakdown, Attridge suggests: ... if Joyce intentionally builds a machine of such complexity that unforseen connections are bound to arise when it comes into contact with a reader possessing equally complex systems of memory and information, we can't call them 'unintentional' in any straightforward sense of the word. And this means we can't say that the openness to chance and to the reader ... is only an accidental effect.<9> Moreover, as Derrida points out, such distinctions as "unintentional," "chance," or "accidental effect," would themselves depend, "as they say, on the context; but a context is never determined enough to prohibit all random deviation."<10> As with the notion of "transverse unities," the inter-/intra-textuality of reading would describe a place of "communication" within which apparently determined significations (defined by the encoding-decoding process) would necessarily have the chance of going astray, and metaphysical distinctions would risk breaking down. "Communication," as Bennington urges, "takes place, if at all, in a fundamental and irreducible uncertainty as to the very fact and possibility of communication."<11> If we take Attridge's remarks about the Joycean machine and the way it appears to be driven by a breakdown in the distinction between intentionality and chance, and set them beside Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "desiring machines," we may gain certain insights into Joyce's use of the term "re-embodying."<12> According to Deleuze and Guattari, "desiring machines" function through a process of Joycean "interregnation" (FW 224.14), "flows and interruptions" or "breakthroughs and breakdowns," somewhat akin to the apparent discontinuities Attridge identifies between the concepts of non-straightforward unintentionality and chance. For Deleuze and Guattari the desiring-production of "desiring machines" coalesces about what Artaud had called "the body without organs," a body which "is produced as a whole, but in its own particular place within the process of production, alongside the parts that it neither unifies nor totalises."<13> Further, when the body without organs "turns back upon" these other parts, "it brings about transverse communications, transfinite summarisations, polyvocal and transcursive inscriptions on its own surface, on which the functional breaks of partial objects are continually intersected by breaks in the signifying chains, and by breaks effected by a subject that uses them as reference points in order to locate itself,"<14> recalling the process in Finnegans Wake by which Shem the Penman writes over the entire surface of his body with his own excrement.<15> This sense of "transverse communications," between the body without organs and its signifiers, suggests a kind of Wakean "grand continuum, overlorded by fate and interlarded with accidence" (FW 472.30-31)-what we might regard also as a form of telepathy wherein the concepts of re-embodiment, metempsychosis, chance and intentionality intersect, so that it seems as if "[c]oming events cast their shadows before" (U 165.31): Signifying ... that, primeval conditions hav[e] gradually receded but nevertheless ... [have] persisted through intermittences of ... providential divining, making possible and even inevitable, after his a time ... morphological circumformation. [FW 599.09-17] Such a mechanism of "circumformation," described by a system of traces "persisting through intermittences," recalls what Derrida, in 'Two Words for Joyce,' terms "a hypermnesiac machine."<16> Following Joyce's writing practice in Finnegans Wake, Derrida is interested in how the idea (eidos) put to work hypermnemically, as an alternative to the intuition or direct experience of phenomenology, is not the signified concept (according to the destiny of the sign) but the elision of meaning brought about in language by the constant re-alignment of récits, tropes, themes, genres, but also individual words, letters or phonemes. In Dissemination, Derrida suggests that this elision would give rise to a type of hypertextual apparatus which would operate "in two absolutely different places at once, even if these were only separated by a veil"<17>: Paradoxical logic of this relationship between two texts, two programmes or two literary "softwares": whatever the difference between them, even if ... it is immense and incommensurable, the '"second" text, the one which, fatally, refers to the other, quotes it, exploits it, parasites it and deciphers it, is no doubt the minute parcel detached from the other, the metonymic dwarf, the jester of the great anterior text ... and yet it is also another set, quite other, bigger, and more powerful than the all-powerful which it drags off and reinscribes elsewhere in order to defy its ascendancy. Each writing is at once the detached fragment of a software more powerful than the other, a part larger than the whole of which it is a part.<18> Like the metaphor of Shem-the-Penman's excremental writing, Derrida's software metaphor provides us with a means of thinking this intra- and extra-linguistic process of communication in Finnegans Wake.<19> The first is the ambivalent set between two writing/translation softwares, in which one is a "minute" and "metonymic dwarf" which is nonetheless "detached from" and able to "exploit" the other. The second is the equivalent set of relations between two softwares in which both are a "detached fragment of a software" and, simultaneously, a "software more powerful than the other" and a "part larger than the whole of which it is a part." This model of communication is similar to Jacques Lacan's notion of intra-/inter-dit, in which interior monologue is held to be contiguous with exterior discourse. According to Lacan, the "place" of the inter-dit is also the place of the intra-dit of a "between-two-subjects": "the very place in which the transparency of the classical subject is divided and passes through the effects of 'fading' that specify the Freudian subject by its occultation."<20> "It is a question," Lacan insists, "of recentring the subject as speaking in the very lacunae of that which, at first sight, it presents itself as speaking."<21> The inter-/intra-dit structure of discourse disrupts any attempt to reduce signification to the determination of an "inside" or "outside" of language-that is, by reducing it to the ideality of the sign. It is largely on similar grounds (what is later brought within the signification of différance) that Derrida critiques the Husserlean notion of the ideality of the sign, revealing that the structure of the sign itself is already "deconstructed" from within. The sign, according to Derrida, "is from its origin and to the core of its sense" marked by a paradoxical "will to derivation and effacement,"<22> so that every "significatory event is a substitute (for the signified as well as the ideal form of the signifier)."<23> What takes place for Lacan is that the so-called "outside" of discourse (its object) is always already "inside" that discourse (as subject),<24> in a manner elsewhere described by Derrida, borrowed from heraldry, as mise en abyme, wherein a "totality" "is represented on the model of one of its parts which thus becomes greater than the whole of which it forms a part, which it makes into a part."<25> In Finnegans Wake this effect of mise en abyme is obtained through a type of reflexivity which recalls the Renaissance device of the play-within-a-play. The progress from play to play-within-a-play takes on the form of an infinite regress, whereby each element of the text seems to preserve a genetic blueprint of the entire text, which it not merely allegories but in fact inscribes. In order to accommodate this seeming paradox Joyce employs the symbolic recursion of the Phoenix, whose apparently infinite powers of regeneration are bounded by the finitude of its cyclical process, and of its genealogical discontinuities. In Finnegans Wake, the symbol of the Phoenix is "transposed" onto the prominent Dublin landmark, Phoenix Park. References to this locality recur throughout the text as the site of an elusive transgression (or "fall"), allegedly perpetrated by one of the Wake's "triads," H.C.E., and about which the Wake is alternately an inquisition, a history, a legend, a fabrication, a testimony, and a malicious piece of gossip. This transgression is most often alluded to in terms of incest, although the particular nature of this incest remains uncertain, although numerous passages suggest that it is in fact the act of writing. In this way Finnegans Wake might itself be considered as being inscribed within "Phoenix Park," its textual fabric woven "from spark to phoenish" (FW 322.20) by the "onanymous letters" (FW 435.31) which circulate, Phoenix-like, around an indeterminate event, a fall, in a sense, situated in an-other "Phoenix Park," whose limits are henceforth inflated through a libidinal economy of self-engendered dissemination. Phoenix Park, as the elusive site of an "originary" incest, structures the mise en abyme of Joyce's text along a series of transversals which not only trace this process of self-engenderment, but participate in its economy. What we have called a transversal, and the way it is at work in the formation of the quasi-infrastructures of a text, is such that there need not be any outward connection between different events, myths, etymologies and so on. The transversal creates "simulacrum" links which are no less "real" than those particular chance events it happens to bring into communication. Moreover, the "narrative thread" brought about by the transversal is such that it is no longer possible to isolate the supposed events that "gave rise" to it ("Or whatever it was that they thread to make out he thried to two in the Fiendish park" [FW 196.09-11]). We would, in fact, no longer be able to speak of events preceding the transversal, since our experience of these events can in no way be closed off from the inventions of the transversal in the first place. Thus we can say that the transversal marks, in a sense, the contingent relatedness of structural events, keeping in mind that every "event" is already "its own" simulacrum. As Margot Norris has pointed out with regard to the Phoenix Park incident in Finnegans Wake: At no point does the account of the Phoenix Park incident qualify as the real or factual event, the "true" account of what happened that day. Instead we merely receive different versions with unmistakable similarities ... The lack of an authentic source, of a "true" version, suggests that ... the original trauma, was itself experienced as a fiction or myth at the moment of its occurrence.<26> What we are confronted with is a textual effect wherein the desire for truth is itself anticipated, assimilated, and set to work as a structural device. We are placed in the situation where it is no longer possible, with any level of certainty, even to assert that "[a]t no point does the account of the Phoenix Park incident qualify as the real or factual event," simply because it is only through an experience of dissimulation that we configure an horizon of "truth." The significance of Norris' point here should not be overlooked. On the one hand, she suggests, the "original trauma" of the Phoenix Park incident can be considered as already belonging to myth, even, or rather precisely, at the moment of its occurrence. In other words, the so-called event of the Phoenix Park incident would necessarily be a mythical event. On the other hand she indicates that at no point does the account of the Phoenix Park incident qualify as "real" or "factual." That is to say, the account would also, in a sense, constitute a mythical event in and of itself. What is important here is the way "account" and "event" have come to overlap. Each account, while referring to, or repeating, a prior event ("the Phoenix Park incident") would also inaugurate that event ("the Phoenix Park incident") since what would be repeated would not be anything, as such, other than the process of (originary) mythification itself. Hence the "incident(s)" of Phoenix Park can be said to take place between the assumption of a "'true' account" and the "unmistakable similarities" of the Wake's "gossipaceous" (FW 194.04) narrative fragments (in the same way as the "moments of convergence" described by Rabaté, wherein similitude is seen to repeat an "originary" lapsus). It marks, from its origin, a genetic site of mythification-oscillating, Phoenix-like, between similitude on the one hand and dis-simulation on the other-a lacunary site of a recurrent fall whose monumentality thus resembles the self-engenderment of textual production or of the textual apparatus. Referring to Derrida's text Glas (what, in itself, has been described as "a sort of wake"<27>), Gregory Ulmer coins the neologism "phonex" to indicate a kind of "generative grid" motivated by the recurrence of chance in the alignment and re-alignment of sublexical graphic and phonic units in the process of meaning formation-a process whereby these units can be said to effect, as well as affect, the entire schematic arrangement of the text within which they are otherwise contained.<28> This "generative grid," which opens up a virtual text, or hypertext, exceeding linear teleological forms, would deploy "the image of the Phoenix and the idea of metempsychosis"<29> as metaphors of a "pyromaniac dissemination." For Derrida, the "re-embodiment[s]" of the Phoenix are related, not to a dialectical unveiling of historical narrative, but rather to something more like a transverse; something which cuts across dialectics in the form, perhaps, of a (Nietzschean) eternal return. In other words, "phonex" could indicate (beginning with its own internal resonances of "Phoenix" and "phoneme," and its deployment as a kind of linguistic-semantic "matrix")<30> an elision or lapsus in the narrative of intentionality which would open language to the recurrence of the chance event. Derrida terms this "the debility or failure that organises the telos or the eschaton"<31>-what Hegel in Reason in History calls "[t]he relief of inadequation" and which Derrida links to the phenomenon, symbolised by the image of the Phoenix, of destiny's "suicide."<32> As Joyce writes: "That's the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso counterpoint words" (FW 482.33-34). According to Derrida, the recurrence of the chance event is characterised as ostensibly mechanical repetition and "marks the necessity of a contamination of any essence by a generalised 'technology.'"<33> This contamination derives from a kind of technology which occupies the position of "prehistory," thus inscribing itself ahead of a teleological system or historical narrative in which the Phoenix myth functions as allegory, and insofar as it appears to describe a dialectical movement, it does so within this system, without annulling the "technological" impetus that could be said to have given rise to it. Posing the question of the "fundamental" nature of such a technological impetus (as a model of all allegorical unveiling of narrative), Derrida writes: "the current technology of our computers and our micro-computerified archives and our translating machines remains a bricolage of a prehistoric child's toys."<34> Elsewhere he is more specific: The game, of which the repetition of repetition consists, is a selbstgeschaffene game, that the child has produced or has permitted to be produced by itself, spontaneously, and it is the first of its type. But none of all this (spontaneity, autoproduction, the originality of the first time) contributes any descriptive content that does not amount to the self-engendering of the repetition of itself. Hetero-tautology (definition of the Hegelian speculative) of repeated repetition, of self-repetition.<35> We can identify this selbstgeschaffene game more precisely as the fort/da game of Freud's grandson. Watching his grandson playing in his pram one day, Freud observed him throwing a toy out of the pram and exclaiming fort! (away), then hauling it back in by means of a leash to the cry of da! (here).<36> The mechanical repetition of the game, however, opens up another space which is not contained within the narrative sequence-the space of repetition itself. This space, however overly determined, allows for possible contingencies to arise (for instance, the chance of the object not being returned).<37> Without this possibility the game itself could have no force, although it is important to keep in mind that such an "outcome," which would mark the game's termination, necessarily stands outside the "system" described (in the form of a detour) by the fort/da game. In a sense, this possibility marks the dissymmetry between the closed system (of a dialectics, of identification, desire, etc.) and what Lacan termed "the field of the Other" (within which the system is inscribed but which cannot be totalised or brought within that system, let alone be comprehended by it). Hence the "possibility" of a terminus functions as the locus of the fort/da ritual as well as of the Phoenix myth, precisely as the terminus of possibility itself. Moreover, we could say that this repetition (of the space of repetition itself) and this possibility both give rise to a kind of telepathy whereby the child is put into "communication" with the Other (or rather, we might say, by which the child is "communicated" as subject of its signifying attachment to an imaginary other). Like the symbol of the telephone in Ulysses, which Derrida engages in his essay 'Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,' the fort/da game reveals the importance of the leash (the handset, telephone cord, Stephen Dedalus' ashplant in 'Circe' ("Nothung" [U 583]), the tapping cane of the blind man ('Lestrygonians,' 'Sirens') or the staff of Oedipus, Ariadne's thread) as what binds the subject to the destining "call" (of the Other).<38> For Derrida, this "call" is also connected to Heidegger's concepts of Verfallen and "thrown-ness." The chance "throw" (of Dasein, of the child's toy)<39> doubles "the endless plunge" which "throws you back onto the river-bank, on the brink of another possible immersion, ad infinitum."<40> Hence we might find in Finnegans Wake, also, a repetition of this child's game of repetition-the "endless plunge" into the "riverrun" of the Wake corresponding to a primordial "call" which calls repetition over to the place of the Other and of other texts. This calling-over might also be considered as a process of metamorphosis, it marks that which, of the Other, allows it to be called-back by the child as something belonging to it, what of (it)self allows it to give (it)self as different signifiers and as differences between (and within) signifiers-including the different aspects of the child's toy "revealed" at every moment in the fort/da ritual. Moreover, this (re-)embodiment of the Other as repetition of repetition provides the ritual basis of the Phoenix myth and the symbolic force of the Wakean "phonex." Beginning with the elision of desire upon which this proto-technological game is founded, the ritual of the machine marks an accumulation or gathering of chance which is then "disguised" in the form(s) of intentionality-so that the child imagines that it has attained the desired mastery of its absent (m)other (or so that Spirit, as an aspect of the Phoenix, is misrecognised as attaining to self through a process of dialectics). We could begin to view this disguise-the quasi-transcendental-as a kind of anamorphosis whereby the apparent inferrability of (mnemic) traces runs up against the always-prior of originary repetition and dis-simulation. 2. TRA(NS)VERSALS In The Major Ordeals of the Mind, Henri Michaux describes "a schizophrenic table in terms of a process of production which is that of desire."<41> This process (what Lévi-Strauss will have called "bricolage") produces certain results which remain unassimilable within classical systems of meaning or use. The element of the unassimilable here marks the point at which the "infernal machinery" (FW 320.33) of this schizophrenic apparatus achieves an "unintended" complexity which could not be "explained" unless by something equally complex and unassimilable<42>-the mark, in other words, of what we have begun to describe in terms of a transversal: Once noticed, it continued to occupy one's mind. It even persisted, as it were, in going about its own business ... The striking thing was that it was neither simple nor really complex, initially or intentionally complex, or constructed according to a complicated plan. Instead, it had been desimplified in the course of its carpentering ... As it stood, it was a table of additions, much like certain schizophrenics' drawings, described as "overstuffed," and if finished it was only in so far as there was no way of adding anything more to it, the table having become more and more an accumulation, less and less a table ... Its top surface, the useful part of the table, having been gradually reduced, was disappearing.<43> As with Michaux's schizophrenic table, a transversal is also an apparatus which, having marked a division, divides (it)self, gradually effacing (it)self in a way that forces it to be continually approached and interrogated from different perspectives. This heavily mediated text would describe a kind of anamorphosis without derivation.<44> In a sense, the transverse-apparatus accumulates these discontinuities-genetic mutations-so that the desire to put a handle on it, to situate it in regards to a plane of reference, is continually thwarted. Like the schizophrenic table, the transversal will have "lent itself to no function, self-protective, denying itself to service and communication alike."<45> Non-communicating while making communication possible, it cancels-conceals itself in its apparent purposelessness, its "superexuberabundency" (FW 612.05), so that we can never be sure whether this schizophrenic apparatus is a table that has been debased, or simply a freak of chaotic assemblage that has taken on the appearance of something which may once have been a table, or may yet become one. Either way, any hope of derivation or archaeology is spoiled by this indeterminacy.<46> In a similar way, the Wake's author-plagiarist figure, Shem the Penman, is rendered in terms of a "desimplified" assemblage of falsifications, unstable surfaces, disguises, second-hand or reversible clothing, disfunctional appliances, and elements of what Bataille terms "l'informe" (ejaculate, ink, spit) which link "archaeology" to a kind of scatology<47>: ... borrowed brogues, reversibles jackets, blackeye lenses ... falsehair shirts, Godforsaken scapulars ... cutthroat ties, counterfeit franks, best intentions, curried notes ... once current puns, quashed quotations, messes of mottage, unquestionable issue papers, seedy ejaculations ... crocodile tears, spilt ink, blasphematory spits ... [FW 183.17-24] As a kind of bricoleur figure, Shem the Penman is ultimately parasitical. Moreover, his own substance is equally as "inauthentic" as the texts he produces (and from which he becomes indistinguishable), suggesting not merely an unlocatable "centre," but rather a radical "dishemination"<48> such that the text cannot be traced back to anything other than its own accumulation and layering of dissimulative affects. This "shemblable" (FW 489.28)<49> can be considered as describing a type of transversal, the "form" of which parodies the assumptions of a structural thematics through the construction of ruses, forgeries and plays which motivates what Derrida has called an "archival desire,"<50> directing us towards a sham "archaeology" (a disruption of "identity" and arché through the confusing of signifiers for "sham" and the proper name "Shem"). In this instance, confusion might be said to "originate" in the relationship between Shem's name and its Hebrew meaning ("name"), while the further relation of this name to the confusion issuing out of the destruction of the Tower of Babel marks a particular "transverse" in the structure of the Wake's language generally. This sense of "sham" (FW 170.25), however, would not refer to the contamination of some prior pristine condition, but rather to an "essential" condition of the Real itself, in that what language "names" does not constitute a transcendental signified, but rather its own clothing, so to speak, its own folds and enfolding ("when is a man not a man? ... when he is ... Sham" [FW 170.05-24]). This grouping of signifiers around the proper name, "Shem," provides one example of the way a transversal marks out a network of discontinuities-metaphor and metonymy-as it relates, not to a particular context, but to what opens a context at its frontiers to an alterior discourse. Yet, in so far as we can assign to this grouping (tribe?) the name "Shem," we need to keep in mind that this signifier itself is part of another grouping, to which would belong all the so-called proper names in Finnegans Wake and their various manifestations as common nouns, parts of other words and in further disparate lexical forms. Moreover, we need to keep in mind the way Finnegans Wake spoils any attempt to privilege the grouping of proper names in regards to other signifiers, as a species apart. Indeed, any effort to establish a distinction between signifiers in the Wake on the basis of such a genetics is constantly disrupted by what we might call a hetero-genetics, whereby signification is structured discursively and not according to axes of external filiation (in a similar way to what, in Mandelbrot's fractal theories, are called polynômes), and so giving rise to "fables, communic suctions and vellicar frictions" (FW 385.11-12) whose conception can be said to be hypertextual. The antonomasian function of the proper name Shem thus suggests one way in which a signifier is open to an alterior communication within. We might also say that a transversal, or "transverse unity," manifests itself as a particular kind of punctuation or puncturing. It weaves the fabric of a hypertext which resembles an accumulation of punctures (divisions, splits, ruptures, discontinuities), suggestive of the "numerous stabs and foliated gashes" or "paper wounds" (FW 124.02) which comprise Finnegans Wake. This punctuated fabric in a sense produces itself and its variant "texts" within, and as, a grouping of what Marc Augé calls "non-places"<51> and what Hélene Cixous refers to as "a metonymic chain where the other place always has its other place"<52>-it marks a liminal zone between what has previously been thought as the "inside" and "outside" of language. According to Derrida, this zone would be designated by the "is," placed under erasure, in the (in)equation <53>: the inside >is< the outside. In the case of hypertextual "linkage," such a non-place would describe a kind of mechanical copula between aspects of the same signifier (a type of internal catachresis). And this non-place of the copula, the "allness eversides" (FW 568.26) of the "is" placed under erasure (between the "inside" and the "outside"), allows a transversal to take place without, as it were, taking place-resembling what recent Chaos theories have described as a "virtual."<54> We might further envisage hypertextual transversality in terms of what the Hungarian aesthetic theorist and painter Victor Vasarely called Surface Kinetics, wherein two-dimensional surfaces are set into an apparently three-dimensional pulsation. This pulsation is brought about textually by a type of sham transparency, a kind of palimpsestic illusion-the way in which a textual surface appears to be punctuated by the competing presence of differing, and apparently discrete, textual "events" which are simultaneously confluent.<55> Envisaging something similar, Georges Bataille has suggested that we should consider language as structured like a labyrinth, not simply as being involved in its own "dazecrazemazed" (FW 389.27) convolution of signifiers, but in a more profound way. For Bataille what is essential is that language distributes or disseminates its signifying force by means, precisely, of copulas: ... each phrase connects one thing to another by means of copulas; and it would be all visibly connected if one could discover in a single glance the line, in all its entirety, left by Ariadne's thread, leading thought through its own labyrinth.<56> Which of course would not be possible, as such, and that is the point-the transversal marked out by means of the copula cannot be reduced to a narrative thread, to a determination of presence, or of the visible as something revealed. As Paul Davies, in The Cosmic Blueprint, suggests, topological space is structured by means of prepositions, which act as fundamental connectors. Or as Joyce writes: "if we look at it verbally there is no true noun in active nature where every bally being ... is becoming in its owntown eyeballs" (FW 523.10-12). The copulative function of the verb to be is caught up in a system which retrospectively imposes a semantic value upon it, so that the verbal form which will have opened the possibility of meaning at its "origin," and which could have been described as non-substantive, becomes substantive in turn, and "Being" becomes the horizon of meaning (a "verbivocovisual presentment" [FW 341.18]). As Derrida has pointed out: Although it has always been disturbed and tormented from within ... the fusion of the grammatical and lexical functions of to be has, no doubt, an essential relationship with the history of metaphysics and with all of its co-ordinates in the west.<57> Hence it is never simply the case that a transversal marks the active transgression of meaning, since meaning could only arise on the basis of what is already "essential" to a transversal. As Geoffrey Bennington has noted, referring to Derrida's treatment of the Joycean "hypertext" machine: "this machine is already in place, it is the 'already' itself."<58> Therefore, to suggest that the hypertextual transverse is nothing more than a relativistic network of copulas would be misleading, since a transversal could not be what it is without the prior occurrence, and recurrence, of a "split" at the beginning of Being; between the non-substantive and substantive aspect of the copula of the verb to be. This split at the beginning of Being thus opens the possibility of a tra(ns)versed text which would comprise an apparatus of mechanical repetition or re-partition of its own significatory horizon, and whose structure would no longer defer to a unifying principle beyond the copulative function itself. According to Derrida: All oppositions based on the distinction between original and derived, the simple and the repeated, the first and the second, etc., lose their pertinence from the moment everything "begins" by following a vestige. I.e. a certain repetition or text.<59> Everything begins with the trace, and the trace itself only ever refers to traces, to traces of the other: "[s]ince the trace can only imprint itself by referring to the other, to another trace ("the trace of its reflection") ... its force of production stands in necessary relation to the energy of its erasure."<60> If we think of all texts as arising in terms of a trace, rather than as existing in some isolated relation to a prior meaning, then we can also begin to comprehend the way in which any concept of priority, or of a beginning, is already itself a product of transversality: ... some incision, some violent arbitrary cut ... it is of course a beginning that is forever fictional, and the scission, far from being an inaugural act, is dictated by the absence ... of any de-cisive beginning, any pure event that would not divide and repeat itself and already refer back to some other "beginning."<61> In Finnegans Wake this sense of beginning with an incision is one of the possible significations evoked by the following passage: There's a split in their infinitive from to have to have been to will be. As they warred in their big innings ease now we never shall know. [FW 271.21-24] The words "big" and "innings" might be seen literally as referring to the score in a game of cricket-that is, to a kind of cumulative statistical narrative or history. Yet "big innings" might also be seen as signifying something quite different. The word "split," for instance, might also refer to the caesura which seems to have been introduced into a word which is not present in Joyce's text (i.e. beginnings) in order to render two different words that are (i.e. "big" and "innings"). Similarly, this "split" might refer to an irreducible remainder if we were to attempt to reduce the words "big" and "innings" to a signification of beginnings. Or, allegorically, if we were to attempt to reduce an otherwise arbitrary numerical system of keeping score (chronology for example) to some transcendental or universal meaning (whatever that might be). Such a meaning is posed as precisely what "we never shall know," because we will only ever encounter there a "split" substituting itself to infinity.<62> In this way the beginning itself is never a beginning as such, since it always already constitutes a division ("as they warred [both were and war] in their big innings"<63>). Or we might say, according to the "genealogical" distinction made by Jean-Michel Rabaté, the Wake "begets only beginnings but invalidates all origins."<64> The beginning without origin is always a beginning-already and a beginning-not-yet; a non-place which is also a containment and an uncontained flow. This is perhaps nowhere more in evidence than in the opening line of Finnegans Wake: riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. At the very "beginning" of Joyce's text there appears a "split" which, despite all efforts, cannot be recuperated within a system, whether dialectical or grammatical, according to which it might be substituted for by a signifier of sense. That is to say, also, that the apparent absence of a straightforward meaning in the text's opening passage cannot simply be supplied by joining the first and last lines of Finnegans Wake together, as has often been alleged by those who espouse the notion that the Wake is a cyclical text (in the very limited sense of that term). The elision of the ultimate line of Finnegans Wake, precisely at that point towards which the definite article will have directed its signifying force, suggests that it is not simply a matter of regarding Joyce's text as a "book of Doublends Jined" (FW 20.16): A way a lone a last a loved a long the [|the outside of the book|] riverrun ... [FW 628.15-16, 3.01] since the articulating joint itself also exceeds the text, mocking, in a sense, the desire for a gesture of affirming definite articulation, and causing the desire for closure to spend itself in the process (what we might call the interruption and excess of "riverrun").<65> This split or dis-articulation would mark what, according to Derrida, "can never be mediated, mastered, sublated, or dialectised through any Erinnerung or Aufhebung."<66> The Wake, with the possible signification of its "first term" ("riverrun"), as Erinnerung (remembrance as internalisation), and its apparent haunting by the "ultimate term" ("the"), enacts at its "beginning" what is illustrated graphically in "big innings" as the (non-) place or partition of/at the origin. In his essay 'riverrun' Jacques Aubert offers an analysis of the opening lines of Finnegans Wake that suggests how some theories of textual genetics might shed light on questions of genealogy in Joyce's text, commencing with its "readability": If "riverrun" remains unreadable, it is because it remains undifferentiated. Reading is obstructed by a lack of difference ... [that] would consist of: either a + (the article, or the subject, or the mark which would transform "r" into "R"), or a - (a silence), or indeed a + ("R") followed by a - (the separation of "river" and "run") followed by a + (a comma).<67> By analysing Joyce's text in this way, Aubert identifies one means by which resistance to the text's heterogeneity might manifest itself as a movement to restore the opening "riverrun" to a more traditional grammatical form; by capitalising it and rendering it as a noun or a verb (i.e. "The," or "A," "river run," or simply "River run"): that is, in order to "restore" a certain level of "readability." For Derrida, however, "unreadability" defines a necessary pre-condition for reading to commence, if "reading means making accessible a meaning that can be transmitted as such, in its own unequivocal, translatable identity."<68> Such a "reading" is a mirage (as Aubert later explains), but this mirage describes the path taken by a reader in expectation of a meaning. As Derrida argues: ... unreadability does not arrest reading, does not leave it paralysed in the face of an opaque surface: rather, it starts reading and writing and translation moving again. The unreadable is not the opposite of the readable, but rather the ridge [arete] that also gives its momentum, movement, sets it in motion. Similarly Aubert suggests approaching Joyce's "unreadable" text by reading "the sentence [in which 'riverrun' occurs] quickly ... without stopping."<69> For Aubert, reading the word "riverrun" in this context gives the impression that the "motor has started to run," implying the manifestation of "something resembling a system" or at least something which invites identification with a system: ... "riverrun" figures as the subject of "brings," it functions as a noun, more specifically as a subject. This places a more familiar system before us, a grammatical one, whose rules are provisionally accepted.<70> Aubert's analysis is also directed by the ways in which the "mechanism" of articulation allows "what comes 'after' ... to define what went 'before.'" Hence the term "brings" seems to allow "riverrun" to be read as a noun. If this initial "reversibility mechanism" offers one possible (grammatical) state, a "final state" is provided by the closing words of the text. Aubert suggests that one of the tasks offered to the reader is to discover a possible connection between these two states, a link which seems to be framed by "a degree of complementarity: an article was missing, and the book ends with an article"<71>: ... this closing fragment provides us not only with a definite article and several indefinite articles, but also reveals how indefinite articulation comes about and what motivates its connection with definite articulation.<72> Aubert further suggests that "in order to be rigorous and comprehensive, our reading has had to work in both directions, moving both with and against the flow of words," with the apparent result that we bare witness to "the actualisation of the noun as it emerges from an echo, by means of the dismemberment and differential analysis of a set of adverbs and of prepositions"<73>: It is all the more remarkable to note that in the case of Joyce, the article and the shade of the noun emerge from adverbs and prepositions, and so stand as particular instances of the well attested phenomenon of second-degree formalisation ... by virtue of which "values originally assigned to a word through inflexion become values designated by a separate word." To sum up, we could say that the two-way process described above reveals the true genealogy of the noun.<74> Despite the problematic appearance of this notion of a "true genealogy of the noun," Aubert's analysis does provide important insights into the ways in which a systemic reading requires increasingly complex notions of grammar and syntax. Moreover, Aubert argues that the possible signifying functions of the noun, which becomes more important in regards to questions of meaning and identity in Finnegans Wake, can be seen as "emerging" from a "breakdown" in a grammatical system as much as a breakdown in a syntactical one. Notably, Aubert's "genealogy" is defined more or less in terms of a certain resistance of Joyce's text to the rules of conventional orthography, syntax and grammar.<75> But while such a writing may nonetheless "call" back to some indecipherable genealogy, it cannot be reconstituted according to the traditional requirements of a genealogy. In this sense there is no noun. Or as Joyce says, there is only "nonoun" (FW 104.16). One of the further difficulties, Aubert suggests, in dealing with the word "riverrun," is the way in which it can function simultaneously as both a noun and a verb. According to Aubert this is but one of the means by which the Wake "constantly calls representation into question," that is by inventing significatory "categories" in a way that "runs counter to the mechanisms of language and of myth while also obtaining from them a prodigiously high output." However, while Joyce's writing calls into question existing systems of representation ("linguistic, mechanical, cybernetic and so on") Aubert insists that "we still must define as rigorously as possible the interconnections between the various systems it uses ... and the modes of articulation of one with another,"<76> even if, as he seems to suggest, such a project of defining could not, in the final analysis, articulate itself independently of Joyce's text. Such a desire for preservation and genealogy, while at the same time recognising the impossibility of both, marks another way in which we can view hypertextual transversality in terms of what Jean-Michel Rabaté called dis-articulation. In other words, there can be no genealogy at work upon the Wake which is not already compelled by the Wake to disengage itself from its own system, which nevertheless continues to haunt it, involving it in a type of "solipsism" that Jean Baudrillard (meditating on the work of McLuhan) terms "the narcissistic mirage of technique."<77> A comment of Heidegger's may shed some light upon this matter: What looks like disunity and an unsure, "haphazard" [Zufall] way of "trying things out," is an elemental restlessness, the goal of which is to understand "life" philosophically and to secure for this understanding a hermeneutical foundation.<78> The genealogical (or hermeneutical will), in its attempt to recuperate chance as a means toward a foundation, reveals a deep-rooted anxiety (Angst) at its "origin." Or as Joyce suggests, the reader "clings to it [uncertainty] as with drowning hands, hoping against all hope all the while that, by the light of philophosy ... things will begin to clear up a bit one way or another within the next quarrel of an hour" (FW 119.03-06). In this way the anxiety which Freud associates with the (un)heimlich also seems to arise in Aubert's encounter with the word "riverrun" and its apparent haunting by the definite article "the" and by the notion of Erinnerung, suggesting that we might view Aubert's genealogical paradox in terms of a kind of "double-articulation" of memory (as Erinnerung) which is continually made to run up against Gedächtnis (or thinking memory),<79> revealing the dependence of genealogy and its various "infrastructures" upon a "technical and mechanical hypermnesis."<80> For Heidegger, what comes to light in Erinnerung is the "persistence" of the beginning through all that follows: The beginning is the strangest and mightiest. What comes afterwards is not a development but the flattening that results from mere spreading out; it is the inability to retain the beginning.<81> The beginning's inability to retain itself is announced in the experience of the "essence" of modern technology in which, according to Heidegger, it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself, in the form of a proliferation of discourse<82> (-which bears certain resemblances to Hegel's concept of "pure self-recognition in absolute otherness").<83> Moreover, discourse (in Derrida's conceptualisation as "writing") is "that forgetting of the self, that exteriorisation, the contrary of the interiorising memory, of the Erinnerung that opens the history of spirit," since "writing is at once the mnemotechnique and the power of forgetting."<84> In Heidegger's thinking, however, this self-reflection is not a perfection but "the final delusion," since it is ignorant of technology as a challenge addressed to humanity.<85> This challenge resides in a breakdown in the way, for Hegel, Weltgeist becomes self-conscious Spirit. We can identify this breakdown elsewhere in Heidegger as the relationship between Dasein and the language of idle talk (Gerede), and the way everyday signification introduces a division which closes off Dasein from self-knowing. This alienating experience of language, which became so important for the Existentialists, is regarded by Denis Hollier (a critic of Bataille) as what "makes man into a relationship to, an opening to," since "it prohibits his withdrawing into utopian self-presence, cut off from his retreat towards closure. It dispossesses him of his origins."<86> In the 'Scylla and Charybdis' episode of Ulysses this is expressed in the form of a question: But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under ever changing forms. [U 189: 39-40] Referring to Aristotle's system of forms (entelechy, actuality), Stephen Dedalus poses the question of whether identity is not in fact a function of memory since the so-called formal unity of the self ("I") is seen to be shifting and unstable, or at least concealed beneath a shifting exterior. In Aristotle's De Anima the "mind" (nous) is considered "the form of forms," and in the Metaphysics Aristotle argues that the prime mover is thought thinking itself.<87> In the 'Proteus' episode, Stephen considers the notion that "thought is the ... form of forms," musing upon the figure of Proteus, while Joyce's language simultaneously enacts a metamorphosis of "exterior forms" through Stephen's interior "stream of consciousness" (U 26.3-4). Joyce thus raises the question of internalised presence (aletheia) and thought (dianoia) which underlies the problem of "identity" as constituting a play between thinking memory (as technological, mechanical repetition) and the internalising memory or presencing of the "I" (the ideal horizon of formal unity).<88> 3. ACROSTIC MECHANISMS One of the prominent features of Finnegans Wake is the problem of formal articulation in the structuring of identity posed by the "figures" A.L.P. and H.C.E. (nominally "Anna Livia Plurabelle" and "Humphrey Chimpdon Earwicker"): Now ... concerning the genesis of Harold or Humphrey Chimpden's occupational agnomen (we are back in the presurnames prodromarith period, of course just when enos chalked halltraps) ... Hag Chivychas Eve, in prefall paradise. [FW 30.01-15, emphasis in bold type added] Identity in Finnegans Wake is always linked to a concept of the fall (Eden, Babel) and a particular notion of sundering. With generation and dispersal names no longer refer back to an origin in unity, but rather to an origin described as the object of a "paradox lust" (FW 263.L4); a hermeneutic mirage whose nature is structural rather than metaphysical or phenomenal. Identity is conceived not in terms of a unicum, or even as a moment of transition, but rather as a type of matrix or acrostic, contingent upon the relations between all of its parts. Such a concept suggests a type of genetics, or pattern recognition, in which "form" and "content" operate on equal levels of significance. In this way the "identity" of H.C.E. is signified by the dissemination of these three letters in the text of Finnegans Wake, rather than by a motif or figure as such, even though the pattern of this dispersal-H.C.E.-is itself characterised by virtually infinite permutations and combinations (-its elemental possibilities suggested, for example, in the quasi-molecular compound H2CE3 [FW 95.12]): The great fact emerges that ... all holographs so far exhumed initialled by Haromphery bear the sigla H.C.E ... which gave him as sense of those normative letters the nickname Here Comes Everybody. [FW 32. 12-18] As with the idea of a genetic blue-print, these holographs, initialled by their dead author, enter into a process of dissociation and dissimulation, not merely through the normative function of the sigla (which interchangeably signify both author and holograph, and which are interchangeable from one holograph to another), but also through the process of interpretation (archaeology, exhumation) and metamorphosis (the substitution of a nickname which is universally inclusive). Recalling the figure of Adam in Genesis, the eponymous "Haromphery" could be seen as engendering a species of signifiers in whose genetic code he is ultimately subsumed and for which he exists as a mere inference, or at least as the trace of a prior possibility of substitution (or metonymic filiation) whose schemata would be the structural trinity H.C.E. Generalising, we could say that the various permutations of the two Wakean triads, H.C.E. and A.L.P., brings about transverse communications between otherwise non-communicating textual elements, causing them to intersect (with varying probabilities) like a boundless acrostic (or "croststyx" [FW 206.04]) machine-a transverse "polyhedron" or self-generative grid motivated by the recurrence of chance in the alignment and re-alignment of its own sublexical graphic and phonic units (for instance, A.L.P. emerges at one point as "Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities" [FW 104.1-2], and H.C.E. as "Hear! Calls! Everywhair!" [FW 109.23]). The coordinates of this grid might then be thought as motivating a kind of hypertext, or historical cybernetic apparatus, which would bring-forth other-texts with no directly apparent relation to its "parent" text(s). Like the relativity of inertial frames of reference in the train journey in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, the "genealogical" movement of the Wake's signifiers reveals the Cartesian organisation of temporal and spatial difference as simply one possible (chance) outcome, among many, of a "communication" between shifting contextual limits. In the 'Nightlessons' episode of Finnegans Wake this relativity of outcomes is demonstrated as an unsecuring of historical filiation by differing alignments of the letters A B C and D: Please stop if you're a B.C. minding missy, please do. But if you prefer A.D. stepplease. [FW 272.09-14] The distinction here is not one of historical (dis)continuity-between the so-called Christian and pre-Christian epochs-but rather one of identity and determination ("Please stop if you're a B.C.") opening onto contingency ("But if you prefer A.D. stepplease"). The acrostic function of these signifiers is made more evident if we cast back to an earlier permutation of the passage cited above: (Stoop) of you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? [FW 18.17-19] Recalling Jacob Boehme's Signatura Rerum, this passage makes use of an invocation ("can you rede ... its world?") to suggest a type of apocryphal text whose meaning can be discerned if we learn to read, like the alchemist, the significance embedded in the limus profundis. With its further suggestions of the origin of man (Adam, "red clay"), and of Genesis (the Fall metamorphosed into a "stoop," whereby the ideality of "signs" are reduced to base matter, after the neo-Platonist fashion), this "abcedminded" logic puns on the notion of historical meaning belonging not to eidos, nor to divine reason, but rather to a species of "absent-mindedness" (a history, that is, not imbued with some form of self-consciousness). In this way we might consider the alphabetical "acrostic" as a product of chance (or at least its possibility in language), as well as indicating the absence of a structuring reason to which history would defer for its meaning (or essence; as Zeitgeist animating the historical corpus). The acrostic possibilities the letters ABC and D, however, are ultimately infinite,<89> and pose questions of formal significance which ask whether or not an apparently random constellation of texts whose resemblance is always fractional can exert mutual simultaneous influence at a level which is not merely superficial. Returning to the passage cited above (FW 272.09-14), our attention is drawn to the corresponding left-hand marginalia in which the letters BCA and D seem to have been transposed into musical notation (FW 272.L2).<90> The possible substitution here of musical notation for the historical signifiers A.D. and B.C. raises, among other things, the question of graphic and phonic difference, but more immediately it draws attention, through the physical disposition of the notes on the stave, to the significance of the transposition itself. For instance, the relative positioning on the stave of the notes BC and AD is such that the range A-D immediately encloses that of B-C, so that if we were to extrapolate the signifiers of the two historical epochs, B.C. and A.D., through the corresponding positions of the notes BCA and D according to the stave, we would arrive at an arrangement of historical signification which is no longer linear, but rather heterogenic-what Joyce, in another marginal note, calls a: "PANOPTICAL PURVIEW" or "FUTURE PRE- / SENTATION / OF THE PAST" (FW 272.R1). In other words, a later epoch (A.D.) is shown, not to proceed from an earlier epoch (B.C.), but in a sense to precede it, and also to encompass it-suggesting a conception of time which is heterogeneous and according to which what is commonly understood to be past would in fact be closed within what "comes after." Or, as Joyce writes elsewhere, that "there is a future in every past that is present" (FW 496.35-36). Similarly, the marginal note "FUTURE PRE- / SENTATION / OF THE PAST" suggests a communication between differing aspects of time (synchronic/diachronic). The prefix "PRE-" suggests a double articulation of "FUTURE" and the genitive "OF" in "OF THE PAST," marking also a division (hyphenation) in the "PRESENT" of "PRE-SENTATION," which is henceforth reduced to a type of "presentiment." However, what is of particular interest is the way in which the force and form of the signifiers A.D. and B.C. belongs to a particular convention that orientates and articulates history in terms of a zero-point-the year "O" (the point at which B.C. "stop[s]" but A.D. "step[s]"). This is brought into clearer focus elsewhere in Finnegans Wake, in the story of the "grave Brofesor" (FW 124.09). This story traces the "genetic" history of A.L.P.'s letter, which is discovered in a midden heap by a hen, by the name of Biddy Doran, and then "pierced" "by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument" (being the fork of "Brotfressor Prenderguest" [FW 124.15], whilst eating his breakfast): These paper wounds, four in type, were gradually and correctly understood to mean stop, please stop, do please stop, and O do please stop respectively [FW 124.01-05] This passage appears at a point on the page just before Joyce's text itself "breaks down" into a series of quasi-phonetic renderings of words interspersed with apparently random diacritical markings. The passage recounts the process by which the grave Brofesor unwittingly stabs the manuscript of A.L.P.'s letter with his fork, and suggests that the "purpose" of these marks was: ... to=introduce a notion of time [upon a plane (?) su''faç'e'] by punct! ingh oles (sic) in iSpace?! [FW 124.12] This spatial notion, or notation, of time as a series of punct-ure marks ("O do please stop") recalls the passage "Please stop if you're a B.C. ..." in which time is again punctuated and annotated by an alignment of marks on the page. We could say that these puncture marks serve to articulate a notion of time, in a two-fold manner, whereby the mark (or "O") introduces a hypertextual dimension-one that opens the "plane (?) su''façe" of the page (but also the cartesian plane) onto non-fixed, non-linear modes of signification. In terms of the historical signifiers A.D. and B.C., the zero-point, the point "O" on the Christian time-line, thus not only functions as a point of articulation, in the literal sense, between two epochs, but also articulates these epochs. This "Janus"-like (FW 272.16) point of double articulation describes a place of unsecuring in the Wake's hypertextual re-alignment of the letters ADB and C-so that the former "zero-point" comes to indicate another sense of emplacement.91 In a sense, the zero point also marks an infinity ("nought time ?" [FW 284.11]), O opens onto ( ), a mise en abyme of internal substitution whose outer limits cannot be defined according to existing notions of finitude.<92> But this opening is also a "Gyre O" (FW 275.23), the hermeneutic circle or entropic spiral, or "the O of woman" (FW 270.25-26); the re-birthing passage of a "cyclewheeling history" (FW 186.02), or a "languo of flows" (FW 621.22), that continually "returns us by a commodius vicus of recirculation" to the "riverrun" (FW 3.01) of language and time. Clive Hart has suggested that we read A.L.P., as a signifier of this river(r)ing flow (the "Liffey"), as "Mother Zero,"<93> and elsewhere in Finnegans Wake this relationship is made more explicit: A . . . . . . . . . . ! ? . . . . . . . . . . O [FW 94.21] This possible rendering of biblical eschatology (historical closure as the revelation of God's Being, "Alpha and Omega") provides one way in which we might view A.L.P. as the locus of a particular temporal schema. Interestingly, this rendering is structured tropically, with two sequences of ten periods dividing the A from and exclamation mark and the O from a question mark ("decembs within the ephemerids of profane history" [FW 87.07]). Again Joyce's typographical arrangement bears possible significance. Read vertically, the text renders A as a question (of identity, of origin) adumbrating the number 10 (!O), or an emphatic zero ("absolute zero or the babbling pumpt of platinism" [FW 164.10-11]), whose numerological significance is worth considering in this context. But we may also read this passage phonetically as a question in the vernacular ("eh?"), followed by a hushed response (".........."), followed then by an exclamation ("oh!"); the whole sequence suggesting two or more people exchanging pieces of gossip (like the washerwomen at the opening of the 'Anna Livia' section ("O / tell me all about / Anna Livia! I want to hear all / about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, / we all know Anna Livia. Tell me. Tell me now ..." [FW 196.1-5]) which might in turn describe a "Bibelous hics / tory and Barbar / assa harestary" (FW 280.R1). The historical motif is further linked to the "figure" of A.L.P. in a curious imperative statement which involves an anagram of the name "Plato": "Approach to lead our passage!" (FW 262.02), which is accompanied in the right-hand margin by the formulation: "PROBA- / POSSIBLE / PROLEGO- / MENA TO / IDEAREAL / HISTORY" (FW 262.R1). Two pages earlier we find: Wheel, to where ... by New Livius Lane till where we whiled while we withered. Old Vico Roundpoint. Be fahr, be fear. And natural, simple, slavish, filial. [FW 260.09-16] Like an acrostic grid, this Viconian street map presents an idea of intersection which is both punctual and recurrent, rather than teleological: The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin. Still onappealed to by cycles & unapalled by the recoursers. [FW 452.21-23] In Joyce's punning text, the cycle is both the passage of history and the vehicle of history, its terminus and commencement; a doubly articulated mechanism in which we might detect the solicitation of a particular "technology" of (re-)engenderment, represented in terms of the "vesica piscus" diagram on page 293 of the Wake. This Viconian cum Platonistic ("Plutonic loveliaks twinnt Platonic yearlings-you must, how, in undivided reawlity draw the line somewhere" [292.30-32]) "duplex" (292.24) can be seen as describing a transversal along the co-ordinates A(a), L(l), P(p), between a trinitarian eschatology and cyclical re-birth, or "between shift and shift ere the death he has lived through and the life he is to die into" (FW 293.003-05), becoming "Uteralterance or / the Interplay of / Bones in the / Womb" (FW 293.L1). Recalling the dual Freudean drives towards life and death, this diagram suggests a mechanism operating according to a type of "paradox lust" whose locus is not self-identical but an acrostic convergence, where: "A is for Anna like L is for Liv. Aha hahah, Ante Ann you're apt to ape aunty annalive! Dawn gives rise ... Eve takes fall ... we're last to the lost ... Tis perfect." (293.18-23). NOTES 1 Derrida, Jacques. 'Two Words for Joyce.' Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, eds. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984: 147-148 2 Cf Rabaté, Jean-Michel. 'Pour une cryptogénetique de l'idiolecte Joycien.' Genese de Babel: Joyce et la création, ed. Claud Jacquet. Paris: Louis Hay Éditions du Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, 1985. Cf. also Rabaté, Jean-Michel. 'Le Noued Gordien de «Pénélope».' James Joyce «Scribble» 1: genese des textes, ed. Claude Jacquet. Paris: Lettres Modernes Minard, 1988. 3 Rabaté, Jean-Michel. 'Lapsus ex machina.' Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, eds. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. London: Cambridge UP, 1984: 79. 4 Blanchot, Maurice. La part du feu. Paris: Gallimard, 1949: 123. 5 Bennington, Geoffrey. 'Derridabase.' Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993: 315-6 6 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane. New York: Viking, 1977: 43. 7 Ibid. 8 Attridge, Derek. 'Postmodern Joyce: Chance, Coincidence and the Reader.' Joyce Studies Annual, 1995, Thomas F. Staley. Austin: U of Texas P, 1995: 287-8. 9 Ibid., 283. 10 Derrida, Jacques. 'My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with some Epicurean Stereophonies.' Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature, eds. J. H. Smith and W. Kerrigan. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1984: 4. 11 Bennington, Geoffrey. Legislations. London: Verso, 1994: 2. 12 Cited in Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 43. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Towards the end of Book I, Shem is described as "produc[ing]": "nichthemerically from his unheavenly body a no uncertain quantity of obscene matter not protected by copriright in the United States of Ourania or bedeed and bedood and bedang and bedung to him, with his double dye, brought to blood heat, gallic acid on iron ore, through the bowels of his misery, flashly, nastily, appropriately, this Esuan Menschavik and the first till last alchemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integumented slowly unfolded in all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history" (FW 185.29, 186.02). 16 Derrida, 'Two Words for Joyce,' 147. 17 Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981: 221. 18 Derrida, 'Two Words for Joyce,' 148. 19 Cf. Derrida, Jacques. 'Signature Event Context.' Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988: 7ff. Derrida describes a "writing apparatus" which functions as a play of citation, iteration, repetition, difference and deferral, enacting the dissimulation of an authorial presence by cutting into other texts (which come to constitute its totality) at points where language is open to a moment of alterity and from which divergent paths through the text can be pursued. 20 Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridon New York: Norton, 1977: 299. 21 Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan. London: The Hogarth Press, 1977: 83. 22 Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. D. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973: 32ff. 23 Ibid., 50. 24 Lacan, Jacques. Le séminaire: Livre III: Les psychoses 1955-1956. Paris: Seuil, 1981: 247. 25 Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Iain McLeod. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1987: 27. 26 Norris, Margot. The De-centered Universe of Finnegans Wake: A Structuralist Analysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976: 26. 27 Derrida, 'Two Words for Joyce,' 150. 28 Ulmer, Gregory. 'Op Writing: Derrida's Solicitation of Theoria,' 56. 29 Derrida, Jacques. Glas, trans. J. P. Leavey Jnr. and Richard Rand. Nebraska: U of Nebraska P, 1990: 117ai. 30 The word "phonex" also carries the more mundane signification of a mechanical index of telephone numbers. 31 Derrida, Dissemination, 7. 32 Derrida, Jacques. Glas, trans. J. P. Leavey Jnr and Richard Rand. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990: 117a. 33 Bennington, 'Derridabase,' 312-3. 34 Derrida, 'Two Words for Joyce,' 147. 35 Derrida, The Post Card, 301. 36 Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. C. J. M. Hubback. London: The Hogarth Press, 1922: 14ff. Freud interprets the fort/da as depicting the child's symbolic mastery of its mother's absence, and accordingly provides the basis of all future narratives of loss and recovery. 37 The German verb fortgehen, to go away, leaves open the possibility of return and remains ambiguous in this sense (also fort, to continue)-as opposed, for instance, to weggehen, to go away or leave, which suggests a definite absence. 38 Derrida, Jacques. 'Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,' trans. T. Kendal. James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth, ed. Bernard Benstock. New York: Syracuse UP, 1984. 39 The "thrownness" of Dasein, brought into the proximity here of the "throw" in the fort/da game of Freud's grandson, provides a way of beginning to think the relation between Verfallen and Gefallen, thus introducing the Heideggerean notion of "falling" to the apparatus of Freud's "pleasure principle." 40 Derrida, 'Two Words for Joyce,' 148. 41 Michaux, Henri. The Major Ordeals of the Mind, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974: 125-127. 42 Cf. Rice, Thomas Jackson. 'Ulysses, Chaos, and Complexity.' JJQ 31.2 (1994): 41-54. 43 Ibid., 125-126. 44 Cf. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 79ff. Also Baltrusaitis, Jurgis, Anamorphoses ou perspectives curieuses. 45 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 127. 46 Cf. Derrida, 'Structure, Sign and Play,' 279. According to Derrida: "one perhaps could say that the movement of any archaeology... is an accomplice of ... reduction ... and always attempts to conceive of structure on the basis of a full presence which is beyond play." See also Derrida, Jacques. The Archaeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac, trans. J. P. Leavey, Jnr. Pittsburg: Duquesne UP, 1980. 47 Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985: 31. 48 Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987: 144. 49 "Shemblable" suggests Shem-babble, Shem-Babel, as well as the French semblable, "similar"). 50 Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996: 12. 51 Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. 52 Cixous, Hélene. 'Joyce: the (r)use of writing.' Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, eds. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984: 23 53 Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976: 30ff. 54 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson. London; Verso, 1994: 118. 55 What defines a hypertext is not simply the potential for fluid movement between significatory planes (by means of mechanical copulas), but that the planes themselves are always kept in an internal fluidic pulsation. Indeed, we might say that hypertext is that pulsation itself. 56 Bataille, Georges. 'L'Anus Solaire.' Ouvres Completes. VIII vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1971-1988: V.81. 57 Derrida, Jacques. 'Le Supplement de copule.' Marges. Paris: Minuit, 1972: 243. 58 Bennington, 'Derridabase,' 314-5. 59 Derrida, 'Dissemination,' 330. 60 Ibid., 331. See also Paul de Man, personal correspondence cited in Jones, W. T. 'Deconstructing Derrida.' Metaphilosophy 23.3 (1992): 232. According to Jones' account, de Man defines "trace" as "an empty referent-there is not nor was there ever any actual content latent in the unconscious to which the trace refers ... the signifier is the sign of a lack ..." 61 Derrida, Dissemination, 300. 62 This mark of iterability would also describe a kind of Joycean deus ex machina: "Blankdeblank, god of all machineries" (FW 253.33). 63 Cf. Derrida's discussion of the words "he war" in 'Two Words for Joyce.' 64 Rabaté, Jean-Michel. 'Lapsus ex machina,' trans. Elizabeth Gould. Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, eds. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984: 79. 65 NB. Derrida, Dissemination, 221. This elision, or split at the beginning, would also mark, according to Derrida, what "can never be mediated, mastered, sublated, or dialectised through any Erinnerung or Aufhebung." Cf. de Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. 2nd rev. ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983: 90-91. According to de Man, "the illusion that continuity can be restored by an act of memory turns out to be merely another moment of transition." 66 Derrida, Dissemination, 221. 67 Aubert, Jacques. 'riverrun.' Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, eds. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984: 69-70. 68 Derrida, Jacques. 'Survivre.' Parages. Paris: Galilée, 1986: 161. 69 Aubert, 'riverrun,' 70. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., 71. 72 Aubert, 'riverrun,' 70. 73 It is worth noting that the term "echo" here corresponds to Clive Hart's usage of the term in his Concordance. Nevertheless, to render this haunting of the word "riverrun" in terms of what Aubert calls "the actualisation of a noun ... as it emerges from an echo," without first distinguishing this "echo" from a signifier of a prior plenitude or past presence (of meaning, even of a grammatical system), would be to lose sight of the "originary" nature of this partition-especially in regards to Joyce's writing practice in Finnegans Wake and the suggestion therein that the "inspiration," intentionality, or originality of the text belongs to what he calls a "lethemuse" (FW 272.F3). Joyce's allusion to the mythical river Lethe not only provides a possible link between riverrun and lethemuse, but also hints at the way in which the text's origin, or beginning, belongs to an underworld of originary mythification, recalling the epigraph to Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams: "Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo" (-or the dissimulation of that which cannot go above in the daylight, the underworld or unconscious itself). The question of genealogy thus runs up against the challenge posed by psychoanalytic theory to the classical notions of inference and derivation. In so far as we can speak of any "true genealogy of the noun," as Aubert suggests, it would have to be a genealogy "described," not by the inference of signifying chains, but by the (re)occurrence of a rupture or dissimulating event, a "split" which before hand would spoil every possible tense "from to have to have been to will be" to which traditional genealogy could lay claim as the basis of its science. 74 Ibid., 72. 75 Cf. Lacan, Jacques. 'Joyce le symptôme I.' Joyce avec Lacan, ed. Jacques Aubert. Paris: Navarin Éditeur, 1987: 26. Lacan investigates a line from Finnegans Wake, "Who ails tongue coddeau aspace of dumbillsilly?" (FW 15.18), which he "translates" as: "Ou est ton caddeau, espece d'imbécile?" According to Lacan, however, "[i]l y a ... d'ambigu dans cet usage phonétique ... c'est que cette homophonie en l'occasion translinquistique ne se supporte que d'une lettre conforme a l'orthographie de la langue anglaise. Vous ne sauriez pas que who peut se transformer en ou si vous ne saviez que who au sens interrogatif se prononce ainsi." 76 Ibid., 77. 77 Baudrillard, Jean. 'Simulacra and Simulations,' trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988: 182 n1. 78 Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarie and E. Robinson. London: Blackwell, 1992: 398. 79 For further discussion of the terms Erinnerung and Gedächtnis see James, L.L. '"Hearasay in / Paradox Lust": Dissemination, Desire and Joyce's Hypertextual Apparatus.' Litteraria Pragensia 6.11 (1996): 91-100. 80 Derrida, Jacques. Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. C. Lindsay, J. Culler, E. Cadava, and P. Kamuf. New York: Columbia UP, 1986: 36. 81 Heidegger, Martin. An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. R. Menheim. New Haven: Yale UP, 1966: 155. 82 Heidegger, Martin. 'The Question Concerning Technology.' Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell. Revised edition. London: Routledge, 1993: 308. 83 Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Arthur V. Miller. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1977: 14. 84 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 24. See also Derrida, Jacques. 'La Pharmacie de Platon.' Tel Quel 32 (1967): 3-48. 85 Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology,' 311. 86 Hollier, Dennis. Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992: 65. 87 Aristotle, De Anima, 3:432a. 88 Cf. Leibnitz, G.W.F. 'The Monadology,' trans. George Montgomery. The Rationalists. New York: Dolphin Books, 1960: 455ff. 89 Cf. FW 140-1. ABC and D function here, as elsewhere, as the subsectional index of various questions, to which it is required "to harmonise your abecedeed responses" (FW 140.14). 90 A musical motif also emerges from the letters H.C.E., where H can be take as signifying the note B natural according to the German convention. Cf. Contrapunctus XV of Bach's Die Kunst der Fuge-where he introduces B-A-C-H as a contra-subject: "NB. Über dieser Fuge, wo der Nahme B-A-C-H im Contrasubjekt angebracht worden, ist der Verfasser gestorben" (-this note appears at the bottom of the last page of Bach's manuscript in the hand of Philipp Emanuel Bach). What is of importance here is the role of hypermnesis in the acrostic structure (fugue form, hypertext, historical articulation, the movement of Erinnerung-Gedächtnis, etc.). 91 Cf. Weber, Samuel. 'The Vaulted Eye: Remarks on Knowledge and Professionalism.' Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 50. 92 The parentheses act as a point of possible entry or insertion through which other text are continually summoned: "(and may this hundred thousand welcome stewed letters, relayed wand postchased, multiply, ay faith, and plultiply!)" [FW 404.36-405.01]. 93 Hart, Clive. 'Quinet.' James Joyce: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. W.M. Chance. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1974: 133. (c) LOUIS ARMAND, 2000. Louis Armand is a senior lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies, Charles University, Prague, and a lecturer in art history at the University of New York, Prague.