Joycemedia: James Joyce, Hypermedia, and Textual Genetics 8023922661, 9788023922660

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joyceMedia James Joyce, Hypermedia & Textual Genetics

edited by Louis Armand

þ Litteraria Pragensia Prague 2006

Copyright © Louis Armand, 2004, 2006 Copyright © of individual works remains with the authors. First edition published 2004 by Litteraria Pragensia Second edition published 2006 Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University Náměstí Jana Palacha 2, 116 38 Prague 1 Czech Republic www.litterariapragensia.com All rights reserved. This book is copyright under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the copyright holders. Requests to publish work from this book should be directed to the publishers.

The  publication  of  this  book  has  been  supported  by:  research  grant  MSM0021620824  “Foundations of the Modern World as Reflected in Literature and Philosophy” awarded to the  Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University, Prague, by the Czech Ministry of Education; and by 

a grant from the Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland / Comhar Cultúra Éireann of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ireland.       Cataloguing in Publication Data    Joyce Media” James Joyce, Hypermedia & Textual Genetics, edited by Louis Armand.—2nd  ed.        p.    cm. 

ISBN 80-239-2266-1  (pb)  1. James Joyce.   2. Literary Theory.   3. Hypermedia.   4. Textual Genetics.     I. Armand, Louis.  II. Title     

Typeset & design by Lazarus Printed in the Czech Republic by PB Tisk

CONTENTS Abbreviations Preface

vii ix

Louis Armand INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ENGINES

1

\1 Donald F. Theall TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE BOOK IN JOYCE’S DREAM VISION OF DIGICULTURE

28

Mark Nunes GAPS AND CONVERGENCES IN THE JOYCEAN NETWORK

44

Laurent Milesi H Y P E R W A K E 3D

66

Louis Armand FROM HYPERTEXT TO VORTEXT

73

\2 Daniel Ferrer THE WORK OF JOYCE IN THE AGE OF HYPERTEXTUAL PRODUCTION

86

Marlena Corcoran SIRENS TO CYCLOPS: MOMENTARY JUXTAPOSITION IN GENETIC HYPERTEXT

105

Michael Groden PROBLEMS OF ANNOTATION IN A DIGITAL ULYSSES

116

Dirk Van Hulle AN ELECTRONIC STEREOPTICON: DISTRIBUTION AND RECOMBINATION IN JOYCE’S “GUILTLESS” COPYBOOK (BL 47471B)

133

/3 Thomas Jackson Rice I DO MINCE WORDS, DON’T I? ULYSSES IN TEMPORE BELLI

144

Alan R. Roughley ENTEN: SUBJECTS: BURGESS, SHAKESPEARE, JOYCE [TEXT, INTERTEXT; HYPERTEXT, VORTEX]

152

Darren Tofts ASSESSING THE GREEN BOX ULYSSES: PROLEGOMENA TO JOYCEAN HYPERTEXTUALITY

165

Notes on Contributors

174

ABBREVIATIONS Finnegans Wake has been cited following the standard form used by Joyce scholars, either by page number and line—viz. (278.13)—or, with reference to the accepted division of the text into four books with chapters, by Roman numeral (book) and Arabic numeral (chapter)—viz. (III.2). The following abbreviations are used throughout the text: D P U FW CW L SL Census JJI JJII AWD AWN FWC JJLS JJQ JJR BM JJA

JJA 28 JJA 29 JJA 30 JJA 31

Dubliners, ed. Robert Scholes with Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1967. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The definitive text corrected from the Dublin Holograph by Chester G. Anderson and edited by Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1966. Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1934, reset and corrected 1961. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1939. The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Eds. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1959. Letters of James Joyce. Vol. I, ed. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Viking Press, 1957; re-issued with corrections 1966. Vols. II and III, ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1966. Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1975. Adaline Glasheen, A Census of Finnegans Wake, III vols. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1952; 1963; 1977. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Revised edition. London: Oxford University Press, 1982. A Wake Digest, eds. Clive Hart and Fritz Senn. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1968. A Wake Newslitter A Finnegans Wake Circular James Joyce Literary Supplement James Joyce Quarterly James Joyce Review British Museum + catalogue number (documents belonging to Joyce, including Finnegans Wake drafts, lodged with the British Museum by Harriet Shaw Weaver. Cf. JJA). James Joyce Archive, ed. Michael Groden, et al. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1977-79. N.B. The correlation of the Finnegans Wake notebooks and drafts within the James Joyce Archive are as follows: Finnegans Wake: Buffalo Notebooks VI.A Finnegans Wake: Buffalo Notebooks VI.B.1-4 Finnegans Wake: Buffalo Notebooks VI.B.5-8 Finnegans Wake: Buffalo Notebooks VI.B.9-12

vii

JJA 32 JJA 33 JJA 34 JJA 35 JJA 36 JJA 37 JJA 38 JJA 39 JJA 40 JJA 41 JJA 42 JJA 43 JJA 44 JJA 45 JJA 46 JJA 47 JJA 48 JJA 49 JJA 50 JJA 51 JJA 52 JJA 53 JJA 54 JJA 55 JJA 56 JJA 57 JJA 58 JJA 59 JJA 60 JJA 61 JJA 62 JJA 63

Finnegans Wake: Buffalo Notebooks VI.B.13-16 Finnegans Wake: Buffalo Notebooks VI.B.17-20 Finnegans Wake: Buffalo Notebooks VI.B.21-24 Finnegans Wake: Buffalo Notebooks VI.B.25-28 Finnegans Wake: Buffalo Notebooks VI.B.29-32 Finnegans Wake: Buffalo Notebooks VI.B.33-36 Finnegans Wake: Buffalo Notebooks VI.B.37-40 Finnegans Wake: Buffalo Notebooks VI.B.41-44 Finnegans Wake: Buffalo Notebooks VI.B.45-50 Finnegans Wake: Buffalo Notebooks VI.C.1,2,3,4,5,7 Finnegans Wake: Buffalo Notebooks VI.C.6,8,9,10,16,15 Finnegans Wake: Buffalo Notebooks VI.C.12,13,14,17,11,18 Finnegans Wake: Bk. I.1, Drafts, TSS and Proofs Finnegans Wake: Bk. I.2-3, Drafts, TSS and Proofs Finnegans Wake: Bk. I.4-5, Drafts, TSS and Proofs Finnegans Wake: Bk. I.6-7, Drafts, TSS and Proofs Finnegans Wake: Bk. I.8, Drafts, TSS and Proofs Finnegans Wake: Bk. I, Galley Proofs, Vol.1 Finnegans Wake: Bk. I, Galley Proofs, Vol.2 Finnegans Wake: Bk. II.1, Drafts, TSS and Proofs Finnegans Wake: Bk. II.2, Drafts, TSS and Proofs, Vol.1 Finnegans Wake: Bk. II.2, Drafts, TSS and Proofs, Vol.2 Finnegans Wake: Bk. II.3, Drafts, TSS and Proofs, Vol.1 Finnegans Wake: Bk. II.3, Drafts, TSS and Proofs, Vol.2 Finnegans Wake: Bk. II.4, Drafts, TSS and Proofs Finnegans Wake: Bk. III.1-2, Drafts, TSS and Proofs Finnegans Wake: Bk. III.3, Drafts, TSS and Proofs, Vol.1 Finnegans Wake: Bk. III.3, Drafts, TSS and Proofs, Vol.2 Finnegans Wake: Bk. III.4, Drafts, TSS and Proofs Finnegans Wake: Bk. III, transition Pages Finnegans Wake: Bk. III, Galley Proofs Finnegans Wake: Bk. IV, Drafts, TSS and Proofs

viii

PREFACE The genesis of this book extends back over the last ten years, during which time it has taken a number of different conceptual forms, few of which resemble the current volume whose realisation has been, in many senses, fortuitous and linked to an equally fortuitous event—the Prague James Joyce Colloquium, held in September 2003, to address the topic of “Joycean Genetics and Hypertext.” The Colloquium participants included Derek Attridge, Daniel Ferrer, Stacey Herbert, Laurent Milesi, Luca Crispi, Vincent Deane, Alan Roughley, myself, and (in absentia) Michael Groden, Fritz Senn and Sam Slote. In certain respects the Colloquium was a type of re-union. At the James Joyce Symposium in Seville, in 1994, I first encountered Daniel Ferrer’s work on hypertextual applications to the genetic analysis of “avanttextes,” along with Laurent Milesi’s work on textual genetics. Alan Roughley, myself and Darren Tofts shared a panel on “Joyce’s Philosophical Intertexts” (Tofts’s paper from that event, on Joyce and Duchamp, is reproduced here). It was also the last Symposium that Bernard Benstock attended, shortly prior to his untimely death, and in many respects marked the end point of an important stage in the critical-theoretical engagement with Joyce’s texts. It would be another five years before work like Alan Roughley’s Reading Derrida Reading Joyce would finally get to print, having been commissioned under Benstock’s editorship at the University Press of Florida’s Joyce series. That a distinct stage in Joyce “theory” was about to emerge—separate from the mainstream of “method” theorising (applying to Joyce the latest theory that comes along)—became evident the following June, at Brown University where, on the initiative of Bob Scholes, Daniel Ferrer presented a keynote address on Joycean hypertext (as well as a hypertext demonstration in partnership with the Intermedia Lab) alerting the world to the fact of a major development in both the theoretical and practical engagement with Joyce’s texts, one which, far from being simply a “method,” had its genesis in the work itself (and the work-in-progress) of Joyce. The Brown conference also saw the first panel discussion of Joycean hypertext, chaired by Morris Beja, with Bill Brockman, Jim LeBlanc, and myself. This was followed at the Chicago MLA convention that December by a panel discussion on the question of “Theorising Knowledge in/of the Joycean Text,” chaired by Margot Norris, with Michael Groden, myself and Paul Saint Amour. And it was at this event, during a reception at the Hyatt Regency hosted by the then Joyce Foundation president, Karen Lawrence, that the idea of this volume first seriously arose—in a discussion that involved Derek Attridge, Sheldon Brivic, Brandon Kershner and the editor-in-chief of FUP, Walda Metcalf. ix

During 1994 and 1995, numerous hypermedia projects focused on Joyce— many with pedagogical intentions—were being undertaken, often spontaneously and independently of one another, in Australia, Europe and North America. In large part this was due to the fact that in 1991 the majority of Joyce’s work had moved out of copyright, followed by a rash of publishing activity, not only within the conventional publishing industry, but also online and on CD-ROM. It was at this time that Donald Theall’s electronic versions of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake appeared on the Trent University server in Canada, followed by online texts of A Portrait, Dubliners and transcriptions of various notebooks, concordances, and so on. Much of this activity came to an abrupt end when Europe and America revised their copyright laws. It was partly due to the enthusiasm of the “inter-copyright” period that Joycean hypertext received, at least initially, so much attention. The ambitions of editors and scholars recognised in the medium an immediate way of capitalising upon new means of treating Joyce’s work, as well as the potential for new markets and new funding opportunities. It was this climate, too, which provided an initial renewal of public interest in Joycean genetics. Its “renaissance,” however, would have to await the discovery of previously “lost” or unknown notebooks in 2000 and 2003, and the renewal of investment in projects that had, and have, been quietly on-going for many years in Paris, Antwerp, Buffalo, and elsewhere—far removed from the Bloomsday Industry. In 1994, developing out of a CD-ROM project based on Joyce’s Dubliners (with Alan Roughley and Julian Croft), the idea emerged for an electronic journal of James Joyce scholarship. With the increasing prevalence of the Internet in daily life, and with the publication of Donald Theall’s seminal work on Joyce “Beyond the Literacy-Orality Dichotomy,” the idea seemed more than merely timely. The project was finally realised in collaboration with Rob Callahan at Temple University, originally under the working title Hypertituitary Joysis and reported in the JJLS. In keeping with the nature of such projects, I met Rob Callahan only in 1995, at Brown University, where we debated the merits of html and stml, and generally decided on the immediate future of what, by then, had become Hypermedia Joyce Studies or HJS—the first issue of which, under our joint editorship (with Alan Roughly and Julian Croft advising), finally appeared in December of that year, with essays by Donald Theall, Derek Attridge, Tom Rice, Alan Roughley, Darren Tofts, and Fritz Senn. A subsequent issue of HJS appeared in 1999 under the direction of Brandon Kershner, Sheldon Brivic, Rob Callahan, Michael Groden, Tom Rice and Cheryl Herr. Thence followed a further lapsus before its current, continuing resurrection as a bi-annual in 2002, reaching its tenth anniversary in 2005 (hjs.ff.cuni.cz). x

Over the years HJS has published work by a wide variety of authors, and while its contents has encompassed most traditional forms of scholarship, it remains an active vehicle for Joycean hypertext, and what has come to be called Joycemedia (a term coined by Mark Nunes). Recent contributors have included Simon Critchley, Darren Tofts, Clare Wallace, Kevin Nolan, Michael Groden, Sheldon Brivic, Jane Lewty, Andrew Mitchel, Simon Critchley, Megan Roughley, Jim LeBlanc, Ian Gunn, D.J. Schiff, Timothy Murphy, Cheryl Herr, Mark Wollaeger, McKenzie Wark, Gregory Downing, Gerald Parks and Stephen Donovan. Excerpts from the writings of the late Petr Škrabánek have also appeared, along with important texts by Donald Theall, author of James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics (1997) and Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture, and Communication (1995). Renewed interest in Joycean hypertext began at the 1998 Rome Joyce Symposium, at which Mark Nunes chaired panels on the subject of “Joyce’s hypertext/Hypertext’s Joyce,” involving myself, Darren Tofts, Michael Groden, Paul Saint Amour and others. Nunes’s “A Genealogy of the Joycean Hypertext” ably summed up what, until then, had been a disparate undertaking, seemingly wrecked by the inertia following the reversion to copyright of Joyce’s texts. Between 1998 and the Symposium at Goldsmiths College in 2000, the idea of a volume devoted to Joycean hypertext was taken up by Nunes who pitched the idea, with initial success, to Mark Poster at Minneapolis University Press. By 2001, however, it was clear that the project had once again stalled. Other projects were going ahead, however, including the launch of the electronic journal Genetic Joyce Studies, and by the time the National Library of Ireland acquired its stake in Joyce, publication had begun of the Buffalo Finnegans Wake Notebooks under the editorship of Daniel Ferrer, Vincent Deane and Geert Lernout. The 2002 Symposium in Trieste once again focused on hypertext, but this time almost exclusively in the context of Joycean genetics, including presentations by Michael Groden, Hans Gabler, Hillis Miller, Sam Slote, Luca Crispi, Stacey Herbert, Daniel Ferrer, Geert Lernout, Dirk Van Hulle, Vincent Neyt and Wim Van Mierlo. The event was something of a reprise of the Brown conference, and it was clear that the future of Joycean hypertext and theory lay in the direction of the notebooks and projects related to them. In 2002, Michael Groden’s Digital Ulysses seemed, incredibly, to be on the verge of realisation—now in partnership with the Ulysses notebooks project at Buffalo, under the direction of Sam Slote and Luca Crispi—an extraordinary undertaking, only to be wrecked by the Joyce Estate at the end of 2003, only six months before its planned launch.

xi

In such circumstances as these, it seemed that the current volume was long overdue. Clearly it would no longer serve the function of mapping out new ground, as during the ten years in which this book has had its virtual existence, that function has been taken up by far more extensive and comprehensive studies, both in the area of theorising Joycean hypertext and in delineating a hypertextual practice. Much of the work originally intended for publication has been incorporated elsewhere, and a number of those who might have contributed have had their attention directed towards other, highly exacting projects. Consequently, the present volume no longer represents the initial ambitions under which it was conceived, but has become something of a chronicle—both of its own genesis, and that of the intellectual environment which spawned interest in it in the first place, however precarious that interest may have seemed. It would be an error to imagine, however, that this volume comes somehow “after the event.” The fact remains that Joycemedia has a still quite rarefied existence, even as its effects become increasingly evident upon the mainstream of Joyce criticism, and textual criticism generally. There is a rigour and a set of seemingly limitless practical and theoretical demands involved with Joycemedia that make it a difficult proposition for those more used to the “method” of applying theories that have already been worked out elsewhere. It is arguable, indeed, that after deconstruction, the fusion of genetics and hypertext represents the first major theoretical discourse to have emerged directly out of an engagement with Joyce’s texts. If this is truly the case, then there is every reason to consider that this volume—however tardy its arrival must seem to those who first heard news of it ten years ago—remains nonetheless “in advance” of itself, and that its “news” is, in fact, still to be received. At the 2005 Joyce conference at Cornell, a panel entitled “Hypermedia Joyce” (with Donald Theall, Michael Groden and myself), symbolically brought the trajectory this project “full circle.” Which may be another way of saying that we have returned, once more, to a point of starting out. Along the way many have deserved our thanks and acknowledgement, in particular Rob Callahan, Donald Theall, Daniel Ferrer, Margot Norris, Alan Roughley, Mark Nunes, Derek Attridge, Sheldon Brivic, Darren Tofts, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Bonnie Kime Scott, Karen Lawrence, Julian Croft, Morris Beja, Jim LeBlanc, Bill Brockman. Thanks are also due to Clare Wallace, Ondřej Pilný and Martin Procházka for their assistance and support. Louis Armand Prague, April 2006 xii

Louis Armand INTRODUCTION: LITERARY ENGINES We crossed a Walk to the other Part of the Academy, where, as I have already said, the Projectors in speculative Learning resided. The first Professor I saw was in a very large Room, with forty Pupils about him. After Salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a Frame, which took up the greatest part of both the Length and Breadth of the Room, he said perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a Project for improving speculative Knowledge by practical and mechanical Operations. But the World would soon be sensible of its Usefulness, and he flattered himself that a more noble exalted Thought never sprung in any other Man’s Head. Every one knew how laborious the usual Method is of attaining to Arts and Sciences; whereas by his Contrivance, the most ignorant Person at a reasonable Charge, and with a little bodily Labour, may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks and Theology, without the least Assistance from Genius or Study. He then led me to the Frame, about the Sides whereof all his Pupils stood in Ranks. It was twenty Foot Square, placed in the middle of the Room. The Superficies was composed of several bits of Wood, about the bigness of a Dye, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender Wires. These bits of Wood were covered on every Square with Paper pasted on them, and on these Papers were written all the Words of their Language, in their several Moods, Tenses, and Declensions, but without any Order. The Professor then desired me to observe, for he was going to set his Engine at Work. The Pupils at his Command took each of them hold of an Iron Handle, whereof there were fourty fixed round the Edges of the Frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole Disposition of the Words was entirely changed. He then commanded six and thirty of the Lads to read the several Lines softly as they appeared upon the Frame; and where they found three or four Words together that might make part of a Sentence, they dictated to the four remaining Boys who were Scribes. This Work was repeated three or four Times, and at every turn the Engine was so contrived that the Words shifted into new Places, as the Square bits of Wood moved upside down. —Jonathan Swift, “The Academy of Lagado,” Gulliver’s Travels

What, until recently, has been called for alternately empirical and mystical reasons the book is entering a distinct epoch in which it is no longer possible to limit the range of a “material body of writing” by enclosing it within a printed volume. By the late Renaissance, engineers and thinkers had already begun to conceive of the marriage between the book and machinery, projecting the idea of the Gutenberg invention towards its (techno)logical, evolutionary ends.1 With the advent of hypertext and of the World Wide Web this marriage seems to have been consummated at last, linking together both the means, medium and matter of print publication as something like an open, universal “mechanised” text, in the sober, at times evangelical realisation of a Swiftian satire. Moreover, this marriage has linked the traditional domain of the book 1

to the entire field of techno-mechanical production and re-production, from machine aesthetics and “machine art,”2 to aesthetic machines, by means of extensive, interconnected computing networks—a project whose positivism is matched only by the gratuitousness of its structural outcomes. For it is upon precisely such a fantastic “Project for improving speculative Knowledge by practical and mechanical Operations” that the twentieth-century evolution of “hypertext” and “artificial intelligence” is founded. The historical advent of the World Wide Web in late 1990 opened the possibility that any form of electronic “text” (or media) could, quite literally, be integrally linked to any other electronic text. Invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist at the Centre Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), the World Wide Web was originally conceived and developed for large high-energy physics collaborations which require instantaneous data processing and information sharing between laboratories and computing facilities around the world. Berners-Lee, along with a colleague at CERN, Robert Cailliau, also established fundamental protocols such as URLs (Universal Resource Locators), HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language), which provide the basis for electronic hypertext as we know it today (as distinct from existing Internet protocols). Anticipating this development as early as the mid-1940s, Vannevar Bush (at that time Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in America) envisaged a form of electronic, interactive text archive (or prosthetic memory), which he termed the “memex.” This prototype of modern hypertext was first described in an article by Bush in 1945, in the Atlantic Monthly,3 and was envisaged as a type of electronically linked information retrieval machine designed to help scientists and private individuals process, organise and access the increasing quantities of information that new research and communications technologies were making available. Bush described this machine, the memex, as: a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanised private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records and communications, and which is mechanised so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged supplement to his memory.4

This supplemental memory was envisaged as performing a prosthetic function of “associative indexing” linked to a mechanical archive, of which it would form an integral part, “the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex.”5 According to George P. Landow, Bush’s 2

memex is essentially a “poetic machine,” which works on the basis of analogy and association, describing a pre-digital cybernetic interface that drew in some degree upon the poetic science of Giambattista Vico and at the same time anticipated the mind ecologies of Gregory Bateson.6 In the 1960s Bush’s ideas were taken up by computing engineers like Douglas C. Englebart and Theodor H. Nelson, who coined the term “hypertext” to describe a similar type of interface. In Literary Machines, Nelson defined hypertext as “non-sequential writing—text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways.”7 For Nelson, a “hypertext” is not determined by its assumed physical or conceptual boundaries, but by communications between texts, between textual structures and between textual elements (where every apparent “limit” suggests, instead, the possibility of a further linkage). Consequently today hypertext as a term is taken to refer almost exclusively to computer-based networks of interlinked texts, supported by an array of “mark-up” languages and specialised scripts. This form of “hypertext,” however, only began to be generally available for personal computers in the late 1980s, whilst the ubiquitous World Wide Web did not take form in the popular imagination until the advent of browser software like Mosaic and Netscape in the early 1990s, and the appearance of the Windows operating system for PCs in the middle of the decade. HYPER/TEXT According to hypertext theorist Jay David Bolter, tradition has it that the “written text” is a “stable record of thought, and [that] to achieve this stability the text has to be based on a physical medium: clay, papyrus or paper; tablet, scroll or book.”8 Indeed, certain empirical approaches to the materiality of the “book” argue that “not only is the text [...] caught in the materiality of the book, it is also tied to the book’s paper, cardboard, ink, and glue to the historical and economic conditions of its production and distribution.”9 Such an approach considers the advent of electronic texts as representing a crisis and a threat to the integrity and meaning especially of literary texts and of literary genres. J. Hillis Miller, commenting upon the fate of the novel, suggests that electronic texts are given: a strange new historic placement in the cyberspace of today. A date of original publication is indicated, and that is about all. The novel exists not as embodied in material form, or at least not material in the fixed way of a printed book. It exists as a large number of bits of information, zeroes and ones inscribed as magnetic differences on a hard disk or on magnetic tape or as minute scratches 3

on an optical disk or as electronic pulses on the wired and wireless transmissions of the Internet.10

For Hillis Miller, a “text” suspended in cyberspace is thus “detached from its local historical context” and becomes “a text in the context of an enormous and incoherent abundance of works of all kinds—verbal, pictorial, and auditory—on the Internet.” Moreover, “this transformation is occurring even though it is still a primary goal of literary history and literary criticism in the modern languages to understand and interpret the culture of the book.”11 Nostalgia for the “text” as artefact belies a central confusion in much of what continues to pass for “literary criticism,” between what we might call bibliographic and linguistic codes, for example: a confusion that often persists in the synonymous use of terms like “book” and “text.” This can be seen as representative of an empirical tendency still current in some areas of literary scholarship, where “materiality” and historical context remain conceptually fixed outside any discourse (including critical discourse) which would not respect such boundaries or which would challenge the certainties implied by them. Joyce himself parodies this preoccupation with the artefactual value of the book at length in Finnegans Wake in regards to a certain letter, “discovered” by a hen in a dunghill in an advanced state of decomposition. This letter, which is said to “belong” to ALP (Anna’s gramme),12 is subjected to extensive “genetic” analysis by a grave Bròfessor, and posed as evidence during various “inquisitions,” but nevertheless remains indecipherable (due not only to its decomposition, but to the physical “damage” wrought upon it by the hen, the Bròfessor, and the general process of its exegesis, not to mention the fact that the letter is to start with also a text). The desire to decipher “all there may remain to be seen” (FW 113.32-33) from this tea-stained letter, suggests a desire to gain knowledge about the real, revealing that beneath the desire to address the artefactual value of the book is also hidden a desire to situate the meaning of the text in the material reality that is supposed to frame it. This hermeneutic recovery is shown, however, to be a mirage. As Joyce puts it: “Closer inspection of the bordereau would reveal a multiplicity of personalities inflicted on the documents or document” (FW 107.23-26), suggesting that the singular identity of the letter is not only in question,13 but a product itself of hermeneutic “infliction”: every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle anyway connected with the gobblydumped turkery was moving and changing every part of the time: the travelling inkhorn (possibly pot), the hare and turtle pen and paper, the continually more or less intermisunderstanding minds of the anticollaborators, the as time went on as it will variously inflected, differently pronounced, 4

otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns [...] riot of inkblots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed. [FW 118.11-30]

But even if we are to take into account the different possible factors that confer meaning upon the “book” as an artefact, or even upon the printed word as signifying in a way distinct from, say, a word displayed on a computer screen—that would still not mean that the text can be considered simply as the shadow or trace of an idea “already shaped,” as it were, by an historical context within which the “technology of the book” would be imbedded. Even adopting a more or less socio-empirical view of literate cultures, what we would call textual structures can be seen as actively determining so-called “ideas” just as powerfully as the “primal structures” that are considered as shaping language itself (as in McLuhan’s dictum: the medium is the message).14 And this would suggest, quite trivially, that what Hillis Miller terms the “culture of the book” and its grounding in certain “historical contexts” describes an elementary confusion: on the one hand, of textuality with the normative structures that it in fact determines and to which it is made to appear subject, and, on the other hand, of the signifying “materiality” of the text with the artefactual value of the printed book. However, as long as “the text” was seen to be married to physical media, many readers and writers took for granted three crucial attributes: that the text was linear, bounded and fixed. Generations of scholars have internalised these qualities as the rules of thought, and they have had persuasive, and pervasive, social consequences. Nevertheless, these rules of thought have come under increasing scrutiny during the course of the twentieth-century, most recently in the form of post-structural theory and the advent of hypertext. As the critic Richard Lanham has noted: It was establishing the original text that the Renaissance scholars thought their main task, and generations of textual editors since have renewed their labours. The aim of all this was to fix the text forever.15

The continuing controversy over Hans Gabler’s “computerised Ulysses” (as Hugh Kenner called it in the April 1980 edition of Harper’s) makes abundantly clear just how intense the desire to “fix the text forever” can be.16 Gabler’s conceptualisation of the editing process may have occurred “independently of his decision to use the computer,”17 but the controversy over his “synoptic” version of Ulysses offers a clear illustration of the way computers can revolutionise our understanding of text, but also how they can become the tools of a form of technological nostalgia. Every word in Gabler’s synoptic 5

text was supposedly written by Joyce himself, and yet the final “reading text” is a text no one ever wrote: it had never existed prior to its 1984 publication.18 In this sense Gabler’s Ulysses recalls certain mathematical formulae which produce structures that, while in some cases resembling phenomena in the “real” world, have no counterpart in that world. JOYCE INC. Gabler’s use of the computer to “restore” Ulysses to the form of its “total conception,” belies a tendency within some areas of textual scholarship towards a certain imitative encyclopaedism, constructing upon the assumptions of a possible totality of authorial intention something like a codex, or signatura rerum. The archival desire which underwrites this project also extends to the totality of authorial identity, and to the projection of this encyclopaedism onto the body of artefacts and testimonies which circulate around the proper name of the author. Indeed, since its inception Joyce studies has been effected by issues of legality and ownership. William Brockman has pointed out that “amongst these should be included the aggressive acquisition by American universities of library collections during the 1950s, the beneficence of donors, the tastes of private collectors, the sporadic restrictions placed upon access by the Joyce estate, and the intentional destruction of documents”—all of which has strongly influenced the disposition of Joyce studies.19 As Brockman suggests, one result of Joyce’s “lifelong peripatetic style of residence,” and of his abrupt departure from Paris in 1939, was that there remained after his death a legacy of letters and manuscripts scattered throughout Europe.20 In the 1940s Joyce’s papers were distributed amongst a variety of private owners, beyond the knowledge, or at least control, of the Joyce Estate, and for the most part unavailable to scholars. Sales in 1924 of most of John Quinn’s library (not including a manuscript copy of the eighth draft of “Circe”),21 and in 1935 of manuscripts in the possession of Sylvia Beach, brought a limited number of papers onto the open market.22 But whilst Harvard had acquired the manuscript of Stephen Hero in 1937, there was no effective institutional collecting of Joyce’s papers until the 1950s. Even after Joyce’s death in 1941, libraries remained ambivalent about collecting Joyceana, despite Judge John M. Woolsey’s decision lifting the United States ban on Ulysses in 1933,23 while the upheavals of the Second World War, combined with issues of “propriety and public responsibility,” necessarily limited availability. But over the next fifteen years, during the height of collecting by American universities, Joyce’s papers gained sufficient value “to subject their

6

acquisition to contention and dispute.” It was this market, as Brockman points out, that resulted in their complicated distribution among libraries today.24 In 1979, a group of scholars—Michael Groden, Danis Rose, A. Walton Litz, Hans Walter Gabler and David Hayman—completed work on one of the major efforts of publishing in Joyce Studies, aimed at resolving at least some of the difficulties caused by the distribution of Joyce’s notebooks and manuscripts. The James Joyce Archive in 63 volumes was, for a time, seen as solving the more immediate problem of accessing the many disparate library collections, although it soon became apparent that the sheer size and cost of the Archive (and its limited edition of 250 copies) was itself prohibitive. Moreover, among other increasingly notable flaws, the Archive did not in fact represent the entire body of Joyce’s extant papers, many of which still remain in private hands. By 1984 the question of accessibility had become of pressing importance, with the publication of Gabler’s three-volume “Critical and Synoptic Edition” of Ulysses by Garland (although as John Kidd has pointed out, not always for lack of documentation and availability of primary materials). Gabler, with the assistance of graduate students Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior at the Institute for English Philology, in Munich, and supported by a grant of US $300,000 from the German government, produced what was for a time hailed by its admirers as the definitive text of Ulysses, with no fewer than five thousand “improvements.” In 1986 Gabler’s “Estate authorised” Ulysses: The Corrected Text was published in one volume, with all other editions being withdrawn from the market—a situation which in turn raised afresh questions about the accessibility of “Ulysses as Joyce wrote it.” In 1990 the bulk of Joyce’s work temporarily moved out of copyright. But in 1993 Britain and the United States revised their copyright laws in line with broader European standards, retrospectively extending the term of copyright protection from fifty to seventy years from the author’s death. However, during the three years in which Joyce’s work fell out of copyright control, Donald Theall at Trent University in Canada (where copyright laws remain unaffected by the 1993 amendments) established online versions of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, while revised editions of Joyce’s work were produced by several major publishers, including Penguin’s re-issue of the 1961 Bodley Head Ulysses, following the 1988 controversy over Gabler’s “corrected” text. By the mid-1990s, Gabler’s major rival, John Kidd of Boston University, also lost favour with critics, resulting in the indefinite suspension of plans by Norton to publish his three-volume text of Ulysses, initially scheduled for 1992 release, but first deferred and then later abandoned altogether. In 1994 Joyce’s grandson, Stephen Joyce, began to issue a series of legal threats against academics who chose to quote from Joyce’s private 7

correspondence. Brenda Maddox’s Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce (awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography in 1988, and subsequently, in 2000, adapted for film by director Pat Murphy) was withdrawn by its publishers, Random House, and re-issued with substantial emendations. On this occasion the Joyce estate had taken offence at Maddox’s reference to Joyce’s “pornographic” and scatological letters in the last chapter of her book.25 Similarly, at the XVth International James Joyce Symposium, held in Zürich in June 1996, Stephen Joyce vowed that he would “prevent the genetic scholars from ‘mucking up’ Joyce’s texts with new editions ‘just to build reputations.’”26 In 2001 Danis Rose’s controversial “Readers’ Edition” of Ulysses was found by the High Court in London to be in breach of copyright, at the behest of Estate lawyers (not for unlawful use of Joyce’s text, as such, but for the inclusion of 250 previously unpublished words taken by Rose from Joyce’s manuscripts and notebooks). Ahead of the 2003 James Joyce Colloquium in Prague, the Joyce Estate issued threats to several colloquium delegates regarding the use of copyrighted materials, particularly images of the Ulysses notebooks acquired in 2002 by the National Library in Dublin, effectively gagging the curator of the Dublin Bloomsday Centenary exhibition. This occasioned extensive discussion about the nature of “Fair Use” provisions under international copyright conventions and the legal rights and responsibilities of scholars and copyright holders. In 2004 the situation has not improved. Most recently, the longdiscussed Digital Ulysses project, co-ordinated by Michael Groden with an international editorial team of Joyce scholars, had to be suspended indefinitely after Stephen Joyce, grandson of the author, demanded the sum of US $3million for permission to reproduce the three core editions of Joyce’s text (1922, 1961, 1984) alongside notebook and manuscript facsimiles. These concerns aside, there remains the problem of access to the disparate and extensive collections of Joyce’s notebooks and manuscripts. Joyce himself often joked that his books would keep the professors busy for centuries, something which seems at times to be born out by the academic concern for textual minutiae. But after the excesses of the 1980s, Joyce studies has for the time being ceased to be dominated by the Alexandrian project of resurrecting an Ur-text of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake: “Ur greeft on them!” (FW 241.31). On the other hand, the challenges of the James Joyce Archive, and the attention aroused by the Gabler-Kidd scandal, have prompted many Joyce scholars to look deeper into the significance of manuscript analysis and its impact upon Joyce studies generally.27 In the early 1990s the widespread availability of hypermedia software seemed to provide possible solutions to many of the dilemmas posed by the existing distribution of Joyce’s papers and to the ethical problems that had 8

arisen during the 1980s over editorial practice. It also seemed to offer a possible bridge between traditional manuscript analysis and current trends in textual theory, a way of re-consolidating the Joycean project, and of combining the enthusiasm of grant bodies and commercial investors (particularly in the area of CD and DVD-ROM development) with the interests of scholarship. With the rapid growth in virtual media, there has also been a renewal and extension of existing theories and practices of “genetic” criticism, particularly at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM) in Paris, the Antwerp Joyce Centre, and the Poetry and Rare Books Collection at SUNY Buffalo, along with various individual projects world-wide.28 Among other things, the marriage of textual genetics and hypertext promises a means of tracing the formation of received versions of Joyce’s work and of the “unreceivable” Joycean archive which haunts them, without necessarily resorting to the archaeological precepts (not to mention the histrionics) of Urcritics like Gabler and Kidd, and “keeping the book open” on the on-going genesis of Joyce’s texts as they were written and as they are being read. LITERATE TECHNOLOGIES Generally speaking, hypertext emerged at a time when textual theories had already reconfigured the way we think about the book and about what it is that constitutes a text. To a greater or lesser extent hypertext presented a possible means of overcoming the material limitations of the existing reading culture— from the most “mundane” reading practice, to the more complex requirements of cross referencing and the presentation of simultaneous or variorum texts. This utilitarian function of hypertext, an extension of older information retrieval systems, is still the most common use of the medium— and despite its supposedly radical break with the existing structure of the book it remains, in fact, closely related to such traditional “internal” meta-textual functions as citation, indexing, tables of contents, etc., as well as to such “external” functions as concordances, annotations, encyclopaedias and so on. By the same token, hypertext has also been seen as eroding precisely those boundaries which determine the relation of text to meta-text, along with such institutionalised notions as completion, closure and linearity. When it first began to encroach upon the field of textual studies, however, the real challenge of hypertext was that it rendered explicit the particular psychological processes of “synthesis” that have always been a part of the experience of language, but that have nonetheless been subordinated to the interests of formal discourse. Practically speaking, the advent of hypertext brought with it a number of problems that made it difficult to continue regarding post-Saussurean discourse as purely “speculative.” It seemed that 9

heretofore “theoretical speculations” on the nature of signifying structure would have a “material” realisation in the shape of a functional “technology” that, rather than existing on the margins of the academy or passing in as a kind of literary fashion, was in fact about to entrench itself in the very fabric of popular and official culture globally. And in the process, this strange technology has come to further re-define the way in which we conceive of the relationship between “information” and “textuality.” In the context of literary studies, this novel, and seemingly unlimited capacity to manipulate texts brought with it conceptual problems which, by and large, arose from the purely utilitarian function scholars had considered computers to serve in regards to their research needs (primarily as a reference tool). When it became evident that hypertext was something far more dynamic than simply an information retrieval system—that is, as a medium in its own right (the first verbal medium, after computing languages, to emerge from the computer revolution)—questions again arose as to what constitutes a unit of text, and what are the relevant (or possible) links between textual units? That a text is not an object was one of the arguments of Roman Ingarden’s 1931 phenomenological study, The Literary Work of Art,29 and a similar conclusion is to be found in the twelfth chapter of René Wellek’s and Austin Warren’s 1949 Theory of Literature.30 This chapter, written by Wellek and heavily indebted to Ingarden, disputes various accounts of the literary text as any sort of empirical or psychological entity, although it nevertheless suggests that the text may be situated or realised by empirical means.31 In Wellek’s conception, the text is neither an artefact like a piece of sculpture (that is, the physical pages or book), nor the real sounds uttered by someone performing it. Neither is it the psychological experience of someone hearing or reading it, the experience of the author in creating it, nor, finally, is it the totality of readers’ experiences or even what all of them have in common (which would be merely a lowest common denominator). Wellek concludes that a text is only a matter of norms which serve as “a potential cause of experiences,”32 which Ingarden views as phenomenological in nature, whereby the term “experience” is substituted for the various ways in which a text can be konkretisiert or realised.33 Nevertheless, it is arguable that the first requirement for a theory of hypertext is that it take into account the medium itself as a technology. That is, not in its utilitarian sense, but in its signifying function. Borrowing a metaphor of a virtual, medium or interface, we might view this technology as contiguous with the a-centric structures inscribed within or between languages and programmed “by language.” In other words, as an accumulation of processes of coding and transcoding, translation and integration between differing softwares and different semantic systems. At the same time, its technē remains 10

linked to textuality: “helping us to think writing in a more complicated relation with space and time […] because of the possibilities of folding a text back on itself, of discontinuous jumps establishing quasi-instantaneous links.”34 In other words, this “medium” would articulate a textual apparatus which would also be technological. In Of Grammatology, Derrida suggests that cybernetics, and in particular the cybernetic programme, in fact describes a field of writing. For Derrida: if the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts— including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory—which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, grammē [written mark], or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed.35

This may in fact be one of the most succinct statements about the nature of such metaphors as “hypertext,” situated as it is on the breach of the mechanical and the human, technē and physis, and so on—informing the cybernetic apparatus, from the most elementary processes of information to structural formulations of semantic systems, as contiguous with a condition of writing. At the same time, this condition itself is seen to undergo modifications, following the various developments of “the practical methods of information retrieval” which extend “the possibilities of the ‘message’ vastly, to the point where it is no longer the ‘written’ translation of a language, the transporting of a signified which could remain to be spoken in its integrity.”36 For “cybernetics” can be thought of as a moment or series of moments in which the pro-grammē is seen to mark a writing “prior” to the sign, that “medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technical and economic adventure of the West,” which in its turn is “limited in space and time” to a particular historical placement. It is this tentative “priority” of the pro-grammē which provides the deconstructive “element” of Derrida’s cybernetics, as nonlinguistic inscription: Even before being determined as human (with all the distinctive characteristics that have always been attributed to man and the entire system of significations that they imply) or nonhuman, the grammē—or the grapheme—would thus name the element. An element without simplicity. An element, whether it is understood as a medium or as the irreducible atom, of the archē-synthesis in general, of what one must forbid oneself to define within the system of oppositions of metaphysics, of what consequently one should not even call experience in general, that is to say, the origin of meaning in general.37

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This “nonfortuitous conjunction of cybernetics and the ‘human sciences’”38 could be one way in which we might understand Derrida’s description of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as a “1000th generation computer” or “hypermnesiac machine.”39 HYPERWAKE One of the earliest attempts at a computer presentation of the work of James Joyce was undertaken in 1990 by Fritz Senn and the Zürich Joyce Foundation. This prototype, entitled HyperWake, comprised a computer-based hypermedia “demonstration” of a paragraph from Finnegans Wake. HyperWake was first put on public display at a Joyce exhibition in 1991, entitled Joyce and Cage, as part of the annual Zürich June Festival, and was later exhibited at the XIIIth International James Joyce Symposium in Dublin, in June 1992. The following is a quote from the exhibition’s description: HyperWake is simply a labyrinthine presentation of 6.13-28 (“Shize fuddled, O!”), a sort of extended annotation. You can hear the text (spoken by two different Irish voices), switch to two German and a French or an Italian translation; or follow the text’s growth and genesis in several stages (in facsimile and transcriptions); the main part is a sentence by sentence annotation, with further thematic groupings and cross-references, as well as a marginal fringe of further echoes. And you can listen to the respective songs. This pristine version is entirely didactic and intended for non-Wakeans, to give them some feel of the text’s behaviour. It also puts some of its fun and the intricate nature across. It might become a prototype for insiders and computer experts more skilled than we have been up to now. Of course the main point is that everything will become expandable ad libitum.

HyperWake developed a number of themes and ideas mapped out earlier in composer John Cage’s Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake.40 Cage’s Roaratorio was originally conceived as a radio drama, and was first produced by Klaus Schöning for IRCAM in Paris in 1979, and later performed at the Frankfurt Opera House during the 1984 Joyce Symposium. The title itself derives from a passage in Finnegans Wake: “this longawaited Messiagh of roaratorios” (FW 41.28), as does the content and most of the composition’s formal logic.41 The idea for the Roaratorio began when Cage was invited to provide musical accompaniment to another project based upon Joyce’s text, which he had begun in 1976 as a contribution to an issue of TriQuarterly entitled In the Wake of the Wake, and which evolved into the book Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake. Cage himself already had a long history of involvement with 12

Joyce’s text, beginning with the adaptation of part of Finnegans Wake (556.1-22) in 1942 for the song lyric “The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs,” originally composed “for voice and closed piano.” For the later project, however, Cage turned to a combination of mechanical means to select and combine elements of Joyce’s text, initially subjecting the Wake to a series of chance operations determined by a computer programme called Mesolist (based on the I-Ching), which ultimately produced “a 41-page mesostic text, using the string JAMES JOYCE.”42 In Cage’s lexicon, a mesostic is a type of hermetic, “found” acrostic (“croststyx” [FW 206.04]) poem, which emerges in the form of textual fragments agglutinating around the capitalised proper name of the author: A mesostic is like an acrostic; I used the name of JAMES JOYCE. And had I written acrostics the name would have gone down the margin, the left-handside. But a mesostic is a road down the middle. So I would look for a word with a J in it that didn’t have an A because the A belongs on the second line for JAMES. And then a word with A that didn’t have an M, and an M that didn’t have an E, and an E that didn’t have an S and in this way I made a path through the entire book […]. I made the rule of not repeating a syllable that had already been used to express the J of James. So I kept an index, a card index […] of 41 pages.

Working through Finnegans Wake, Cage uncovered 862 instances in which Joyce had “signed” his text in this way, collecting them in a single volume under the title Writing through Finnegans Wake. But after pressure from his editor at Wesleyan University Press, who claimed that the text was too long and boring, Cage produced another reading, this time entitled Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake,43 the outcome of which is a peculiar yet insightful approach to the possible hypertexts of Finnegans Wake. The idea of mesostics is interesting for a consideration of Joycean hypertext for many reasons, not least because it mimics, to a greater or lesser extent, the structural schema of the Wake’s “central figures,” HCE and ALP (as well as being a parody of the mystical idea of revelation through divine logos or “authorial signature), but because it also requires that we begin to account for Joyce’s work within a larger tradition of schematic writing or “literate technologies.” As Pound argues in his work on machine art, “the best form comes from a mathematic of strains”—a notion of poietic or textual constraint which, although it has always underwritten language as such and literary form in particular, had largely until the Industrial Revolution been concealed behind the illusionism of the fictive arts. Joyce’s major pre-occupation from early in Ulysses and throughout Finnegans Wake had been to make such technical 13

procedures the focus of the “literary work” itself, thereby de-mystifying the notion of “literature” as well as quasi-divinity of the “author.” The same procedures are foregrounded in Roaratorio, where Cage’s use of Joyce’s text as “raw material” for his textual assemblages is affected with a critical indifference to its cultural or even semantic value, but with an incisiveness nonetheless with regards to those forms of cultural fetishism which determine such procedures as acts of vandalism, philistinism or as simply taboo. Cage’s use of mesostics is also revealing of the way in which most schematic readings of the Wake ultimately display a certain arbitrariness in regards to so-called “first principles.” The idea of Joyce’s name as a mock “skeleton key” to Finnegans Wake reveals, among other things, that schematic renderings of Joyce’s text are firstly involved in a process of textual invention and secondly in one of self-definition and examination. wroth with twoone nathandJoe A M jhEm Shen pftJschute sOlid man that the humptYhillhead of humself is at the knoCk out in thE park44

In 1979 the 41-page text of Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake became the foundation for Roaratorio, which was composed as a sixty minute soundscape, directed by references to place-names in Joyce’s text. As Cage recalled: “places mentioned in the Wake are identified in Louis Mink’s book A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer […]. And so a sound coming from Nagasaki, or from Canberra in Australia, or from a town in Ireland or a street in Dublin—could be identified by page and line and then put into this hour, where it belonged in relation to the page and line of Finnegans Wake.”45 Cage and his assistants then went to many of those places and recorded the sounds they found there, and obtained a number of other recordings by contacting radio stations around the world. Cage then made a recording of himself reading various passages from the Wake. A third set of tapes was made of Irish music. Finally, he made a sound collage from all of these source tapes, divided into four parts, with each part representing a book of the Wake. The result was something not unlike the

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language of the Wake itself and is to date one of the most interesting attempts to “record” Joyce’s text. In 1963, Clive Hart published A Concordance to Finnegans Wake,46 which remained until the publication of the James Joyce Archive in 1984 the largest and most complicated undertaking in the history of Joyce scholarship. Moreover, although it was compiled entirely manually, the Concordance is arguably one of the earliest prototypes of a Joycean hypertext. Undertaken over a period of many years in Newcastle, Australia (funded by the University of Minnesota), and using literally thousands of catalogue cards, Hart’s project ultimately resulted in an index of almost the same size (if only fractionally as complex) as the Wake itself. The sheer volume of neologisms to be found in the Wake (218,076) meant that Hart’s Concordance had by and large to repeat, almost word for word (51,925 of which occur only once), and in alphabetical order, virtually the entire contents of Joyce’s book (including 141 common words which appear without references or with only partial references). Hart himself was central to establishing the first schematic renderings of Joyce’s texts, many of which remain the basis of a great deal of Joycean scholarship, and continue to influence textual genetics today. His 1962 study Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake represented the first major attempt at investigating Joyce’s work in terms of structural principles, and while the importance of paronomasia in Finnegans Wake was generally acknowledged well before Hart’s study, it was Hart who first insisted upon the “structural” significance of Joyce’s puns. As Darren Tofts has noted: “The pun is […] the nanotechnology of literacy, a supercharged micro-machine capable of generating ‘counterpoint words’ at the speed of thought itself.”47 But the technology of the pun is also at work at the schematic or cosmological level of text (the “chaosmos of Alle” [FW 118.21])—in what we might call its structural convergence. Hart’s insight into the importance of context and the preparation of the reader in the operation of the pun recalls the structural importance Freud attributed to puns in Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious (1916) [Der Witz und Seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten (1905)] and anticipates, in many respects, Umberto Eco’s later analysis of the Wake’s paronomasia in his 1979 book The Role of the Reader.48 Hart’s thinking in this regard also incorporates many of the ideas of the Prague Structuralist and Russian Formalist critics, and further anticipates much of later “reader response” or “reception” theory. His historical-schematic rendering of the Wake and of the Wake’s language brings to mind Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser’s contention that language offers different “schematised views” through which the subject matter of the work can come to light, although the actual bringing to light is an action of Konkretisation.49 15

In Structure and Motif, Hart identifies two major patterns of organisation in the structure of Finnegans Wake. The first of these is a three-plus-one pattern which Joyce ostensibly borrowed from Vico’s Scienza Nuova, of a cyclical model of history comprising three evolutionary stages and a ricorso. Where Hart’s work touches closest on contemporary genetic approaches to Joyce’s text is his idea of schemata functioning as prototypical models of different levels of textual production—although where Hart focuses on how these emerge within Joyce’s text along more traditional lines of character and narrative, genetics tends to focus on how these schemata emerge from different points in the history of the text’s composition. Hart suggests that the overall structure of the Wake—by the three-plus-one pattern and its four-plusone schematic compliment—can also be understood in terms of the symbol ⊕. This cross within a circle corresponds to the siglum in the Finnegans Wake manuscripts used to designate what Hart refers to as the “highly important ninth question in I.6.9”: if a human being duly fatigued [...] having plenxty off time on his gouty hands [...] were [...] accorded [...] with an earsighted view of old hopinhaven [...] then what would that fargazer seem to seemself to seem seeming of, dimm it all? [FW 143.4-27]50

The Wake’s answer: “A collideorscope” (FW 143.28), can be seen as one of the many terms with which Joyce’s text describes itself, and Hart contends that Joyce’s use of the ⊕ siglum to designate a passage dealing with the structure of Finnegans Wake “suggests that in one structural sense, the whole book forms a mandala,” which the ⊕ symbol represents (“a quadripartite with diametrically inverted ornaments”).51 This symbol can also be taken as defining a shift across scale, between trope and schema, describing an implicitly hypertextual relation:

Book III

Book I.1-4 Book IV

Book II

Book I.5-8

16

Following from Hart’s project, Roland McHugh, in 1980, published his Annotations to Finnegans Wake which has formed the basis for a large body of scholarship devoted to annotating Joyce’s texts.52 McHugh’s other important study, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake (1976), furnished the first systematic inquiry into Joyce’s use of sigla in his writing: The Doodles Family,

Hoodle doodle, fam.? [FW 299.F4]

McHugh’s study is significant to the conceptualisation of hypertext because it engages the way in which textual elements in Joyce’s writing signify otherwise than linguistically, by means of a “siglification.” In a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver (24 March 1924), Joyce wrote: “In making notes I used signs for the chief characters,” but as McHugh himself has pointed out, any nominal approach to the sigla is liable to ambiguity, despite Joyce’s advertisements.53 As with the notational anagrams of H.C.E. and A.L.P., the sigla appear to stand in place of different “characters” or characteristics at different times. Studies into the Wake’s paronomasia have long seen Joyce’s phonic and graphic puns and portmanteau words as examples of lexemes or other sublexical units bearing “autonomous” significations beyond simply designating linguistic difference, as Ferdinand de Saussure first contended in his posthumous Cours de Linguistique Général (1913). This effect of verbal atomism has been compared to the “optical mixing” of post-Impressionist artists like Georges Seurat. According to early Joyce biographer and critic Stuart Gilbert, Finnegans Wake is “pointilliste throughout,”54 and Clive Hart has suggested that the Wake described: “The development of a style which involved the manipulation of ever smaller and more autonomous units.”55 LOGISTICAL TEXTS The problems confronting empirical studies of Joyce’s manuscripts or of his published work, such as McHugh’s Annotations, however, are similar to the logistical problems involved with Clive Hart’s Concordance. As scholarship expands the ground of the Annotations, other problems of how to establish a standard and up-to-date database of Finnegans Wake annotations arise. Resolving these problems was, for a long time, considered impractical when it wasn’t considered simply impossible. Part of the difficulty centres upon the Wake itself. Because of the complexity of its structure and language, and because of the difficulty of collating the manuscripts, there has been no published attempt to undertake a revision of the standard text of Finnegans Wake apart from the publication of a list of corrections prepared by Joyce as an appendix to the 1945 Viking edition, and its incorporation into the text of 17

the 1958 edition. But while the printed text itself has neither been corrected nor re-set since 1958,56 in 1990 the complete Finnegans Wake (along with Ulysses) was scanned from the Viking edition and made available in ASCII, and later HTML, format via the World Wide Web as part of an ambitious project undertaken by Donald Theall with Tim Szelinga at Trent University in Canada. Theall’s work on Joyce goes back to the McLuhan-Carpenter journal Explorations, where in 1954 he published an article on Joyce and communications,57 and since the early 1990s he has been at the centre of debate over the technological underpinnings of Joyce’s later writings. Moreover, Theall’s electronic versions of Joyce’s texts have greatly assisted in overcoming numerous logistical difficulties associated with Joycean textual scholarship, and provide the basis for establishing online databases incorporating the various existing Annotations (McHugh’s, as well as Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated)58 and the extensive body of genetic scholarship which has accumulated since (such as the internet-based FWAKE-N archive). After Hart’s Concordance, the most ambitious attempt at referencing and collating Joyce’s work was, as has already been mentioned, the James Joyce Archive, which has now been out of print for some years. One of its editors, Michael Groden, of the University of Western Ontario, has been another central figure in the application of hypermedia technologies in Joyce studies, following the publication of his book Ulysses in Progress in 1977.59 He himself has described Ulysses as “a hypertext novel before its time.”60 Since the early 1990s Groden has been involved in a project to engineer a hypermedia resource for Ulysses. Provisionally entitled James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Hypermedia Presentation, and later Digital Ulysses, Groden’s project aimed, like Cage’s Roaratorio, to incorporate a large number of extra-textual material. These include: “footnotes from the Gabler edition of Ulysses; highlights from Richard Ellmann’s Joyce biography; scanned images of advertisements and pop-culture ephemera; a minutely detailed map of the streets of Dublin,”61 as well as digitised footage from Joseph Strick’s 1967 film adaptation of Ulysses.62 A prototype of Groden’s project, comprising six pages from the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses, was demonstrated at the University of Toronto, during the “Hysterical/Historical Joyce” conference, on 16 June 1996, and “Digital Proteus” (a prototype of the vastly ambitious Digital Ulysses) was demonstrated in late 2003. As noted above, the project is currently suspended due to copyright issues. For some years now problems with copyright have also stood in the way of one of the more advanced hypertext projects concerned with Finnegans Wake. This project, directed by Daniel Ferrer at ITEM in Paris, is concerned mainly with providing a resource for mapping textual genetics in the Wake. Ferrer, 18

well known for his collaboration with Derek Attridge on Post-structuralist Joyce (1984) and his ongoing work as co-editor of the annotated facsimile editions of the Buffalo Finnegans Wake Notebooks (with Vincent Deane and Geert Lernout), has devoted a great deal of time not only to theorising textual genetics, but also to researching Joyce’s manuscripts. In 1994 he led a panel discussion on the question of avant-textes at the Seville Joyce Symposium (a discussion which was concerned with the structure of the trace in genetic criticism), and in 1995, at the Joyce and Modern Culture Conference at Brown University, delivered a keynote address on Wakean genetics and hypertext. At the 1996 Zürich Joyce Symposium, Ferrer demonstrated a “genetic hypertext” version of the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses, which allowed for a study of the episode using all extant pre-publication drafts and proofs for tracing the evolution of passages and revisions. Much of Ferrer’s work has been informed by Freudian theories of psychoanalysis, and this is reflected in his development of the notion of avanttexte (an idea also explored by Jacques Aubert, Laurent Milesi and André Topia). Ferrer’s goal has not been to use hypertext as a means of accessing textual annotations or of drawing out various echoes within the Wake, rather his interest has lain in the quasi-empirical way avant-textes (Joyce’s manuscripts, notebooks, letters, and so on) continue to haunt the published text of Finnegans Wake as a type of virtual memory. That is not to say that Ferrer advocates the idea of deciphering Joyce’s text by means of the various avant-textes, or of using these avant-textes to establish an Ur-text (such as Gabler’s and Kidd’s efforts with Ulysses). Rather Ferrer considers that avant-textes come to exercise a certain influence over the text itself, that they somehow “determine” the Wake’s structural and semantic forms in a similar way as the Freudian unconscious and preconscious might be seen to “determine” the structurality of the discourses of consciousness. Ferrer’s concern with this active haunting of the text derives partly from an interest in the effects Joyce’s writing has had on the idea of mimēsis or representation. With Michael Groden, Ferrer also acted as a consultant in the acquisition by the National Library of Ireland in 2002 of previously unknown Ulysses notebooks held by the family of Paul Léon. TEXTUAL MACHINES Anticipating the increased significance of hypertext in James Joyce scholarship, Jacques Derrida, in his 1984 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 19

Wake.”63 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 presentiment which is also a warning or a interdiction: “you can say nothing that is not programmed on this 1000th generation computer.” Besides Jacques Derrida, the idea of Joyce’s text as a kind of machine has also been treated by Jean-Michel Rabaté.64 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.”65 Importantly, this “perversion” does not arise through a process of distortion of meaning, but rather arises 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.”66 For Rabaté, this recurrence describes an irreducibility or “lapsus” in the totalising movement of the book—here in terms of the Wake’s paronomasia (“you have remembered my lapsus langways” [FW 484.25]). By disarticulating the received phonic-graphic binary (“What 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 requires the reader to attempt to (re-)assemble the semantic horizon of the text with whatever is near at hand.67 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 another 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 interpretatio: translation or 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 and to which it is ultimately 20

indifferent. Accordingly, this transverse structure reveals a “rupture” in the classical analytic scene and the objectivist methodology that belongs to it. In this way, analysis itself is opened to the necessary possibility of the radically contingent in the orientation and structure of its “own” procedures. Positing a similar rupture in the procedures of coding and decoding, Derek Attridge proposes that a text’s possible significations are not dependent upon discrete and quantifiable linguistic, phenomenological or psychological events, but “the multiple coincidences of language, both within language and across languages.”68 These coincidences 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 unforeseen 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.69

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 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s vaguely Fordist notion of desiring machines, it is possible to arrive at yet another sense of Joyce’s use of the term metempsychosis or “re-embodying.”70 For 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 unintentionality and chance. In Deleuze and Guattari’s conception, 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.”71 Further, when its body “turns back upon” its other parts, it is said to bring 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.72

21

This sense of “transverse communications,” between the textual body 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 recursion wherein the concepts of re-embodiment, metempsychosis, chance and intentionality intersect: Signifying [...] that, primeval conditions hav[e] gradually receded but nevertheless [have] persisted through intermittences of [...] providential divining, making possible and even inevitable [...] morphological circumformation. [FW 599.09-17]

Such a mechanism of “circumformation,” described by a system of traces “persisting through intermittences,” recalls what Derrida, in his essay “Two Words for Joyce,” terms “a hypermnesiac machine.”73 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 but the elision of meaning brought about in language by the constant re-alignment of narratives, 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,”74 an idea he further elaborates upon in “Two Words for Joyce”: 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.75

The topological structure of the relationship described here, between two textual programmes, suggests a 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.”76 Elsewhere Derrida describes this process in terms of a supplementary “chain of substitutions,” or as a “decentring,” suggesting analogies to what the mathematician Henri Poincaré termed the “Vicious Circle Principle” and which Russell in 1908 22

defined as an exclusion of metonymic totality. For Russell: “whatever involves all of a collection must not [itself] be one of the collection.”77 As with Derrida, Jean-Michel Rabaté envisages Joyce’s writing as a machine in which production is driven by an internal division (memory or desire) which opens a place of potentially limitless substitutions—a movement which finds itself programmed in advance by the irreducibility of the machine’s own internal paradox. This paradox is pervasive, but it might be said to be most fully accommodated in the purpose of the machine to supersede itself—a form of “built-in obsolescence,” which is also a form of projective self-substitution and auto-production. As Rabaté suggests, this paradox functions as a “lapsus” and points to the way in which a programmatic discourse would “attempt to fill the blank space of desire left hollow by—or in—the machine.”78 As in the Swiftian satire, it is this “subjection to the machine” that most radically reveals the susceptibility of “speculative reason” to the indifferent mechanics of language: the point at which the machine assumes the function of literacy as though “in place” of a subject that thinks, and this too in accordance with an inscrutable programme whose meaning will have been written there in advance of any possible reading.

23

NOTES 1

2 3 4 5 6

7 8

9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17

18 19

20 21

See Marshall McLuhan, “Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press,” Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan: 1943/1962, ed. E. McNamarra (New York: McGraw Hill, 1969) 5-21. Cf. David Hayman, Joyce et Mallarmé (Les Cahiers des lettres modernes. Collection confrontations, no. 2. Paris: Lettres modernes, 1956). Cf. Ezra Pund, Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years, ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly 176 (July 1945): 101-08. Bush, “As We May Think,” 106. Bush, “As We May Think,” 107. George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) 10. Cf. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972). Theodor H. Nelson, Literary Machines (Swarthmore, Pa.: Self-published, 1981) 0/2. Cited in George P. Landow, and Paul Delany, “Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies: The State of the Art,” Hypermedia and Literary Studies, eds. Landow and Delaney (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994) 3. J. Hillis Miller, “What is the Future of the Print Record?” Profession 95 (MLA, 1995): 34. Miller, “What is the Future of the Print Record?” 34-35. Miller, “What is the Future of the Print Record?” 35. Cf. Alan Roughley, Reading Derrida Reading Joyce (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1999) 56. The question of authority and authenticity, in regards to the letter, is most clearly illustrated in the “Tales Told of Shem and Shaun” episode of the Wake, where not only does Shem become in one moment both the body of the text and its author, but as “Sham” marks the letter as an originary forgery. In this sense the letter defines a simulacrum at the origin of textual production, and of logos (which Shem “embodies” in his moment of autopoiesis or auto-writing, mimicking the word of God). Marshal McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographical Man (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1962). Richard Lanham, “Convergent Pressures: Social, Technological, Theoretical,” Hypermedia and Literary Studies, 155. Charles Rossman, “The New Ulysses: The Hidden Controversy,” New York Review of Books 25:19 (1988): 53-58. Michael Groden, “Editing Joyce’s Ulysses: An International Effort,” Scholarly Publishing in an Era of Change: Proceedings of the Second Annual Meeting, Society for Scholarly Publishing, Minneapolis, Minnesota June 2-4, 1980, ed. Ethel C. Langlois (Washington, D.C.: Society for Scholarly Publishing, 1981) 29. Cf. John Kidd, “The Scandal of Ulysses,” New York Review of Books 11.35 (June 30, 1988). William S. Brockman, “Joyce and the Librarians,” paper delivered at the “Joyce and Modern Culture” conference, Brown University, June 13, 1995: rpr. “American Librarians and Early Censorship of Ulysses: ‘Aiding the Cause of Free Expression’”? Joyce Studies Annual 5 (1994): 56-74. Brockman, “Joyce and the Librarians.” This previously “unknown” draft, originally mentioned in a letter from Joyce to Quinn in 1921, was purchased by the Irish government on December 14, 2000, at an auction at Christie’s in New York. Terence Killeen, “See the truth behind Ulysses for yourself,” The

24

22 23

24 25 26 27

28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47

Irish Times, Weekend (June 2, 2001): 8. Another auction, this time of “the lost ‘Eumaeus’ notebook for Ulysses,” was held at Sotheby’s in London, July 10, 2001. Catalogue of a Collection Containing Manuscripts and Rare Editions of James Joyce (Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1935). Jeffrey Segall, Joyce in America: Cultural Politics and the Trials of Ulysses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 3ff. This is discussed in detail in Brockman, “American Librarians and Early Censorship of Ulysses.” Brockman, “American Librarians and Early Censorship of Ulysses.” Brenda Maddox, Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce (New York: Random House, 1988). Cf. Carol Schloss, “Privacy and Piracy in the Joyce Trade,” JJQ 33.4 (1996): 499ff. Schloss, “Privacy and Piracy in the Joyce Trade,” 500. Cf. George Steiner, Real Presences (London: Faber, 1989) 40. Steiner makes the point that: “All exegesis [...] transports the text into some measure of distance and banishment. Veiled in analysis and metamorphic exposition, the Ur-text is no longer immediate [...]. On the other hand, the commentary underwrites [...] the continued authority and survival of the primary discourse.” Details of some of these can be found in the online bibliography of the electronic journal Hypermedia Joyce Studies: www.geocities.com/hypermedia_joyce. Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic and Theory of Literature, trans. George G. Grabowicz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973) 3. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). Chapter 12 was written by Wellek. Cf. René Wellek, “The Theory of Literary History,” Études dédiées au quatrième Congrès de linguistes: Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague (Prague: Karolinum, 1936) 179. Wellek, “The Theory of Literary History,” 150. Cf. Roman Ingarden, Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks (Tübingen, 1968) 49ff. Ingarden, Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks, 49. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Chicago: Chicago Uniersity Press, 1979) 9. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 10. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 9. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 10. Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” Poststructuralist Joyce, 147-148. John Cage, Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake and Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake (Ars Acoustica CD: WER 6303-2 [Werbo 286 303-2]). Marjorie Perloff, “John Cage’s Dublin, Lyn Hejinian’s Leningrad: Poetic Cities as Cyberspaces,” Classical, Renaissance, and Postmodern Acts of the Imagination: Essays Commemorating O.B. Hardison, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996) 61. Cf. John Cage and Klaus Schöning, “Laughtears: Conversation on Roaratorio,” Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake, ed. Klaus Schöning (Königstein: Atheneum, 1985) 107. Perloff, “John Cage’s Dublin,” 61-2. John Cage, Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake (New York: Printed Editions, 1978). Cage, Roaratorio, 29. Cage, Roaratorio, 89. Clive Hart, A Concordance to Finnegans Wake., corrected ed. (New York: Paul Appel, 1974). Tofts, Memory Trade, 90.

25

48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64

65 66 67

Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979). Ingarden, Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks, 270ff. Cited in Alan Roughley, James Joyce and Critical Theory: An Introduction (London: Harvester, 1991) 11. Cf. Roland McHugh, The Sigla of Finnegans Wake (London: Edward Arnold, 1976) 118. For McHugh the ⊕ symbol “denotes the mental sensation of contemplating the mandala of Finnegans Wake, a tranquil equipoise at the hub of time” (121). There has been considerable speculation on the relationship between Finnegans Wake’s schematic structures and Jung’s conception of archetypes and collective unconscious (in which Jung employed the mandala symbol). Although Joyce was acquainted with Jung (who treated his daughter, Lucia, for part of her illness), and made several references to Jung in the Wake (“Jungfraud’s” [FW 460.20]), he was more clearly drawn to the ideas of Vico and, to a less certain extent, Freud and the British anthropologist Sir J.G. Frazer. Roland McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). McHugh, Annotations to Finnegans Wake, 135. Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study (New York: Vintage, 1952) 96. Clive Hart, “Quinet,” James Joyce: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. W.M. Chance (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1974) 130. See Hart, introductory note on “The Text,” A Concordance, n. pag. Hart refers to “the first trade edition, emended according to the “Corrections of Misprints in Finnegans Wake,” [1945] after the latter had itself been emended by collation with the typescript (and carbon) of the corrections and with the unbound copy of the first edition […] on which Joyce, with the assistance of Paul Léon, drew up the original list of errata.” Donald Theall, “Here Comes Everybody,” Explorations 2 (April, 1954): 66-77. Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses., rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Michael Groden, Ulysses in Progress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). Cited in Thomas J. Deloughry, “A Multimedia Boot Camp Inspires Scholarly CD-ROMs,” Chronicle of Higher Education (July 26, 1996): A22. Cited in Daniel Zalewski, “Field Notes: Scanners,” Lingua Franca 6.6 (1996): 10. Ulysses (1967: b/w, 124 min.), directed by Joseph Strick; with Barbara Jefford, Milo O’Shea, Maurice Roeves, Fionnula Flanagan (distributed by Mystic Fire Video, PO Box 9323, South Burlington, Vermont 05407, USA). Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” 147-148 Cf. Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Pour une cryptogénetique de l’idiolecte Joycien,” Genèse de Babel: Joyce et la création, ed. Claud Jacquet (Paris: Louis Hay Éditions du Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, 1985). Cf. also Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Le Nœued Gordien de «Pénélope»,” James Joyce «Scribble» 1 genèse des textes, ed. Claude Jacquet (Paris: Lettres Modernes Minard, 1988). Rabaté, “Lapsus ex machina,” Post-structuralist Joyce, 79. Maurice Blanchot, La part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949) 123. By disarticulating the received phonic-graphic binary, Joyce’s writing also deprives hermeneutics of a semantic limit against which “presence” might then be posited in relation to a prior code. The pun between “decorded” (cord f. L cors, cordis, heart) and decoded bears obvious significance here.

26

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

77

78

Derek Attridge, “Postmodern Joyce: Chance, Coincidence and the Reader,” Joyce Studies Annual, 1995, ed. Thomas F. Staley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995) 287-8. Attridge, “Postmodern Joyce,” 283. Cited in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H.R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977) 43. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 43. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 43. Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” 147. Jacques Derrida, “The Double Sessions,” Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) 221. Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” 148. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987) 27. This metaphor describes a two-fold relation that suggests, also, Georg Cantor’s set continuum problem, which also came to pre-occupy Gottlob Frege and Bertram Russell. Bertram Russell, “Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types,” American Journal of Mathematics 30 (1908): 222-62; repr. in Bertram Russell, Logic and Knowledge (London: Allen and Unwin, 1956) 59-102. Russell, Logic and Knowledge.

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Donald F. Theall TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE BOOK IN JOYCE’S DREAM VISION OF DIGICULTURE The digital, pre-cyberfied Joyce, precursor of hypermedia, first emerged at the conclusion of the First World War during his exile to Zürich (1915-20). The first major shift in Joyce’s stylistic and structural directions in his writing of Ulysses occurred while he was composing the “Cyclops” episode in 1919 and continued through the composition of “Circe” and “Ithaca” in Spring and Summer of 1920.1 Stylistically and structurally, these episodes, together with those of “Aeolus,” “Sirens” and “Oxen of the Sun” are the sections of Ulysses which are the ones that most clearly approximate the style, structures and techniques of Finnegans Wake. The unremitting “interetexuality” of the redrafting of “Cyclops,” followed later by the complex multiphonic allusiveness of “Oxen of the Sun” began Joyce’s sophisticated experimental transformations of the mechanics of the text. This transition fully launched his role of becoming the prime explorer of the place of the book in the post-electric world—a road which was to permit him to explore poetically the accelerating modes of synaesthesia, the orchestration of the arts and contextual fluidity which would provide a new language, a new sense of structure and a probing of the depths of the social as well as the individual unconscious in dreams that had always already provided the sense of art as virtuality. Zürich at the end of the second decade of the twentieth century provided Joyce with encouragement and influence from Dadaism—particularly through Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball and Hans Arp—as well as a medley of transEuropean artistic and poetic influences wielded by others sheltering there. Further Euro-American currents reinforced and expanded that impact temporally, spatially and intellectually. He did not achieve this ex nihilo, for that historic Dadaist moment in Zürich during World War I was coupled shortly after with Dadaistic movements in New York, Berlin and Paris, later supplemented by Surrealism. These were further complemented and supplemented by the major impact of French symbolisme, late Nineteenth Century art, and the Americo-British-Gallic poetic movement marked by Imagism (particularly Pound, Eliot and Yeats) and Vorticism. Continental European art, literature and theory of the first three decades of the twentieth century provided Joyce with key debates about the impact of science, mathematics and technology on cultural production, particularly with regard to their importance in the post-electric age which became a focal point for the poetic prophecy of Finnegans Wake. 28

Joyce’s connection with these continental artistic currents is further confirmed by his close friendship with Carola Giedion-Welcker and her husband, the historian-theorist of architecture and art, Sigfried Giedion; by the combination of his fascinating admiration for, and his sharp artistic, intellectual and satiric criticism of Wyndham Lewis; and by his close friendship with Frank Budgen. Rather than operating as specific influences on Joyce, this historic complex—a multi-logical, polysemic “context of situation”—opened up new ways of perceiving and thinking about events and phenomena that Joyce jointly shared with a contemporary community of artists and intellectuals. Historical awareness of these influences provide an important prolegomena for exploring Joyce’s vision of the digital world. They demonstrate a significant presence of a variety of influences from the contemporary intellectual, scientific, artistic and literary world, and indicate the influence from the cities where he lived as he was in the final stages of the writing of Ulysses and beginning the composition of the Wake (Zürich 1915-20 and Paris after June 1920). This is of considerable assistance in elucidating some of the reasons for his quest for new stylistic and structural directions. But, as we shall see, they also simultaneously provide some understanding of how Joyce came to occupy a unique role in what has recently been called the “pre-history of cyberculture.”2 Whether or not the Wake’s speaking of the “twattering of bards” (FW 37.17) is a reference to Paul Klee’s famous Twittering Machine completed in 1922,3 or Joyce’s speaking of his book as a “claybook,” or Glasheen’s suggesting that he is alluding to Klee’s relation with Marcel Duchamp (j’a moi trouvay la clee dang les champs) by playing on the French phrase for “freedom of the fields” and on the German word for clover (i.e., klee) is consciously intended, the affinity of Joycean interests with the techno-scientific and electromagnetic interests of Klee, Duchamp, Picabia, Ernst, the Dadaists, Surrealists and Expressionists is noteworthy. If Duchamp, Picabia, Klee and a number of other contemporary artists explored the impact of techno-scientific phenomena such as X-rays, atomic structure, electricity and magnetism, radiation, radium and aspects of chemistry on the visual and optical arts, Joyce extended this exploration into their impact on language, gesture, speech and print/writing. If Duchamp’s The Large Glass (1914) marks a turning-point in the marriage of art, science and technology, Joyce’s beginning major new directions in and revisions of the style of Ulysses (1919) marks the moment of his moving toward his complex merger of narrative, science, mathematics, technology and poetics in Finnegans Wake. While Apollinaire, Tzara, Duchamp, and Picabia had noted the value of the transgressive potency of the “pun” in their new 29

“playful science” of the new post-electric arts, Joyce consciously set out to develop the polyvalent, polysemic “pun” using it along with grammar (traditional grammatica, early linguistics and semiotics), mathematics and mnemonic theory to achieve the “abnihilisation of the etym.”4 While the efforts of these artists and of Joyce may initially seem far removed from questions of digitalisation, virtuality or hypertextuality today, they actually contribute to an understanding of the social, artistic, intellectual and practical (i.e., applied) contexts leading to their development. In discussions of art and technology in the 1960s and after, Duchamp, Max Ernst and others stand as figures on the road to the MIT Media Lab, for at the root of the evolution of digital, artificial or virtual reality (i.e., cyberspace) are the early post-electric visions of synaesthesia, of the “orchestration [or integration] of the arts” and of the networks of connections and allusions to other arts, science and technology.5 That Joyce appropriately occupies a unique place in that pre-history is attested first by the fact that he established these motifs at the very outset of the Wake when he began drafting the work starting with the earliest fragments: the satirico-comic debate between St. Patrick and Berkeley about the nature of light and its relations to the physics of light and quanta; the scene of his antihero as an inebriated King Roderick O’Connor, whom Joyce dubs the last “pre-electric king of Ireland”; and the “Mamalujo” fragment introducing the four senile psychoanalysts-historians (also playing on the four evangelists)— who later become the “four claymen” (clay + Klee + ‘klee,’ Ger. key) electronically probing and cross-examining Yawn. These fragments together with: the portrait of HCE; with the semi-incestuous seduction of Isolde (“Izzy”); and with the description of St. Kevin at Glendalough, are the first moments of Joyce’s unique modernist carnivalesque Rabelaisian (or Menippean) satire of the post-Dadaist world—and like the Dadaists and their progeny produce a playful techno-scientific poetic. The first three vignettes— Patrick and the Archdruid, Roderick O’Connor and “Mamalujo”—play with the techno-scientific and with the emergence of the cyborgian but always respecting the human person in the context of a quest for a “parahumanism.” Joyce’s final commitment to the importance of his book as a literary machine is underlined by the fact that in 1938 during the last stages of writing the Wake he produced a newly composed paragraph to introduce the final version of Anna Livia’s concluding letter which provides a bridge between Anna’s letter and Patrick and Berkeley’s debate, that immediately precedes it. This new passage (about one page in length) overtly reasserts the machinic, synaesthetic, coenaesthetic and hypertextual aspects of the Wake—which becomes for Joyce, “Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer, a 30

tetradomational gazebocroticon, the ‘Mamma Lujah , , , ,” (614.27-8). The description of this machinic assemblage, which is identified with “Mamalujo,” the “Four” an[n]ali[y]sts-historians-evangelists-gossips as the consumerproducers of Joyce’s book, is introduced by references to memory processes which constituted part of the earliest drafts of Work in Progress: What has gone? How it ends? Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Forget, remember! 6

The process of remembering is the book, the dream, the vision itself as Joyce had asserted at the outset. In the subsequent paragraphs Joyce’s playful exploration of the mnemonic process involved in remembering is linked to codes in which there is not only a complex blending and interplay of icon, image, writing, sound, movement, and structure, but of past and present, of multidimensionality, of chance and of the metamorphic potentialities of matter, as exemplified in phrases such as: a tetradomational gazebocroticon [FW 614.27-8] autokinatonetically preprovided [FW 614.30] their homely codes [FW 614.32] the heroticisms, catastrophes and eccentricities transmitted by the ancient legacy of the past type by tope, letter from litter, word at ward, with sendence of sundance […] all, anastomosically assimilated and preteridentified paraidiotically, in fact, the sameold gamebold adomic structure […] as highly charged with electrons as hophazards can effective it [FW 614.35-615.7]

What Joyce is able to dramatically demonstrate at the conclusion of the seventeen year process of writing the Wake is that through his transformations of poetic language he has moved writing and speech into that new postelectric world which was rapidly moving beyond media to a hypermedia and virtual reality. As Sergei Eisenstein, film director and theorist, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, design theorist and visual artist, intuited, Wakese—which can easily be described as a hyperlanguage or paralanguage—positions language for an era in which new modes of communication and expression would permit an integration of media in which the goals of synaesthesia, the orchestration of the arts and syncretism would be achieved, thus producing a new language. Motifs suggesting that Joyce consciously developed this integrated, metamorphic character of Wakese occur in other passages in which crucial 31

elements were added toward the end of the 1920s. In one of these the interplay of eye and ear in the poet’s invention of his language simultaneously refers to the merging of the verbal and visual just as it refers to the interplay of writing and speech in which, incidentally, there is clearly a musical element of “dec[h]ording”: The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That’s the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects. [FW 482.31-483.1]

That Joyce had both the merging and the interplay in mind is confirmed by observations such as “Television kills telephony in brothers’ broil. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen!” (FW 52.18), or in the repetitive playful interlinking of the beginnings of modern art and of modernist writing such as juxtaposing the American author, John DosPassos, and the founder of French impressionism, Edouard Manet: “Willed without witting, whorled without aimed. Pappapassos, Mammamanet, warwhetswut and whowitswhy” (272.5). What needs to be noted when interpreting such passages is Joyce’s unique conception of the reader-writer, producer-consumer relationship, which is articulated much later than the passage on “decording” cited above that speaks about eye-ear, code-cord. In a reference to the book itself as “Quinnigans’ Quake,” he asserts, “His producers are they not his consumers?” (FW 497.1). The Joycean writer comes to be replaced by the reader who re-writes the text—the reader as poet related to processes of coding, to mnemonically pursuing transverse references and to a mimesis of multi-media perception. Jacques Derrida, who described the Wake as a “hypermachinic engine” and noted the potentialities of hypermedia to investigate such a text, suggests that Joyce was: in advance, decades in advance, to compute you, control you, forbid you the slightest inaugural syllable because you can say nothing that is not programmed on this 1000th generation computer—Ulysses, Finnegans Wake—beside which the current technology of our computers and micro-computerfied archives and translating machines remain a bricolage of a prehistoric child’s toys. And above all its mechanisms are of a slowness incommensurable with the the quasi-infinite speed of the movements on Joyce’s cables.7

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Joyce’s “hypermnesiac machine” operates through his readers being “in his memory.” By examining his use of pre-digital hyperlinks involving memory and mimesis, this aspect of his creative process provides an interesting way of examining how his virtual or imaginary hypermedia is a pre-digital prophecy of contemporary virtuality and hypermedia. While the machinic had been one of the central motifs in the unfolding explorations by Dadaists, Surrealists, Futurists and other avant-garde movements, what Derrida describes as the “hypermnesiac machine” is a distinctly Joycean invention. Joyce intersects with the Dadaists and their successors with respect to the recognition of: the need for a new language subsequent to the rise of the new science and of post-electric technologies; a new emphasis on chance and, as in the work of such Dadaists as Arp and Richter, ordered chance; convergence of media involving synaesthesia, the orchestration of the arts, and the merging of media; incorporating in their work an interest in the new mathematics, including geometries and science. But Joyce added to this a specific interest in the mnemonic and his perceived post-Viconian recognition of the inter-relatedness of imagination, creative intellect and memory. In these latter concerns he was perhaps closer to Richter’s so-called “fathers of Dada”—Klee and Kandinsky—than to Duchamp, who like Wyndham Lewis, critiqued Henri Bergson. Early in writing the Wake Joyce suggested the rhizomic nature of memory rooted in “increasing, livivorous, feelful thinkamalinks; luxuriotiating everywhencewithersoever among skullhullows and charnelcysts of a weedwastewoldwevild” (FW 613.19-21). Joyce’s hypermnesia complements and supplements the range of the Dadaists, the Surrealists and other avant-garde figures. He is closer to Kandinsky and Klee because their theories stressing the interaction of the material and the immaterial recognise the fundamental presence of the “mnesiac” in the growth of form as an inner landscape. Yet even more particularly in the case of Klee, whose Bauhaus lectures provided the only “Principia Aesthetica” of modernism in the visual arts and whose theory arises from the rhizomic existence of the tree in nature and from such motifs of motion as the natural flows of water in a river.8 Joyce, Klee, and Kandinsky like the Dadaists, Surrealists and other avant-garde artists were involved with the concept of the artist as an engineer designing and building ideographic constructs. These new art movements had been recognised in the avant-garde modernist movements in the visual arts by the development of modes such as collage, ready-mades, techno-constructs (e.g. Duchamp’s Large Glass), optical art, mobiles and the like.

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While the Wake contains key references to collage, to ready-mades, to mobiles and to optical experimentation along with other terms associated with the avant-garde artistic movements, Joyce’s poetic engineering by having to utilise the semiotic, dialectical and rhetorical could also encompass the playfulness of Apollinaire and Jarry supplemented by the entire symboliste tradition from Baudelaire through Mallarmé to Valéry in order to achieve the complex virtuality of the dream. One reference to collage: “and flaunt on the flimsyfilmsies for to grig my collage juniorees who, though they flush fuchsia, are they octette and virginity in my shade but always my figurants” (FW 279F1) is embedded with references to music, to film, to attending college, to erotic play and to fucking thus creating a verbal collage; another appears in the Schoolroom, “Triv and Quad,” episode in a playful note which continues with references to comic strips such as Popeye and other forms of popular culture (FW 279n1 ). A reference to a mobile is included in a painterly and optical introduction to the episode concentrating on Shaun the Post (III.1) where it is included within a vision of the spectrum occurring in a “fogbow” (a phenomenon similar to rainbows but generated by a fog): White fogbow spans. The arch embattled. Mark as capsules. The nose of the man who was nought like the nasoes. It is self tinted, wrinkling, ruddled. His kep is a gorsecone. He am Gascon Titubante of Tegmine sub Fagi whose fixtures are mobiling so wobiling befear my remembrandts. She, exhibit next, his Anastashie. She has prayings in lowdelph. Zeehere green eggbrooms. What named blautoothdmand is yon who stares? Gugurtha! Gugurtha! He has becco of wild hindigan. Ho, he hath hornhide! And hvis now is for you. Pensée! The most beautiful of woman of the veilch veilchen veiled. [FW 403.6-15]

As the “White fogbow spans. The arch embattled” (FW 403.6) the colours of the spectrum appear—“ruddled” (red), “gorse” (orange), “green eggbrooms,” (green and yellow—“broom” = yellow), “blautoothdmand” (blue), “wild hindigan (indigo), “veilde (violet—German, veilchen, violets. Embedded in that vision is an image of King Mark described as one “whose fixtures are mobiling so wobiling befear my remembrandts” (403.9-10). Here Joyce’s play with Rembrandt’s name is in counterpoint with modern mobiles, while simultaneously playing on the presence of memory within the virtuality of the contemporary visual object of art, whether optical or painterly. The word “mobile” also appears later in the pre-cyborgian, parahuman image of HCE as innkeeper with which the barroom scene opens (II.3). Here it appears in the acoustic equivalent of a collage—a sound collage—and takes on a sexual, conjugal spin, for this “tolvtubular high fidelity daildialler” (FW 309.14) is: 34

equipped with supershielded umbrella antennas and connected by the magnetic links of a Bellini_Tosti coupling system with a vitaltone speaker, capable of capturing skybuddies, harbour craft emittences, key clickings, vaticum cleaners, due to woman formed mobile or man made static and bawling the whowle hamshack and wobble down in an eliminium sounds pound so as to serve him up a melegoturny marygoraumd, eclectrically filtered for allirish earths and ohmes. [FW 309.17-310.1]

Here the convergence of the arts and of the new media of technological reproducibility within a world that is moving beyond media (or at least within Joyce’s prophetic dreamworld where that convergence is a dream that is always already beyond specific technical artefacts) is explored in relation to sound and acoustic modes of technology. Their interplay is even more striking in Joyce’s numerous forays into the evolving avant-garde interest in optical aspects of art marked in the Wake, for example, by such playful compounds as the following which include the morpheme “-scope”: “after those few prelimbs made out through his eroscope the apparition of his fond sister Izzy” (FW 431.14-5); looking through at these accidents with the “faroscope of television” (150.32-3); “Hippohopparray helioscope flashed winsor places as the gates might see. (341.23-4); “Amid a fluorescence of spectracular mephiticism there caoculates through the inconoscope stealdily a still, the figure of a fellow […]” (349.16-8); “Two makes a wing at the macroscope telluspeep.” (275.L3-6); “When I’m dreaming back like that I begins to see we’re only all telescopes. Or the comeallyoum saunds (295.10-2); “myrioscope” (127.35); “neviewscope” (449 34); “pudendascope” (115 30); “spectrescope” (230.1); “big Willingdone mormorial tallowscoop “ (8.35, cf. 9.34).9 A passage playing on the kaleidoscopic which concludes a riddle (I.vi. #9) indicates how central this cluster is to the book, its dream structure and its synesthetic modes of virtuality. In that riddle which includes references to a “panaroma of all the flores of speech” (143.4) and “an earsighted view of old hopeinhaven” (143.9), Joyce links this merging of traditional stylistics and electrified matter with the spectral nature of light: what roserude and oragious grows gelb and greem, blue out the ind of it ! Violet’s dyed! then what would that fargazer seem to seemself to seem seeming of, dimm it all? Answer: A collideorscape! [FW 143.25-8]

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One aspect of this “collideorscape” is that it brings together the sound, motion, movement and sights of the city through time as well as space as a series of chaotic (hence, colliding and escaping) bits of the city. Danis Rose’s way of paraphrasing the passage is helpful in underlining this: […] Shem asks could a human being, fatigued after a day in the city and given in sleep a view of Copenhagen whereby he could behold the vast, infolding panorama of its history, the countless events, vicissitudes that were enacted there in the course of its history, could such one, as the vision continued on throughout the night, integrate or differentiate all the millions of particulars, make sense out of the whole or even a part, discern what is static and what kinetic? In short, what would such a dreamer seem to himself seemingly to be seeing? Shaun is not to be foxed and answers succinctly: a kaleidoscope!10

What “that fargazer seem to seemself to seem seeming of,” is clearly virtual for this is a “collideorscape” produced by the “dreams of accuracy” of a “camelot prince of dinmurk” (FW 143.6-7). The Wake is thus not only a verbal recreation of a film (“the reel world”(64.25)), but its dreamworld can also become a virtual reality. With respect to film-making, Duhamp’s colleague, Hans Richter, noted that there is a merging of the dreamworld and reality which permeates the various films that constitute his film Dreams That Money Can Buy. Eisenstein’s remarks on Joyce implicitly and prophetically suggests that the tendency of film is toward creating just this type of convergence of media—a moving beyond media and beyond language as we know it. Joyce’s “collideorscape” provides an escape for “making sense” out of this world which he underlines through an interplay of the phonetic sound spectrum of the vowels and the visual spectrum of light producing colours—a blending of visual and verbal ambivalence. For in recounting history or recounting the story of “his tory,” conservative inkeeper he “will [have] been having recourse […] to the reverberration of knotcracking awes, the reconjungation of node binding ayes, the redissolusingness of mindmouldered ease and the thereby hang of the Hoel of it” (143.12-5). And if the sounds blend creating ambiguous signs, the light creates spectral colours: “what roserude and oragious grows gelb and greem, blue out the ind of it! Violet’s dyed! then what would that fargazer seem to seemself to seem seeming of, dimm it all?” (143.24-7). These phenomena are the stuff of hypermedia, creating the resonance (“reverberration”), the nodebinding (“reconjugation”), and the fluidity (“redissolusingness”) that shape the virtual city (“Copenhagen”).

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The optical spectrum permeates the Wake in conjunction with the image of the rainbow, as we see in an example such as the description of the “fogbow” noted above. The final appearance of the spectrum in the climactic debate between the Saint and the Sage is immediately followed by an explanation of the nature of Joyce’s “vicociclometer,” the “tetradomational gazebocroticon” (FW 614.27-8). At the heart of Joyce’s projects in the composition of the later stages of Ulysses and the Wake was a recognition of a series of transformations which would have to occur in the “book” of the future as the Dadaists had perceived in their merging of the modes of expression by their inclusion of music and poetry in a visual and performance-oriented art movement. So Joyce within the “unique” language of Finnegans Wake provides a constant “fluxion” (297.29) between vision, gesture, movement, sound, speech, printed word and light itself. Like the Dadaists, their immediate progenitors and their successors, Joyce commingled in print what they had commingled in their performances and presentations. In the process the groundwork was being laid for the hypermnesiac machine and the production of hypermedia and digitalised virtual reality, Prior to a development of hypermedia integrating fully text and originary writing with motion, vision, sound, gesture and speech is the creation of a yearning for hypertext in the complex intra- and intertextuality of “ambiviolent” Wakese which gives shape to its rhizomic “chaosmos.” One of Joyce’s prime and complex means for creating networks of interlinkage within the text (i.e., transversality or intratextuality) is to play on linguistic minimal differences. He transforms and/or inserts minimal phonetic or orthographic changes in words, combining these transformations with possibilities for creating assonance and consonance. The items of minimal difference involved frequently relate to prime clusters of words with interrelated meanings, frequently involving an interplay of different national languages, all of which provides further means for achieving their polysemic interconnection.11 Interconnections between memory, mimesis and related concepts both exemplify this phenomenon while they simultaneously shed light on this subject of the “hypermnesiac machine.” The sequence “m” plus any vowel plus another “m” either with the “m”s in inital or final position or preceded or followed by other letters (i.e. m - [aeiou] - m) generates a multitude of relevant examples illustrative of Joycean excesses of meaning, for it selects all the monosyllabic and morphological chains involving mam-memmim-mom-mum (interestingly the first two members of which if the second m is dropped become ma and me.) When the text is searched for occurrences, Joyce’s insistence on the relation of the mother to such concepts as mimesis, mimicry, mime, memory, 37

moment, silence (being mum) is established and the chain expands through multimimetica (multimedia) to semiotics (the meaning of meaning) and mathematics: “lead us seek, lote us see, light us find, let us missnot Maidadate, Mimosa Multimimetica, the maymeaminning of maimoomeining!” (267.2-3) to “the deprofundity of multimathematical immaterialities” (394.31-2). From the multiple plays on the basic chain of vowel changes, the reader is led into relating mimesis and memory to Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning and Ogden’s interest in mathematical (Liebnizian) theories of meaning. The strategy being pursued here rises out of Joyce’s encyclopaedic design coupled with his practico-theoretic interest in inter-relating such basic textual concepts as imitation, dramatic presentation, memory, meaning and mathematical order. This is similar to that which characterises hypermedia links and their rhizomiclike organisation. Joycean aural-mnemonic links, which pre-date contemporary digital culture, serve as nodal points for the rhizomic organisation that generates the intratextual and the intertextual. A phrase such as the “maymeaminning of maimoomeining” (FW 267.3) evokes an allusion to The Meaning of Meaning because these nodal-points are complemented and reinforced by the visual and auditory structure of the words or phrases, including verbal play on the German word for “opinion” (meinung) and the Irish for “stuttering” (meanne, minne) to provide the interdiscursive connections. This interweaving situated in a slightly larger context (“lead us seek, lote us see, light us find, let us missnot Maidadate, Mimosa Multimimetica, the maymeaminning of maimoomeining!” [FW 267.1-3]) goes further anticipatorily mimicking some of the more complex aspects of hypertext by inter-relating the maternal, the imitative, the dramatistic, the semiotic, the mnemonic and the mathematical (and/or logical) ordering. This chaotic, yet ordered, complexity is what creates a reciprocity between the Joycean text and the computer programs which complement (partly, but not solely, by speed) the cerebral processing of the reader reading with eye and ear—the hypertextual path supplementing the path guided by human memory. There is an extremely strong affinity between those features which text analysis and concordancing software dramatically illustrate and Joyce’s concept of the “raiding” (FW 482.32) of the Wake. But the Joycean pre-post-modernist (or radical modernist) project makes it even more appropriate since, as established in Thomas Rice’s Joyce, Chaos and Complexity and my James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics, Joyce utilised geometrical and arithmetical principles of organisation as well as logico-mathematical and structural semiotic ones. This creates a context within which the computer aids and abets the radical type of “raiding” with its “decoding” and “dechording” which the Wake envisions in 38

the reader’s re-writing. The point is that such an interface does not only assist interpretation or understanding, but it also aids and abets a new mode of advanced modernist (or poststructuralist) reading, radically transverse, as our examples with mam-mem-mim-mom-mum demonstrate. Paralleling this there is a strong affinity between what digitalisation of texts has made possible, since this not only increases our capability to investigate the Wake in ways in which the Joycean conception of the text itself invites, but also because its hypermediac encyclopaedism is complementary to the Wake’s protohypermnesiac-encyclopaedism.12 While returning in such a specific way to the verbal textuality of the Wake, it is important to consider how the influence of radical modernist artists interested in sound, the visual, the sculptural and the typographic interplays with the intra- and inter-textuality which is essential to the virtuality of Joyce’s hypermnesiac dream machine. The fluidity of Joyce’s “new” language more readily encompasses the revolution of artistic expression and communication which began in the first decades of the twentieth century. If we have associated Joyce’s development in the last stages of Ulysses and in beginning the Wake with avant-garde movements during the period he lived in Zürich, and then the early period in Paris, one major aspect of aesthetics associated with the Dadaist revolution from the Zürich years, represented primarily by Apollinaire, went back to the relative beginnings of the printed book and the early moments of Alexandria. This was “pattern poetry” or “figured” poetry which took advantage of the spatial arrangement of the words and lines in the poem to make a variety of shapes which complemented the verbal text. Apollinaire’s calligrammes as he entitled his collection of such poems possibly reinforced Joyce’s interest in Mallarmé’s Coup de Dès. It is further apparent that in Ulysses in the composition of which he coupled these interests with experiments such as Wyndham Lewis’s vorticist magazine, Blast, Joyce had become acutely aware of the potentials of typographical form in shaping his book, as evidenced in many of the later revisions of Ulysses. While it is impossible in a short essay to encompass the relations of Joyce with the history and theory of the printed book as an entirety (not just its contents, but particularly its status as an artefact through a multitude of transformations), yet to understand the relationship of the Wake to the emerging digiculture of hypertext and hypermedia it is essential to look at some aspects of this problem—contemporary and historical. The transformations of the book (originally an inscribed medium) clearly indicates that contemporary digital culture has produced completely new potentialities for electronic inscription, providing new possibilities for what the book has been at various moments from its early history through Gutenberg into the 39

electro-mechnical era. The importance of Joyce’s description of the Wake as a “vicociclometer” has already been noted, but it is equally as important to note that the description of this “tetradomational gazebocroticon” (614.27-8) immediately follows the debate about the nature of light between the Saint and Sage with its emphasis on the spectrum. In fact, the variety of references to books repeatedly emphasise the fluidity of the radical modernist post-electric vision of the book—“Jungfraud’s Messongebook,” “claybook,” “tellafun book,” “new book of Morses,” “lingerous longersous book of the dark,” “our book of kills,” “his book of craven images,” “comicsongbook,” “a most moraculous jeerymyhead sindbook,” “his morse-erse wordybook.” From the modern vision to the classical roots of the book, Joyce touches on important moments in its nature as an artifact. His renewed interest in the typographical and other material aspects of the book further appears to have added to the role that the key eighteenth century satirists—Pope, Sterne and Swift—played in the Wake. Their own interest in the book as a production (The Dunciad, Tristram Shandy, and A Tale of the Tub) and the processes of promotion, publication and production (e.g., the Scriblerian build-up including such essays as Of The Art of Sinking in Poetry and the various versions of The Dunciad and The Dunciad Variorum) had been replayed in the processes of promotion, publication and production of the Wake (e.g. the role of Our Exagmination and Joyce’s manipulation of commentary about various episodes). At the most obvious level this is reflected in the use of marginalia and foot-notes in the Schoolroom episode of the Wake (II.3), but it is also reflected in the poetic treatment of such issues within his verbal poetry. Simultaneously Joyce associates the very nature of the manuscript and book with a fluidity. At various moments in the Wake he affiliates it: with illustration and ornamentation (e.g. the Book of Kells); with electrification and codification (“morse-erse wordybook”); with popular visual and auditory presentation (“comicsongbook”); and finally as a “gazebocroticon.” His fascination with the mechanics of the book is complemented by his awareness of its potentiality for metamorphoses. The ultimate comedy of such metamorphoses is Belinda the Hen, pecking up the letter (i.e., manuscript) from a dung heap (FW 111.5ff), which is later simultaneously transformed into a multiplicty of media—newsreels, nursery rhymes, dreams, a diary, a wireless transmission of music (“bostoons”): —This nonday diary, this allnights newseryreel. —My dear sir! In this wireless age any owl rooster can peck up bostoons. [FW 489.35-490.1]

40

What must be noted here is that Joyce’s vision of the book is one that recognises its past historic transformations and its potentialities for a near infinite set of possibilities for future transformations. But all of this contributes to the prophetic, poetic vision of the metamorphoses of the postelectric book. If various moments in history could play with the shape and mechanics of the book, then the book could undergo further transformations as it does in the language and dream of the Wake, but also in the way the Wake provides the prime exemplar for Derrida’s hypermnesiac machine. The potentialities for that conception of the book came to Joyce from symbolism, from the Dadaists and Surrealists and the avant-garde in general who were acutely sensitive to the exponential increase to the transforming power of modes of production, reproduction and dissemination in the post-electric era. Yet from whatever Joyce learned, particularly in Zürich and Paris, it was his unique contribution to craft “a vicociclometer, a tetradomational gazebocroticon,” which would anticipate the impacts on communication and expression of digitalisation and the convergence of media that would accompany it.

41

NOTES 1 2

3

4

5

6 7

8 9

10 11

12

Michael Groden, Ulysses in Progress (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977) 115-18. See Darren Tofts & Murray McKeich, Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture (North Ryde, New South Wales: A 21*C Book published by Interface, 1997); Donald F. Theall, “Beyond the Orality/Literacy Dichotomy: James Joyce and the Prehistory of Cyberspace” (available at:

and ). Cf.: “And so they went on, the fourbottle men, the analists, unguam and nunguam and lunguam again, their anschluss about her whosebefore and his whereafters and how she was lost away away in the fern and how he was founded deap on deep in anear, and the rustlings and the twitterings and the raspings and the snappings and the sighings and the paintings and the ukukuings and the (hist!) the springapartings and the (hast!) the bybyscuttlings and all the scandalmunkers and the pure craigs that used to be (up) that time living and lying and rating and riding round Nunsbelly Square. And all the buds in the bush. And the laughing jackass. Harik! Harik! Harik! The rose is white in the darik! And Sunfella's nose has got rhinoceritis from haunting the roes in the parik! So all rogues lean to rhyme” (FW 95.27). See Derek Attridge, “Unpacking the Portmanteau, or Who’s Afraid of Finnegans Wake ?” On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) 140-55; Donald F. Theall, Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture, and Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); and James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). It is also useful to note that Duchamp, Apollinaire and others promoted Jacques Brisset’s near deification of the pun in the second decade of the twentieth century. See Douglas Davis, Art and The Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration Between Science, Technology and Art (1973; rpt. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1975); Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (New York/Toronto: Viking Penguin Inc, 1987). David Hayman, ed., A First Draft Verson of Finnegans Wake (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963) 281. Original version of FW 614.19-22. Jacques Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce: He War,” in Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, eds. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 147. Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting (New York: Praeger, 1959). By 1931 Walter Benjamin was using the phrase “optical unconscious” in his “A Brief History of Photography.” A more recent use of “optical unconscious,” which takes exception with Benjamin, Rosalind E. Kraus, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1949) 178-9 is using a Lacanian-Freudian sense of unconscious, while Benajmin is closer to Gregory Bateson and ultimately to Joyce, since the optical unconscious is the virtual making visible of the social unconscious. Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon, Understanding “Finnegans Wake”: A Guide to the Narrative of James Joyce’s Masterpiece (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1982) 92. Text analysis software such as TACT with its wild card capability, its use of Booleans operators and other such search devices is of considerable value both in ferreting out these groups and in revealing many of the polysemic aspects of their interconnection. The preceding four paragraphs have been adapted from a paper presented to a joint meeting of the Association of Canadian University Teachers of English and the Canadian Association for Computing in the Humanities. In the paper, which has been published by CACH, there are specific examples applying statistical programs from the Text Analysis and

42

Concordancing Tool (TACT) to the interpretation of Finnegans Wake as well as a fuller amplification of the arguments surrounding the preceding four paragraphs. A complete text of the article may be found at their web site: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/chwp/theall/

43

Mark Nunes GAPS AND CONVERGENCES IN THE JOYCEAN NETWORK It has been some dozen years since George Landow’s book, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, appeared in print. The book in many ways did mark a critical moment of convergences. By the start of the 1990s, the personal computer had become a fixture of everyday life in many households in America and Europe, and the number of individuals with access to email and the Internet had begun its phenomenal growth. A shift was underway, one initiated by the release of Tim Berners-Lee’s WWW via the Internet in 1991, and NCSA’s release of Mosaic, the first point-and-click hypertext navigation application, the following year. The machines changed in 1992, and with that change, hypertext increasingly became a matter of everyday life. We are now very much in a second moment of “new media” studies. Much of the euphoria and dread surrounding the explosion of CMC into everyday life has faded, and we are now faced with the more arduous task of assessing how the uptake of network technology by both academia and popular culture has altered social space and social relations. Likewise, the broad claims that Landow and other first generation hypertext theorists made for the transformative, revolutionary potential of hypertext seem at best dated, and at worst naive. This first wave of hypertextual critical theory attempted to find parallels between the experiments of modernist literature and the narrative challenges of hypertextuality. Thus when Landow discusses Vannevar Bush, he is particularly interested in the challenge to reading and writing practices that the memex device would entail, not its significance as a cybernetic engine. In this convergence of technology and literary object, hypertext theorists of the mid 1990’s found the promise of a form that “opened” a text to multiple lines of narration and positioned the reader as an active participant in the performance of the work. Given this reading of hypertext as experimental fiction, perhaps it is not a surprise to find the works of James Joyce hailed in numerous texts as what Landow calls “implicit hypertexts in nonelectronic form.”1 Thus when Jay Bolter refers to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as “hypertexts that have been flattened out to fit on the printed page,” he is highlighting several features of Joyce’s writing to establish hypertext’s experimental form2: the invocation of a recursive and cross-referential reading practice; a compositional style of a palimpsest, involving overlaid networks of associations with each revision; and a narrative structure that functions as a web rather than a line.3 In fact, whenever a discussion of hypertext or “network logic” comes up in Landow, 44

or Bolter, or Michael Heim, or Kevin Kelly, or Steven Johnson—and the list does go on—reference to Joyce’s “implicit hypertext in nonelectronic form” seems not too far away. The reading practices that Joyce’s novels already demand, such an argument suggests, become actualised as linkages on the screen, a textuality that calls into question the relation between “first” and “next,” body and footnote, supplement and origin. This appropriation of Joyce by hypertext theorists speaks to a certain understanding of Joyce and modernist literature, one that privileges the openness of the text and a dynamic relationship between reader and work. Joyce, then, stands not so much for High Modernism per se, but rather for the all-encompassing, ever opening text itself, the text without hors-text. Thus while The Waste Land offers an intricately constructed network of cross-reference and allusion, it is Joyce and not Eliot, champion of the completed author-ised text, who serves as hypertext’s patron saint. But certainly this reading of Joyce is one of many within a genealogy of Joycean scholarship. In fact, in turning to Joyce to draw upon a convergence of critical theory and technology, Landow is also implicitly foregrounding a convergence in literary studies, marked by the growing dominance of a “poststructuralist Joyce” in the mid-1980s that distanced him from the Eliotic Modernism of the Master Artist. The confluence of these approaches led in the 80s and 90s to a vision of Joyce that emphasised permutations of the text over artistic organicism, proliferation of signal over classical correspondence.4 Commenting specifically on this shift, Derek Attridge notes, for example, how Joyce’s later texts function as a “network of possibilities,” and how the “constantly renewed possibility of connection” distinguishes his texts from the more static, finished works of Eliotic modernism. Attridge sees Joyce as the engineer of a textual machine that provides for a flux of meaning.5 Jean-Michel Rabaté makes similar use of “the machine” to describe the poiesis of meaning in the Wake. He describes the novel as: “a word machine, or a complex machination of meanings.”6 For Rabaté” which, rather than communicating by way of a given code, produce new possibilities of communication by challenging determined systems of signification.7 In other words, the novel performs meaning, while at the same time marking a “lapsus,” or a “misfiring” of meaning.8 These references to machines and networks mark an important convergence of critical theory and technology in their own right, one not cited in Landow’s book, and one arising, I would argue, from the increasing penetration of cybernetics into everyday life in a “network society.” As Joyce scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s became less interested in concordances and skeleton keys, exploring instead networks of intertextuality and semiotic 45

drift, “the network” itself came increasingly under a semantic coding associated with computer networks; the différance of the language machine found itself performing within the family resemblances of the “difference engine” of computers. As the machines changed, so too did our understanding of the network. Geoffrey Bennington notes that when Derrida turns to the computer to discuss Joyce, he does so not just as an image of the archive, but to imagine “the possibilities of folding a text back on itself, of discontinuous jumps establishing quasi-instantaneous links between sentences, words, or marks separated by hundreds of pages.”9 Joyce’s books, therefore, serve for Derrida as supercomputers of textuality: machines of signification, interconnection, and associative leaps. In both of his essays “on” Joyce, Derrida makes reference to the Wake and Ulysses as “hypermnesiac machine[s]” that record, encode, and prefigure all languages, all associations, and all readings.10 This “joyceware” encodes wholes into each part, but in doing so, it undermines the possibility of ever exhausting this network of signification, even from two words.11 The Joycean text becomes a kind of machine itself: a medium for proliferation that doubles and short-circuits the “powerful reading machine” of Joycean scholarship.12 Or as Andre Topia argues, Joycean networks constantly determine meaning while simultaneously suggesting a proliferation of alternate readings that pollute, destabilise, and infect each other.13 This network of the text suggests that any node, as an overcoded textual unit, provides a potential “cybernetic key” that composes a matrix of signals for the text as a whole.14 As a machinic system, any text is always, already a hyper-text. By the mid-1990’s, one could begin to sketch an additional convergence in hypertext theory, critical theory, and Joyce studies. Now hypertext and the computer became foregrounded as both articulations of humanities computing and as a theoretical structuring of a post-structural reading of Joyce. The inauguration of Hypermedia Joyce Studies (HJS) in 1995, along with Rob Callahan’s Work in Progress and Allen Ruch’s The Brazen Head websites, mark moments not only of critical uptake, but of an embrace of hypertextuality in the production of scholarly work. In that first issue of HJS, Louis Armand’s essay, “Phoenix Ex Machina: Joyce’s Solicitation of Hypertext,” presents a convergence in its own right, weaving together Rabaté’s “perverse semic machine,” Deleuze and Guattari’s “desiring machines,” Attridge’s complexity machine, and Derrida’s “hypermnesiac machine” into what he calls the “hypertextual transverse.” In any grid arrangement of the text, he argues, “this grouping of signifiers reveals, if it reveals anything, the way a transverse marks out a network of discontinuities, of metaphor and metonymy, as they relate, not to a particular context, but to what opens a context at its frontiers to an 46

alterior discourse.” Likewise, in Darren Tofts’s contribution to the same issue, “hypertext” serves as a term that marks a cultural convergence of cybernetics, critical theory, and literary studies in the 20th century. Thus he can claim: “It is a mistake to think that with the Wake [Joyce] simply wrote a book that looks like hypertext. In fact he didn’t write a book at all. He provided a complex system of prompting, the primer node in an interface to be activated by the reader.”15 As such, this book—JoyceMedia—marks a convergence as well, a coming together of Joyce scholarship and media theory, a trajectory that has been underway for a number of years. My own contribution began in Rome in 1998 at the Joyce Symposium, when I presented a paper that attempted to trace a genealogy of this convergence of hypertext theorists turning to Joyce, and of Joyceans who had discovered in hypertext a literal or figurative mapping of Joyce’s narrative experimentation. I discovered I was hardly alone, and many of the figures who were present at that conference are still at it, converging here in these pages. Hypertext, of course, has its own genealogy, typically blessed by the trinity of Vannevar Bush, Tim Berners-Lee, and Ted Nelson. While it is important to think through the computer as material artefact—machine—in connection with hypertext, it is equally important to keep in mind the cybernetic underpinnings that provide a conceptual framework for early research into computer design and the foundation of information science. Bush’s memex stands as a precursor to hypertext precisely because it addresses a cybernetic concern: how does one navigate through a universe of information in pursuit of a pattern of signals? Hypertext (in proto- or actual form) provides a technological solution to the problem of command-and-control. Commandand-control are equally important for Berners-Lee, who describes the global reach of hypertext and the individual autonomy of the user as integral, inseparable elements of the Web as an information space. This apparent contradiction is a defining feature of the spatiality of hypertext: while it is a medium on a global scale, it is likewise mapped and enacted in the lived practice of individual users controlling these planetary flows. For example, in describing the future of the WWW as an emergent “Semantic Web,”16 Berners-Lee writes: Imagine what computers can understand when there is a vast tangle of interconnected terms and data that can automatically be followed. The power we will have at our fingertips will be awesome.17

There is a definite ideology at work in this conception of hypertext that on one hand foregrounds the catholic structures of a global information space, while at the same time privileging the agency of the individual, be that as 47

Enlightenment subject or as cybernetic operator with “awesome” powers in hand. This ideology is at work in Ted Nelson’s originary vision of hypertext, albeit in a somewhat different form, in his desire to create a system that will grant the user access to “a universal instantaneous publishing system and archive for the world.”18 The structure of Nelson’s thoughts on hypertext, built around the slogan “everything is deeply intertwingled,” suggests not only a network of interconnections, but the possibility of navigating a universe of information from any node in the network. While hypertext served as a shorthand in critical theory for the ever-opening text, in cybernetics and various branches of “information science,” it spoke to a desire to commandand-control a universal archive, to bring together disparate pieces of information into a convergence “at our fingertips” and on our screens. In marking this intersection of networks, information, and literary theory, it is Eco’s semiotics, rather than the Saussurean variations taken up by Landow, that provides a final convergence of technology and critical theory in this essay. Eco’s discussion of the network of semiosis not only places the lexeme in a very different relation to other nodes of signification, it also speaks to a very different concept of “communication.” Eco’s understanding of information theory, through Shannon and Weaver, treats communication as a mode of conveyance. As Eco explains in A Theory of Semiotics, one can imagine semiotic linkages that are non-communicative, but never a communicative system that does not draw upon a network of semiotic relations. To the extent that a reader “takes up” a code, that reader is involved in a communicative system via the text. Of course, Eco’s The Open Work is a key text in establishing the fundamental feature of the 20th century avant-garde as the production of works that are multiple and involve the reader’s interaction with the work itself. Eco argues that Joyce and other Modernists create texts in which “suggestiveness” takes precedence over singular declaration.19 Yet while foregrounding a post-Einsteinian ontology of “indeterminacy and discontinuity,” Eco is at pains to assure (along with Einstein) that God does not play with dice; the universe as a “field of relations” still obeys governing laws.20 And it is here where Eco’s Peircean semiotics diverges from Saussure’s. The open work of art still offers up a virtual coding that patterns the whole. The reader’s function in completing the open text is, then, to trace or map the patterns within a work: “They are to be seen as the actualisation of a series of consequences whose premises are firmly rooted in the original data provided by the author.”21 For Eco, the coding of semiotics provides the structures and redundancies that allow the text to communicate with the reader.22 The “open work” shrinks the space between reader and writer. Eco’s use of the network implies not only a communicative system, but also a reader 48

who performs as a receiver, commanding and controlling sign-functions through the operation of a code. Reading is active, an act of navigation. Eco’s semiotic networks, then, have perhaps more in common with Vannevar Bush’s memex linkages than with the unlimited drift of Saussurean signifiers. The semiotic network implies control, in that one activates or represses the linkage of sign-functions. That does not mean that these networks are not creative. In a chapter devoted to metaphor in Finnegans Wake, Eco writes: Metaphor, in this sense, appears as a new semantic coupling not preceded by any stipulation of the code (but which generates a new stipulation of the code). In this sense, as we shall see, it assumes a value in regard to communication and, indirectly, to knowledge.23

The code of the text, while not predicting the metaphorical coupling, must support it. In this sense, the actualisation of the text amounts to a determination of linkages. So when exploring the metaphorical functionings that link a 2nd century Church Father and a 1930s cartoon character in a semiotic and semantic web, Eco explains: In point of fact, the reader grasps the analogies between Minucius and Mandrake and does not depend upon the existence of a third term. However, it could be said that he depends upon an extremely long series of third terms that exist in the general context of the book […]24

What justifies the linkages, then, is the fact that each pairing can trace its third term to a wider set of linkages in a network of semiotic production, a coding that allows the text to communicate to the reader. Reading becomes a kind of “bootstrapping” in which meaning becomes increasingly determinate through a process Eco calls amalgamation. In addressing any given node within a semiotic network (Mandrake, Minucius) “the reader does not know as yet which of these virtual properties must be actualised. This decision will be helped only by further amalgamation and by textual operators.”25 This web of connections may become increasingly complex in its involutions, but ultimately it is inscribed in a globe of sorts. As a model of the network, then, Eco’s amalgamations describe and inscribe a process that moves from undetermined potential—a semiotic virtual—to communicative determination. Eco’s semiotic networks provide, then, a final point of convergence by foregrounding a set of cybernetic principles in the context of literary studies, and more generally, meaning-making. These principles often went unnoticed in the euphoric uptake of hypertext theory in the early 1990’s. That is not to say that this rhetorical gap did not itself take part in mapping a convergence of 49

critical theory and technology. As we now find ourselves well underway in a second generation of humanities computing and media theory, I would argue that “hypertext” has become a marker in its own right, calling attention to a set of convergences in Joycean scholarship, critical theory, semiotics, and media studies. As such, “the Joycean network” maps points of contact as well as interstitial gaps in our understanding of meaning-making systems, both textual and hypertextual. As an “opening” gesture, then, coming nearly a third of the way into this chapter, I would like create a convergence—and gap—between two textual nodes in a Joycean network, in effect establishing a linkage between them. The first concerns an often repeated story involving Joyce’s relation to Samuel Beckett, and the drafting of Finnegans Wake. The story, as recounted in Ellman’s biography, runs as follows: Once or twice, [Joyce] dictated a bit of Finnegans Wake to Beckett, though such dictation did not work very well for him; in the middle of one such session there was a knock at the door which Beckett didn’t hear. Joyce said “Come in,” and Beckett wrote it down. Afterwards he read back what he had written and Joyce said, “What’s that ‘Come in’?” “Yes, you said that,” said Beckett. Joyce thought for a moment, then said, “Let it stand.” He was quite willing to accept coincidence as his collaborator. Beckett was fascinated and thwarted by Joyce’s singular method. [JJII 649]

The story has several morals to it, many contrasting Beckett’s and Joyce’s artistic style. The primary moral, however, seems a cautionary tale to the image of Joyce as a modernist artist whose “controlling hands” plan out each resonance in the text. Instead we have an image of Joyce incorporating error and collaborating with chance. While the veracity of the “Come in” anecdote has been challenged on numerous fronts, it serves an important purpose in the context of this current paper, in that it calls attention to the understanding of convergences in the production of meaning, and the production of a text. If we are to understand the text of the Wake through a classical Joycean method—as a kind of network of references, activated for a reader by access to a “key” that reveals the systematic nature of that reference—then it is hard to understand how apparently random material could find a place in a signifying system. A random phrase should strike the reader as an intrusion: noise amidst the signals of the text. But one can also imagine, in that moment of pause—the gap between Beckett’s repetition of the text and Joyce’s recognition of the gap between input and output—that Joyce-as-reader found a coding and an 50

amalgamation that brought the random into coherence. The convergence, then, of the tale, is not merely a matter of Joyce incorporating randomness into his text; rather, it speaks to a certain understanding of error in its relation to the text-as-network and the program of the reader. In the transcription process, Joyce as transmitter sends a signal to Beckett the receiver, yet the channel contains noise, introducing error into the code. This “Come in,” however, is not meaningless, but rather overcoded, serving as a marker of both the gap between sign-functions that gives rise to unlimited semiosis and the convergences that give rise to the production of meaning. But in this interstitial space itself, how can one speak of an amalgamation of significations, or for that matter, a determination of the text? I would like to link this anecdote to another often quoted invocation of Joyce’s method, perhaps not as well known as the Ellman story, but in contemporary Joyce studies (and indeed in this volume) rather well circulated. In a discussion of the indeterminacy of the text in Joyce’s literature—the “yeses” in Ulysses in this instance—Derrida fantasises about a future Joyce Foundation Computer that would serve as an adjunct to Joycean scholarship. He writes: Supposing a department of Joycean studies decides, under the authority of an Elijah professor, Chairman or chairperson, to put my reading to the test and to institute a “program,” the first phase of which would consist of putting in table form a typology of all the yeses in Ulysses, before moving on to the yeses in Finnegans Wake. The chairperson agrees […] to buy an nth generation computer that would be up to the task. The operation agreed to could go very far.26

In fact, a present-day computer is capable of much of the task that Derrida describes here. Electronic versions of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake exist online, and one could easily perform the appropriate key word searches, and then process that data with a grammatical or linguistic mark-up application. But in Derrida’s fantasy, this nth generation computer goes much further, performing “two tasks which would be impossible for any computer of which we possess the concept and control today.”27 That first impossible task would be to generate an exhaustive typology of yeses in Ulysses. Derrida himself identifies ten modalities of “yes” in the novel, but this coding is always only partial and tentative, subject to doubling and indeterminacy. Derrida explains: A computer cannot today enumerate these interlacings, in spite of all the many ways it can help us out. Only an as yet unheard-of computer could, by attempting to integrate with it, and therefore by adding to its own score, its other language and its other writing, respond to that in Ulysses.28 51

To mark, along with all those yeses, the program of reading itself, “part of and not part of the analysed corpus,” this nth generation computer would exceed its own “perilous counting” and “respond” to the text. In a word, this second task is impossible precisely because it commits a “system error” by annulling the operational and programmatic relation between reader and text that treats the text as a system of data, “outside” the reader. Derrida’s essay presents a critique of a certain approach to literary criticism and does so by drawing upon the image of a semiotic super-computer, capable of exhaustive codings and decodings of a text. But in doing so, he also presents a version of cybernetics in which the reader/operator commands and controls the computer as a computational instrument. Simply put, the human provides input, the computer provides output. This operational relation should appear quite familiar, for it is one we enact with every database query or keyword search we perform on our own computers, at home and in the office. In this Derridean fantasy of a Joyce Foundation program, the computer is seen as a device that determines a text, a text that is always multiplying in its meaning. Derrida identifies a programmatic approach to literary criticism, one in which the computer as a cybernetic device for the command, control, and communication of information performs admirably—up to a point. But beyond that point, Derrida argues, the cybernetic device faces the impossible task of treating an indeterminate, open system as though it were a determinate system of data. In contrast to these data processing machines, Derrida gestures toward a textual machine, the text itself, that can never be fully programmed because it always exceeds its own code. The textual convergence, on these pages, of the “Come in” anecdote and the Derridean nth generation computer calls attention to a gap of sorts in how we understand control of the text. Derrida’s critique of programmatic reading plays in well with a certain cybernetic vision of information management in that it imagines complete control as a desirable state. To control the code is to master the text. In contrast, the image of Joyce’s style invoked in the “Come in” anecdote suggests a very different relationship to aleatory information. “Error” disrupts a program as an aberration, as noise. The anecdote suggests that Joyce’s method constantly exceeded his own compositional program. It is a machine and a network that is out of control.29 At its simplest, cybernetics provides a science for the control of information flow. As Norbert Wiener defines the field, the purpose of cybernetics as a discipline is “to attack the problem of control and communication in general.”30 For Wiener, control is problematised by a universe (of information, matter, energy, etc.) that drifts toward disorder. Control provides a structure against what Wiener calls 52

“nature’s tendency to degrade the organised and to destroy the meaningful.”31 From the chaos of virtuality, communication provides a “temporary and local reversal of […] entropy” by actualising information.32 A cybernetic approach to Joyce’s work would in effect attempt to control the language machine by placing the reader in an input/output relation with the text. The text, then, becomes a field of possible readings, and as such, command and control of the text necessitates an ability to predict how a cybernetic system will actualise a given reading as a communicative system. Such an account of the relation between author, reader, and text is taken up by Eco’s Model Reader. He writes: An author can foresee an “ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia” (as happens with Finnegans Wake), able to master different codes and eager to deal with the text as with a maze of many issues. But in the last analysis what matters is not the various issues in themselves but the maze-like structure of the text. You cannot use the text as you want, but only as the text wants you to use it.33

The structure underlying this understanding of an ideal or Model reader, and reading in general, foregrounds an input-output relation to the text: the author (or author-function) who codes a text, and the reader who decodes it. The Model Reader for Eco is not an individual per se, but rather the articulation of coded “presuppositions” that allows for the optimal performance of the text: “the Model Reader is a textually established set of felicity conditions (Austin, [1975]) to be met in order to have a macro-speech act (such as a text is) fully actualised.”34 At issue here is a form of semiotic control over the text. For Eco, the Peircean semiotic chain suggests a continual refining of meaning through the progressive activity of a community of inquirers.35 One can speak, then, of a text, or of any semiotic system, as a virtuality continually moving toward a more perfect articulation of its system of codings: “When faced with a lexeme, the reader does not know which of its virtual properties (or semes, or semantic markers) has to be actualised so as to allow further amalgamations […] All these properties are not to be actually present to the mind of the reader. They are virtually present in the encyclopaedia, that is, they are socially stored, and the reader picks them up from the semantic store only when required by the text.”36 While a text may never be fully determined (in the sense that not even the author need occupy the lived position of Model Reader), a reading advances a semiotic process to the extent that it increases the determination of the text. Any misreading, then, is really a Austinean misfiring—aberrant presuppositions about the text. As with Eco’s semiotics, Wiener describes cybernetics as a control system 53

for increasing determination. Indeterminacy provides a resistance to communication, the process that actualises information. In fact, Weiner explicitly associates the resistance of entropy with a principle of evil.37 Cybernetics dispels, if only locally and temporarily, the curse of indetermination. And this is an important point worth stressing: in a cybernetic account of communication, the operator stands in an antagonistic relation to this field of entropy that resists good and orderly control. In this context, Derrida’s comments on computers, reading, and the irreducibility of the text provide an illuminating point of contrast. For Wiener, indeterminacy is a problem, a resistance, an antagonism. Likewise, the Joycean program in Derrida’s fantasy attempts to determine the text within an exhaustive coding, albeit a coding of a single word. Whatever escapes determination marks a failure in the program, a failure to achieve ideal performance. For Derrida, the indeterminacy of the text always exceeds its coding, precisely because reading responds to the text as “part of and not part of the analysed corpus.” Cybernetics defines a field of givens that are in principle entirely knowable, calculable, and therefore predictable. This concept of predictability is perhaps most clear in a section of The Human Use of Human Beings where Wiener gives a cybernetic reading of legal systems based on precedence. He writes: “The technique of the interpretation of past judgments must be such that a lawyer should know, not only what a court has said, but even with high probability what the court is going to say.”38 In this same passage, Wiener describes a legal situation in which precedent has not yet been determined, when justice, in other words, has not yet been performed. He writes: There are vast fields of law where there is no satisfactory semantic agreement between what the law intends to say, and the actual situation that it contemplates. Whenever such a theoretical agreement fails to exist, we shall have the same sort of no-man’s land that faces us when we have two currency systems without an accepted basis of exchange. In the zone of unconformity between one court and another or one coinage and another, there is always a refuge for the dishonest middleman, who will accept payment neither financially nor morally except in the system most favourable to him, and will give it only in the system in which he sacrifices least. The greatest opportunity of the criminal in the modern community lies in this position as a dishonest broker in the interstices of the law.39

I am intrigued by this position between two systems, in “the interstices of the law,” and the threat it poses to systems of order. Cybernetics as a science of command and control seems to suggest that justice is served only when order has been established, when the system has performed according to a system of 54

laws. The “interstices of the law” is a place of the criminal, error, and the forces of entropy. In contrast, Derrida locates the aporetic program of reading within this interstitial gap. The language machine that is the text differs from the cybernetic language machine in that the text is irreducible to the code it communicates. This relationship between reader, determinacy, and the text plays an important part in understanding how a certain mode of (cybernetic) thinking has had an influence on literary theory, and more specifically how it relates to Joyce studies. In a period in which the computer has come to bear all the more forcefully on literary studies, and often with very fruitful results through various forms of “humanities computing,” an understanding of the influence of operational thinking on literary studies is quite relevant. In a cybernetic approach to the literary object, the goal of reading would be, ultimately, to put the text to rest—to reach (or approximate) a point in which the text has been “fully” determined. The computer, then, would serve as a tool to aid in determinations of the text, in a fashion that places the user in the position of operator/controller, in an input/output relationship with the work at hand. One can further imagine, under the authority of a Humanities Computing professor, Chairman or chairperson, hypertext used as just such a tool, generating spaces of control for its users: searchable databases, an “infinite” library of scholars, a network of multiple editions, audio-visual tools, and supplementary texts all “at our fingertips.” We need not wait for an nth generation computer to find this program well underway; already we can find versions of a Joycean hypertext on the WWW that promise greater control over the text through cybernetic interventions in and of the network.40 To return to the issue of Joyce’s/Beckett’s “Come in” in the Wake: might we, through principles of cybernetic control, determine the location of this spurious moment in the text? According to John Harty’s article, “Is Beckett’s ‘Come In’ in Finnegans Wake,” Joyce did not incorporate the phrase into the text. The anecdote, which was told to Ellman by Beckett, is of questionable accuracy for Harty: “If this event did take place, then Joyce had second thoughts about the ‘Come in’ and deleted it. As scrambled as Finnegans Wake is, this random, needless ‘Come in’ would damage the book’s integrity” (JJII 52). As Harty’s language implies, the complexity of the Wake is a matter of “scrambled” code, not “random, needless” interference. This distinction, while not stated in explicitly cybernetic terms, is very much the distinction that Claude Shannon makes between signal and noise. In his own version of information theory, Claude Shannon differs from Wiener in understanding entropy in a communicative system, establishing a direct, rather than inverse relation between information and entropy. As Warren Weaver explains in his 55

comments on Shannon’s work: Information is […] a measure of one’s freedom of choice in selecting a message. The greater the freedom of choice, and hence the greater the information, the greater is the uncertainty that the message actually selected is some particular one. Thus greater freedom of choice, greater uncertainty, greater information go hand in hand.41

Weaver goes on to explain that the only difference between noise and signal in Shannon’s cybernetics is selection; noise is “spurious” information. But ultimately, we still have a system of control at work in Shannon’s cybernetics: the controlled selection of desired signal from spurious noise. We are still within an input/output relation that places the operator in a position of command and control. As a program of literary study, we are also treating the text itself as a channel (either two-way or one-way, depending on its brand) between authorial coding and reader-response. Hence, Joyce’s removal of this phrase, according to Harty, emphasises that no matter how “scrambled” the code, it still takes part in the conveyance of information, as long as it was “sent” from author-source to reader-receiver. Harty continues his analysis by consulting Clive Hart’s Concordance, where he discovers 150 occurrences of the word “come,” while only four occurrences of “come in” (excluding a fifth, in the form of “Come Inn” FW 512.32).42 Harty’s argument follows primarily from a logic of plot. The first instance, “Take off thatch whitehat (lo, Kersse come in back bespoking of loungeon” (FW 322.1-2), occurs as part of what Harty describes as Joyce’s transmogrification of a tale he heard of a hunchback sea captain and a tailor who fails to fit him properly. The tailor Kersse is asked to enter a pub, thus “the ‘Come in’ is integral to Kersse’s entrance and is not the result of a random accident.”43 Likewise, for Harty, the other “white hat” instance, “Remember to take off your white hat, ech? When we come in the presence” (FW 623.9-10), denies the accidental because the pun (sexual/religious) holds a place of privilege in Joyce’s writing. The argument becomes more tenuous in his reading of the third instance, “come in, come on, you lazy loafs !” (FW 393.27), which is again justified by a reading of plot: “The ‘come in’ here seems to be Matt’s directing the cat into the kitchen and can’t be accidental.”44 In Harty’s reading, however, the “Four Old Men” in this section are variants on (among other things) the four evangelists; one might just as easily connect the passage with an earlier instance of the loaf’s appearance, “so now pass the loaf for Christ sake. Amen” (FW 393.2-3), in the context of a transubstantiation of bread into body and blood. The fourth passage, “Then the court to come in to full morning (FW 566.23-24) reads again for Harty as a 56

sexual pun, but by this point the indeterminability of the text has all but won: “Exactly what happens in the above section and the meaning are debatable. Yet the ‘come in’ is clearly an integral part of the citation and hardly a random phrase.”45 Of course, I am far more interested in the program of criticism cited here than in the specifics of interpretation. Harty’s reading of the passages cited are clearly motivated by a desire to get it right—to determine the status of the errant phrase “come in.” Here plot and an interpretative framework function as a coding of information. Interestingly, with each additional potential site/cite, Harty’s reading becomes all the more tenuous, and his control over the text—what he can “clearly” declare—becomes more a matter of selecting signal from noise than textual plan. In effect, such a program of mastery treats textual gaps as puzzles; whatever conundrums exist are matters of complexity or a lack of a proper code, not markings of interstitial openings of indeterminacy. In cybernetic terms, it expresses itself in the balance between redundancy and entropy’s freedom of choice. A system’s redundancy measures the amount of signal that can be obscured or effaced without effecting communication. Redundancy makes word puzzles possible, Shannon argues, and according to his calculations, English is 50% redundant; a higher degree of redundancy would in effect make the puzzle less puzzling, and hence unsatisfactory, whereas lower degrees of redundancy approach the limit case in which any random array of letters would solve the riddle.46 In this analysis, we might argue from a cybernetic standpoint that Joyce has lowered the redundancy of the English language, but to a level where the puzzle still plays—the equivalent of Shannon’s speculation that a 30% redundant English would allow us to construct satisfying 3-D crossword puzzles.47 In fact, Shannon uses the Wake to make just such a point about the relationship between redundancy and entropy: Two extremes of redundancy in English prose are represented by Basic English and by James Joyce’s book Finnegans Wake. The Basic English vocabulary is limited to 850 words and the redundancy is very high […] Joyce on the other hand enlarges the vocabulary and is alleged to achieve a compression of semantic content.48

Implicit in both Harty’s and Shannon’s reading of the Wake is the assumption that “each word in the Wake serves a purpose, difficult though it may be at times to ascertain.”49 Such an argument claims that any given word stands as a node in a network of signification and is therefore capable of enacting a range of textual linkages that encode the text in a structure of meaning. The “Come in” puzzle, then, assumes that one can speak of the textual 57

network in cybernetic terms: as signal/noise, entropy/redundancy, communication/interference. Such an account defines indeterminacy as a gap in actualisation, but never as an interstitial space. Mastering the network of the text, then, would involve control over as many nodes as possible. As such, one can indeed imagine a hypertextual tooling of “come in”: an electronic concordance of links to passages that in turn link to each other, attempting to distinguish semiotic amalgamations from the non-communicative gaps of noise. One can imagine supplementary material brought to bear as well, such as the latest Archive dates for various passages in the Wake,50 correlated with the dates of Beckett’s most likely collaboration with Joyce (1932-1935). Such a network of convergences, navigated by a Model Joco-Cybernetician, perhaps, would yield one signal passage in which Beckett’s hand could have penned the errant “Come in”: —Take off thatch whitehat (lo, Kersse come in back bespoking of loungeon off the Boildawl stuumplecheats for rushirishis Irush-lrish, dangieling his old Conan over his top gallant shouldier so was, lao yiu shao, he’s like more look a novicer on the nevay). —Tick off that whilehot, you scum of a botch, (of Kersse who, as he turned out, alas, hwen ching hwan chang, had been mocking his hollaballoon a sample of the costume of the country). —Tape oaf that saw foull and sew wrong, welsher, you suck of a thick, stock and the udder, and confiteor yourself (for bekersse he had cuttered up and misfutthered in the most multiplest manner for that poor old bridge’s masthard slouch a shook of cloakses the wise, hou he pouly hung hoang tseu, his own fitther couldn’t nose him). [FW 322.1-13]

In the triple alterations of the text, the parentheticals are not commented to Kersse directly, but in amplification of the command Take off/Tick off/Tape oaf. As such, one could argue that the presence of “come in” in the first instance is a cybernetic redundancy, since “Kersse […] back bespoking of loungeon off the Boildawl stuumplecheats for rushirishis Irush-lrish” has no less of a claim as a complete message than the passage as it appears in print. But such a program of reading spirals out of control in the Wake, particularly in a passage of triple redundancy. In what sense can we say that “come in” does or does not signify in a way that would be demanded by the network of the text—or even an intertextual network (Beckett’s hermetic coding of assent in his own “tailor tale” in Endgame, told by Nagg, who summons his audience with a knock on Nell’s ashbin)? The ideal of mastery of a text speaks to a certain understanding of textuality—an understanding that places either author or reader in a position 58

of engineering a text. The approach suggests that not all textual linkages are valid—or rather, that one could in effect distinguish between what is justified by a reading of the text and what is idiosyncratic to the reader. The convergence of Beckett’s “Come in” and Derrida’s computer, then, also suggests a gap in signification, a gap between Peircean and Saussurean semiotics, between semeiosis and semiosis, between two articulations of drift. And marking this gap, as interstitial text, is the Wake itself. Consider, for example, Eco’s oft-cited discussion of a single Wakean word: “meandertale.”51 He attempts to explain how the web or networked structure of signification in the Wake justifies some readings while excluding others. Eco argues that Finnegans Wake produces a textual network of associations that makes the work’s cultural and psychological context legible. The lexeme “meandertale” produces three other lexemes, all interconnected by a network of associations, each reinforcing the other, at the expense of other possible associative links: “The interconnections show, moreover, the way in which every lexeme can in turn become the archetype of an associative series which would amalgamate sooner or later, with the associative terminals of another lexeme.”52 While Eco emphasises that these semiotic networks place sign-functions in a temporary arrangement via a code, the articulation of a semiotic network by way of that code gives rise to a structure of increasing determination— assuming that this semiotic system also performs as a communicative system (such as a literary object). Nodes, while temporary in their arrangement, are reinforced by the actual activation of a semiotic relation—in the instance of a literary object, by the act of reading. As a network then, what determines signification is the potential to communicate via a code. “Meandertale” resonates because of its nodal relationship with other nodes in the same semiotic amalgamation. One can determine, then, according to Eco, the semiotic value of a given Wakean word not by claims to authorial intent, but by the felicity conditions that allow this network to “fire.” The network, then, specifically becomes an expression of interconnected codings. But in reading Finnegans Wake, one is caught up in an interstitial space, a “zone of unconformity” between two systems of reading. The first treats the word as an interminable opening onto a play of signifiers. The second marks each word with a code that potentially unlocks the “entire” text. At issue are the networks of the text itself. To quote the Wake: It is told in sounds in utter that, in signs so adds to, in universal, in polygluttural, in each auxiliary neutral idiom, sordomutics, florilingua, sheltafocal, flayflutter, a con’s cubane, a pro’s tutute, strassarab, ereperse and anythongue athall. [FW 117.12-16]

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Not only do phrases like “in utter that” and “so adds to” open to multiple interpretation, but networks of resonance start to develop in clusters and repetitions of morphemes and phonemes that reinforce one another. To take a polyglutteral phrase such as “anythongue athall”: from the standpoint of Eco’s semiotics: the unlimited semiosis of reading would entail a process of increasing determination of a sign series through greater control over a semiotic network. The Model Reader would enact the nodes “completely,” or rather, would amalgamate these virtualities into an actual reading that optimises this network of resonances: “Anything at all/Any tongue at all.” This asymptotic semiosis would converge with other lexemes in the sequence in which tongues and plenitude resonate (polyglutteral, florilingua). Although the phrase is never fully determined, it approaches such a point. This sort of reading stands in contradistinction to Derrida’s reading of a single word in the Wake, in which complete determination of the text is not only impossible, but through a chain of signification (Eco’s Hermetic drift), the process is always open toward increasing indetermination. Reading, Derrida suggests, enacts a set of dissipative connections, such that any convergence (anything/any tongue) increases the virtuality of a semiotic network, rather than amalgamating actual links. One finds a similar “zone of unconformity” between systematic treatments of hypertext—as either cybernetic vehicle or post-structural writing space. Do we, for example, understand the WWW as a network of interconnecting determinate nodes, defined by URLs (minus the “noise” of dead links), or as an indeterminate opening, an interstitial gap marked by a user’s hand hovering over mouse and keyboard? The Web is presented in the mass media as the great leveller by providing individuals access to a global medium of production, distribution, and consumption. In addition to providing a material form for a “worldwide” network, hypertext also enacts conceptual structures that foreground the user as an autonomous controller/operator of global resources. Browsing, then, as a lived practice, articulates a space in which the network situates the user in an operational relation with “the world.” This representation of a network of linkages treats the connections between pages of a hypertextual field as a reified structure: a network of nodes. Of course, there is no link between two pages in a material sense, only the potential for one (every “dead” link attests to this fact). As such, the materiality of the link is not on the screen in glowing blue lettering, but rather in the embodied experience of the user whose eye is trained on a screen, and whose hand deftly types, scrolls, and clicks. In fact, there is no reason to treat the link that occurs by way of clicking on the screen as more or less direct than the link that occurs when a user “points” the browser to another page by typing in a URL. This 60

vision of hypertext as a space of cybernetic control represents a dominant ideology of the Web, but one could also argue that each web page presents an opening, the potential to enact an indeterminate network of connections. Thus browsing the WWW does indeed provide users with access to a range of sources, distributed both geographically and topically, but the “connections” that link them are always potential, not actual, until they are articulated though lived practice. Thinking of the space of hypertext as an event rather than a state of affairs, I would suggest that the user enacts a space by calling specific pages into an experienced relation. In this regard, hypertext is a relational space that is actualised in lived practice. As an event, it suggests both virtual structures of potential and actual enacted networks of convergence. In the network produced by the user pointing and clicking her way through various sites, the very possibility for errant or “perverse” connections is inseparable and indistinguishable from its global, “universal” potential. From the perspective of an information space, then, there can be no real distinction between appropriate or inappropriate linkages or sites. Such a vision of the spatiality of hypertext, of course, runs contrary to the ideology of the information superhighway, where connectivity equates with efficiency and productivity. As a cybernetic vehicle, then, hypertext suggests that the greater the degree of control over this virtual structure, the better the sense that the user is mapping a useful and meaningful information space. Yet gaps and fissures will always exist as indisciplines, minor practices, and deterritorialisations. As of 11:18 AM (EST) on 28 January 2004, the search engine website for AltaVista responds to my query: “finnegans wake”

by producing 12,517 links to sites with this key phrase. While information-rich, such a field is unwieldy. By narrowing my search to “finnegans wake” and Joyce and Beckett and “come in” AltaVista provides me with 44 links, most of which refer to the anecdote in question, but some in which the phrase “come in” occurs as spurious information, a random phrase dropped into the text as it were, and not foreseen in the input-output relationship of controller, database, and field of potential information. Other links bring up “404 Not Found” errors. Of the links relevant to the anecdote, I encounter an article by Dan Weiss on Allen Ruch’s Brazen Head website. The article quotes the anecdote for the purpose of explaining how Joyce introduced “the effects of textual drift and plain chance into his works.” (24B). Coincidentally enough, 61

the Weiss article is also interested in networks, writing, and Joyce, with significant reference to Eco’s Open Work. The network of scholars invoked by this anecdote of convergences in a Joycean Hypertext suggests something similar to a Peircean “community of inquirers” in which like-minded searches and like-minded pursuits are brought together. While I had not encountered Weiss’s work prior to writing this article, the ability of the search engine to generate a controlling structure over thousands (in this instance) of potential pages suggests a meaningful amalgamation of scholarship. But that’s not what I was after. We are not any closer to “nailing down” Beckett’s “Come in” than we were at 11:17 AM. It slips through the gap. The convergence that did take place—on networks, Eco, and Finnegans Wake—occurred precisely in this interstitial space between input and output programs. I am working on my computer, with windows open to two websites: The Trent University Finnegans Web and the Grand Teton Joyce Omnicordia. By correlating one with the other, I can perform key word searches and extract textual passages. My generation of “come” produces 156 occurrences. The limits of the current concordance search do not allow me to type “come in” and search the particular phrase. In typing phrases, however, I do manage to enter “comein,” requesting partial and whole word search. I receive the following response: “thou who agnitest! Dah! Arcthuris comeing! Be! Verb umprincipiant through the trancitive spaces! Kilt by kelt shell kithagain” (FW 594.2). Rather than pinning down the passage, or completing my impossible task, the network converges on another slippage, an error, one that for a moment, seems to resonate in the aleatory occurrence of “trancitive spaces.” Isn’t that what I’ve been trying to map on these pages? But can it be said that I activated a code, or in any other way executed a program that commands and controls this network of convergences and meaning-making? Or am I merely caught up in the delirious, hermetic convergences of a drifting similitude? In this interstitial gap between two programs, this trancitive space, something still comes together. Might we define this moment, as with hypertext, as a dynamic event in a relational space of signification? If we think of the networks of convergence in Finnegans Wake as dynamic events, we are forced to think in terms of the generative function of networks. We might now rethink the “meandertale” example as a stabilisation of the text through the articulation of a semiotic network, rather than the activation of a series of semiotic nodes. In such a reading, “anythongue athall” does indeed map a virtuality of signification, but that virtuality does not precede the event of reading; it is articulated in the immanent practice of reading itself. How does the node “anythongue athall” respond to a semiotic convergence that actualises “thong” as a semantic rheme, set against “con’s cubane,” “pro’s tutute?” Such 62

a reading, aberrant and abhorrent to Eco’s semiotic, calls attention to the dynamic, relational event of reading. If we can conceive of a semiotic immanent to the dynamics of convergence, then we will need to account for the production of meaning at these very moments of interstitial slippage: not as aporetic escapes, but as relational spaces of emergent meaning-making. This text itself is a monstrous convergence of sorts, to the extent that its composition straddles a number of years, a number of productions, a number of iterations. The process of condensation that eliminates some material while highlighting others is not so much a matter of separating that which signifies from that which amounts to noise. Instead, the very dynamics of combination gives rise to its own meaning-making. The question, then, of the convergence of textual passages is no more significant than the question of the textual gaps and interstitial spaces that are exploited by the reader, and that articulate the text itself as a communicative system.

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NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16

17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27

George Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) 10. Landow, Hypertext, 24. Landow, Hypertext, 135-137 For an overview of this shift in Joyce scholarship, see Leonard Orr, “Recent Reformations of Joyce,” SubStance 65 (1991): 89-100. Derek Attridge, “The Postmodernity of Joyce: Chance, Coincidence, and the Reader,” Joyce Studies Annual 6 (1995): 12-14. Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Lapsus Ex Machina,” trans. Elizabeth Guild, Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays From the French, eds. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 79. Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) 219-221. Rabaté, “Lapsus Ex Machina,” 91. Geoffrey Bennington. “Derridabase,” Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) 314. Jacques Derrida, “Two Words For Joyce,” trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Post-Structuralist Joyce, 147. Derrida, “Two Words For Joyce,” 155. Jacques Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone,” trans. Tina Kendall, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992) 286. Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone,” 104-106. Topia, André, “The Matrix and the Echo: Intertextuality in Ulysses,” trans. Elizabeth Bell, Post-Structuralist Joyce, 109 For an earlier example of this convergence between Joycean scholarship and media theory, via Marshall McLuhan, see Donald Theall, “Beyond the Orality/Literacy Dichotomy: James Joyce and the Pre-History of Cyberspace,” Postmodern Culture 2.3 (May 1992). . As the Semantic Web learns significance through hypercomplex linkages between sites, Berners-Lee believes, an organic structure begins to emerge from the Web as a whole, with the potential for ideas—and social forms—to evolve out of its structures of connectivity. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 187. Ted Nelson, Literary Machines, edition 87.1. (published by the author, 1987) 2.4. Eco, The Open Work, 9. Eco, The Open Work, 18-19. Eco, The Open Work, 19. But Eco also acknowledges that which escapes coding: the multiplicity of other unactualised expressions. While information occurs through a selection of signal and a decrease in possible choices, the “openness” of poetics correlates to its virtual multiplicities. Poetics, rather than intentionally coding information, seeks a “dis-ordering” that moves expression away from the actual and toward this virtuality. See Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) 66-67. Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) 69. Eco, The Role of the Reader, 72. Eco, The Role of the Reader, 18. Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone,” 305. Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone,” 306.

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28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52

Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone,” 308. For a play on the same pun to describe hypertext, with explicit reference (once again) to Joyce, see Kevin Kelly, Out of Control (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994) 450-467. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1954) 17. Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 17. Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 25. Eco, The Role of the Reader, 9. Eco, The Role of the Reader, 11. See for example Umberto Eco, “Unlimited Semeiosis and Drift: Pragmaticism vs. ‘Pragmatism,’” in Peirce and Contemporary Thought, ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner (New York: Fordham University Press, 1995) 196-221. Eco, The Role of the Reader, 23. In most information systems, this is an Augustinian evil, a lack of perfect order—in contrast to the Manichaean evil that actively works against the forces of order in the world. See Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 35. Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 110 Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 110-111 This is the explicit philosophy behind Jorn Barger’s IQ Infinity Joyce site, for example, where he describes his ambition to use artificial intelligence “ultimately to find the underlying structure of Finnegans Wake, which I think will supply a precise analysis of human motivations, that can serve as a ‘Yahoo’ category-hierarchy for complex psychological content.” See IQ Infinity: The Unknown James Joyce . Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949) 18-19. John Harty, “Is Beckett’s ‘Come in’ in Finnegans Wake?” Notes on Modern Irish Literature 5 (1993): 52. Harty, “Is Beckett’s ‘Come in’ in Finnegans Wake?” 54. Harty, “Is Beckett’s ‘Come in’ in Finnegans Wake?” 55. Harty, “Is Beckett’s ‘Come in’ in Finnegans Wake?” 56. Shannon and Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, 55-6. Shannon and Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, 57. Shannon and Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, 56. Harty, “Is Beckett’s ‘Come in’ in Finnegans Wake?” 52. Available at Antwerp James Joyce Centre, Dates and Drafts, 2002, . “The meandertale, aloss and again, of our old Heidenburgh in the days when Head-inClouds walked the earth” (FW 18.22-24). For a complete discussion, see Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) 67-89. Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) 142.

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Laurent Milesi HYPERWAKE 3D Much of so-called “avant-garde” literature in the twentieth century has been concerned with redefining the relation to space and time within its own artistic medium, sometimes borrowing from the sister arts—especially music but also, increasingly, dance—the inspirational metaphors for suggesting a break beyond the constraints of the sequential, two-dimensional mode of writing. Whether engaged in reshaping verse or the “sculpture of rhyme” (Pound and other Modernist poets), conceptualising the page and poetic composition as a (composition by) field (Olson, Duncan), or implementing alternative novelistic structures and timeframes (Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Pynchon, to name but a few), etc., experimental writers have also turned to science, its key discoveries and ways of adaptively mapping the constantly changing real as a stimulus for renewing the perception of the relationship between the internal processes of literary creation and the external world. With its timeless encyclopaedic framework, how does Joyce’s formidable last novel transcend the limits of its literary medium and manage to evoke the three, even four-dimensional reality of post-Einsteinian physics during whose discovery Work in Progress grew, let alone the more contemporary redefinition of the real in relation to virtuality? Through what means (writing techniques, textual and even genetic dynamics, etc.) can its ultimately linear (2D) mode of aesthetic expression and fictional creation convey these dimensions beyond? And how can such a tour de force be connected to the passage from real to virtual, to the reconfiguration of the relationship between space, identity and meaning in what is called the “virtual world”? 1. JOYCE’S TECHNO-POETICS Joyce’s engineering metaphors to describe his painstaking Work in Progress,1 whose early stages arguably gave its writer more problems as there was no overarching scaffolding à la Ulysses, are the self-conscious traces of how the emerging new idiom was instrumental in shaping a “voluminous” construction, and materialised, in the “final” text, as the work’s self-referential awareness as, for instance, a well-known “vicociclometer” (FW 614.27) featuring a “harmonic condenser enginium” (FW 310.01). The overwhelming presence of science and technology alongside the wealth of expected literary or more generally cultural references implicitly records how the Wake’s linguistic medium is, by implications of the inner mechanics of its semantic construction, a cross between a “scientific” combinatory dynamics and a po(i)etic shaping imagination. Indeed some of the “key moments” that punctuate the endlessly 66

returning cycles of Finnegans Wake derive their thematic consistency from science or newly invented technologies: the Euclidian (re)construction of a female triangle in the geometry lesson of FW II.2 (which reveals ALP’s 3Dforms of sorts), the splitting of the atom on FW 353, at the end of the Butt and Taff skit, which several critics have considered to be the earliest representation of a TV show in literature, before the popularisation of the invention. In that respect, the holograph notebook VI.B.46.204 ff. features an index on “Television,” mainly used for FW 349, which mentions John Logie Baird, inventor of the TV principle in 1925. Mixing old and new in the gyres of Vichian history, Joyce’s Wake takes us back to the ancient etymological link between ars (ars) and technology (technē), and it is therefore quite fitting to conceive of its scriptural activity as a “techno-poetic.”2 The Wake’s “verbivocovisual” (FW 341.18) universe can even be seen as the radical extrapolation and “condensation” of Pound’s own trinity of poetic principles: logopoeia, melopoeia and phanopoeia3—in spite of the American poet’s growing reticence towards, and ultimate disdain for, Joyce’s more mature work, especially Finnegans Wake—to which the rigours of a scientific composition would have been applied. 2. ULTRA-REMOTE CONTROL: JOYCE’S TELE- AND HYPERAs Donald Theall notes in “The Hieroglyphs of Engined Egypsians: Machines, Media and Modes of Communication in Finnegans Wake,” the tele- prefix appears in numerous Wakean coinages: “teleframe,” “telekinesis,” “telemac,” “telepath,” “telephone,” “telephony,” “telescope,” “telesmell,” “telesphorously,” “televisible,” “television,” “televox,” “telewisher,”4 thus featuring most senses in the Wake’s visionary representation of our newly digitised experience of the real. One of the well-known thematic oppositions between Shem and Shaun, or the aural and the visual respectively, is even recast in those “remote” (tele-: distant, away, remote) terms on FW 52.18: “television kills telephony in brothers’ broil,” and FW 338.09-10 features a telescope-cum-television (“Tell ever so often?”) which is “distantly” echoed and distorted on l.14 (“Till even so aften”), as if the linguistic medium of description was attuned to the physical principle it is conveying. Joyce’s words are remote or tele-particles travelling like waves or sounds in a distorting “bush (or bouche) telephone,” a metaphor appropriate to the kind of pre-modern military campaign which this episode stages (the Crimean war and a nationalist claim to a sod of turf): they make the absent (invisible, inaudible) perceptible (cf. FW 546.29). A similar effect on a larger scale, involving synaesthetic amalgamations, can be found on the “television page” (FW 349; cf. also 309), and television becomes “tell a wish” (cf. FW

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489.21, 597.36) to record the dream universe and wishful thinking, with its verbal games of fort-da. Indeed Joyce’s portmanteau idiom operates through such a remote-control procedure and meaning can only be created in a multilayered, polyphonic or polyglottal way through the careful engineering of absences (the eclipsed particles in the verbal constructions: fort) and suggestive presences or “virtualities” (da). Thus memory or even “hypermemory,”5 including the coinage’s own, works throughout Finnegans Wake as such a machinic teletransmitter “from every sides” (cf. FW 614.19-21). This is also where Vico’s “trellis” and especially Jousse’s and Paget’s theories on the gestural origins of language become structurally relevant to understand the hieroglyphic shaping and functioning of the new idiom, in which the gesture of inscription (by a penman) and subsequent transmission (by a postman) is implicitly recorded.6 The Wakean portmanteaus need therefore to be choreographed into recognition through a shaping gesture capable of articulating heterogeneous linguistic elements so that they “coalesce [[…]] in one stable somebody” (FW 107.29-30). Joyce’s writing is thus a tele-graphy of sorts, whereby words communicate what they are not and only remotely, and a joint tele-kinetics of production / arrangement and consumption (or recreation in reverse, as it were) presides over the whole linguistic enterprise. But the text’s “voluminous” dimension is not limited to the imaginary fleshing out of the two-dimensional page of linear writing into a virtual 3D environment. As the development of Work in Progress went on, Joyce not only became adept in his own invented medium but also incorporated into the “finished” product traces of its composition, such as the “compositional tags” indicating changes of direction in the drafting process at key junctions of FW II.2, which now testify to the dynamics of creation.7 Thus, in FW I.5, the Wakeas-house or container (one of Joyce’s structural sigla in the Notebooks) is allegorised as its own manuscript, complete with diverse interpretations—two ways of delving beyond the surface into the depths of a suggestively 3D text. This is also where tele- becomes hyper-: over, above, but also beyond in that redefined textual geo-graphy of the work’s fictional linguistic universe, as the Wake-as-dynamic palimpsest already prefigures its own hypertext (and the invention thereof)—with the pun as a node for its material implementation, each semic unit becoming thus a link of sorts.8 Joyce’s “Dear Dirty Dublin” would thus become the prototype of a 3D world, and the book-as-volume the appropriate designation of such an extended, reconfigured space.

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3. SYNAESTHESIA—COENESTHESIA—CYBERSTHESIA Joyce’s last novel has long been known for its synaesthetic qualities, best captured in the much-vaunted (and already mentioned) “verbivocovisual” (FW 341.18) hinting at the sensorial layering of meaning in the text’s linguistic coinages. The proclaimed necessity for the brothers to unite, or the senses to cooperate, anchors the Wake’s synaesthetic qualities within the implied fourth dimension of a space-time continuum (cf. the work’s circular structure as well as its “continuous present tense integument” (FW 186.01), etc.). But as we saw, such a synaesthetic collaboration in the production and emergence of “sense” is dependent on a craftily engineered stratification which ultimately recalls and records the evolution of language and transmission of meaning, from gesture to rhythm to word in print. The “Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies,” in particular, offers a privileged instance of such a coenesthetic drive within the text, of its own awareness as a “volume” of many interactive parts but also of a general awareness of one’s own body in eliciting an “organic sense” (koine aisthesis: common sensation): the gestural principle at work in shaping the Wakean idiom is conveyed through the girls’s mime of the gestural origin of language in their evocative performance of the word “heliotrope.” Through its reticular organisation and its re-mapping of the boundaries between presence (reality) and absence (virtuality), the Wake-as-hypertext opens up the possibility of a cyberspatial, cybersthetic dimension,9 which I will define as the random navigation by the Wakean cybernaut (cf. kubernan: to steer, guide, govern) among organised strands of perceptual, sensorial data which shape new potential virtual realities with every new Wakean cross-fertilisation, such as the “telesmell,” whose semantic implications felicitously anticipate the recent success at digitising odours, with the prospect of being able to code it into esupermarkets to tempt the virtual consumers … Thus (Wakean) cybernetics could be seen as the radicalisation of the modernist creed of organicity, once poetry crosses from the realm of biology into technology to become what Theall first called “techno-poetics,”10 and Joyce’s accretional method of composition, which fleshed out passages from within early defined limits, finds a rough equivalent in the way an HTML document grows within ““ markers past the “,” including through nesting or embedding tags. And to return to the Joussean-Pagetian flavour of Finnegans Wake within a cybermetic context—one of Jousse’s essays was invitingly called “La Manducation de la parole,” as Theall notes, “[b]y treating the “gest” as a bit (a bite), orality and the written word as the projections of gesture can be seen to spring from the body as a communicating machine.”11 Beginning with gesture, hieroglyph and rune, Joyce traces human communication through its labyrinthine development, rhythms, printed word 69

and even future evolutions like TV, the digitisation of sense(s), and does so in a circular process whereby, paradoxically, oral culture and the cyberspace of our global village (the new form of “Babel”) are adjacent to each other. In that respect the “Mutt and Jute” sketch, which alludes to runes and the Norse alphabet of Futhorc (FW 18.04, 34), may be read as some sort of prehistoric, preliterate encounter but the semi-telegraphic nature of the exchange could also be envisaged as the shorthand transcript of virtual interaction in a chat room, the seemingly physical contact being nothing more than the self-dramatised virtual actions performed by avatars in a cyberworld. Using cinema or advertising as the punning interface, this is what the Wake itself calls three times in sequence the “reel world” (FW 64.25-26), and in integrating within the text a compositional (metatextual) as well as a hypertextual dimension, Joyce’s reticular 3D “virtureal” writing may be interpreted as a literary precursor of the World Wide Web in its multicultural, encyclopaedic functioning in which the physical reality of the space of writing is re-negotiated as a cartographic field of semantic-thematic forces beyond (hyper-) it.

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NOTES 1

2

3

4 5

6

7 8

9

Cf. “engine driver,” “one of the greatest engineers”; Letters of James Joyce, vol. I, ed. Stuart Gilbert (London: Faber, 1957) 251. The implications of these have been discussed in JeanMichel Rabaté, “Lapsus ex machina,” reprinted in Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, eds. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 79-101, and Donald F. Theall, “James Joyce—Literary Engineer,” Literature and Ethics: Essays presented to A.E. Malloch, ed. Gary Wihl and David Williams (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988) 111-27. The concept was first applied by Donald F. Theall in numerous studies, especially “The Hieroglyphs of Engined Egypsians; Machines, Media, and Modes of Communication in Finnegans Wake,” Joyce Studies Annual, ed. Thomas F. Staley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991) 129-62 (pages 148-9 offer a short analysis of FW 349), and James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), and later extended by Louis Armand in Technē: James Joyce, Hypertext and Technology (Prague: Karolinum / Charles University Press, 2003). Cf. Ezra Pound, “How To Read,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. and intr. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1954) 25, and ABC of Reading (London: Faber, 1951), passim, where he also enlists the equation “Dichten = condensare” to summarise his view of great (poetic) literature as “simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree” (ABC of Reading, 36; cf. also 92). Theall, “The Hieroglyphs of Engined Egypsians; Machines, Media, and Modes of Communication in Finnegans Wake,” 131. See Jacques Derrida’s perception of the Wake as a vast hypermnesic machine which we remain “in memory of” in “Two Words for Joyce,” trans. Geoff Bennington, Post-structuralist Joyce, 14559 (147). Jean-Michel Rabaté had developed the view of the Wake as a “semic machine” in “Lapsus ex machina.” See Laurent Milesi, “Vico... Jousse. Joyce.. Langue,” James Joyce 1: “Scribble” 1: Genèse des textes, ed. Claude Jacquet (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1988) 143-62, and “Supplementing Babel: Paget in VI.B.32,” James Joyce: The Study of Languages, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2002) 75-89. See Laurent Milesi, “Towards a Female Grammar of Sexuality: The De/Recomposition of ‘Storiella as she is syung,’“ Modern Fiction Studies 35.3 (Autumn 1989): 569-86. Compare with Donald Theall’s statement in Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture, and Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995) 110: “The pun is a node of semantic energy where the material realisation of the pun (e.g. in print) is an entity which radiates and disseminates signification.” In “Pressing Genetic Inquiries into Joyce,” an unpublished paper delivered at the XVth James Joyce Symposium, Zürich 1996 (to be found at: http://antwerpjamesjoycecenter.com/), Sam Slote already mentioned the “links” which the Wake-as-hypertext (including the notebooks, whose entries can provide critics with HTML tags of sorts—the sigla functioning as structural “anchors,” we might add) and cyberspace share and, like Theall, posits Marshall McLuhan and his enthusiasm for the Wakean compositional universe as a critical predecessor. See McLuhan, “James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial,” Thought 28.108 (Spring 1953): 75-98; Donald F. Theall, “Beyond the Orality-Literacy Dichotomy: James Joyce and the Pre-History of Cyberspace,” Postmodern Culture 2.3 (May 1002), at: http://www.2street.com/joyce/pmcultur.asc, and, with Joan Theall, “Marshall McLuhan and James Joyce: Beyond Media,” Canadian Journal of Communication 14 (1989): 46-66.

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10

11

For an earlier insight focusing on the grounding of communication in physiological processes, see John Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark: “Finnegans Wake” (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), especially chapters 8 (on optics) and 9 (on acoustics). Theall, “Beyond the Orality-Literacy Dichotomy: James Joyce and the Pre-History of Cyberspace”; see also “The Hieroglyphs of Engined Egypsians; Machines, Media, and Modes of Communication in Finnegans Wake,” 148 on the “digesting of bits.”

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Louis Armand FROM HYPERTEXT TO VORTEXT / NOTES ON MATERIALITY & LANGUAGE What I say for the first time, as if as testimony, is already a repetition, at least a repeatability; it is already an iterability, more than once at once, more than an instant in one instant, at the same time; and that being the case, the instant is always divided at its very point, at the point of its writing. It is always on the verge [en instance] of becoming divided, whence the problem of idealisation. To the extent that it is repeatable, the singular instant becomes an ideal instant. The root of the testimonial problem of technē is to be found here. The technical reproducability is excluded from testimony, which always calls for the presence of the live voice in the first person. But from the moment that a testimony must be repeated, technē is admitted; it is introduced where it excluded. For this one need not wait for cameras, videos, typewriters, and computers. As soon as the sentence is repeatable, that is, from its origin, the instant it is pronounced and becomes intelligible, thus idealisable, it is already instrumentalisable and affected by technology. And virtuality. It is thus the very instant of the instant that seems to be exemplary: exemplary in the very place where it seems unique and irreplaceable, under the seal of unicity. And it is perhaps here, with the technological both as ideality and prosthetic iterability, that the possibility of fiction and lie, simulacrum and literature, that of the right to literature insinuates itself, at the very origin of truthful testimony, autobiography in good faith, sincere confession, as their essential composability.—Jacques Derrida, Demeure1

The question of materiality remains as pressing as ever in current discussions of textual genetics and hypertext, and it is the objective of this paper-although highly speculative in places—to provide something like a notational framework within which we might effectively engage with this question without descending either into classical hermeneutics, epistemology or empiricism, while at the same time enlisting certain aspects of their conceptual infrastructures to the work of textual theory—above all to a theory of hypertextuality. The significance of James Joyce’s work for discussions of textual genetics and hypertext has not always been as straightforward as it has been made to seem—even in the specific context of “Joycean genetics” and “Joycean hypertext.” This has to do, to a certain degree, with conflicting theoretical orientations rather than, strictly speaking, with methodologies—at least with working methodologies. In 1995 Geert Lernout mapped out a number of these differences within the filed of Joycean genetics,2 in which praxis is rather foregrounded, delineating between the work of Daniel Ferrer, David Hayman and himself—or between (at that time) a poststructuralist tendency on the one hand, and a “radical philology” on the other. Without rehearsing the arguments set forth in Lernout’s paper, the current discussion may be profitably viewed as a partial response to a number of the points raised in it. 73

* Whatever inheritance has come down to textual genetics and hypertext from the work of the two most prominent of Joyce’s “theoretical” exponents, Marshall McLuhan and Jacques Derrida, and however this has been received, the genealogies are far from simple. One aspect, however, may be seen to be more or less consistent, and that is the emphasis upon “technology”; that is, upon the technē of writing. And, in the work of Derrida at least, upon the mechanical, and above all material, basis of technē as such. Elsewhere I have discussed this at length and will not attempt to go back over the same ground here,3 except to recall to attention certain remarks by Martin Heidegger which, while not directly cited by either McLuhan or Derrida, provide something like a common motto for their respective projects. In “Die Frage nach der Technik,” Heidegger writes: “technē belongs to bringing forth, to poiēsis; it is something poetic.”4 And later he adds: “not praxis but poiēsis may enable us to confront the essential unfolding of technology.”5 In short, the question of materiality remains tied to the question of text, to the inherent structurality of language and the conditions of signification, in advance of any assumption of praxis. For this reason the discussion of hypertext here will focus upon the condition of hypertextuality, rather than upon computer-based electronic writing. It may be instructive to recall that hypertext as it is popularly conceived is fundamentally infrastructural rather than anything like a discrete object or thing. To speak of “a hypertext” in this sense is to engender a fallacy that returns us to such notions as the “literary object.” The materiality of hypertext should not be confused with the electrobibliographical codes that are commonly regarded as standing for it—i.e. the phenomenal aspects of “electronic writing.” The materiality of hypertext is rather the condition itself of such phenomena, of writing per se, and thereby underwrites its “technological application.” The implication of this for textual genetics is clear enough, and evidently extends beyond the instrumental or prosthetic function of computerised “hypertext” as a presentational medium for such things as Joyce’s notebooks and drafts, or annotated or synoptic editions of his published works. While the efficacy of such “applications” is not in question, the idea that such application accounts in any way for hypertext, and for the significance of hypertext for textual genetics, most certainly is. As Lernout points out, the “falsifiability” of genetic research lends it to a logistic conception of text: in short, the connection of meaning and verifiability—and this is the question which must

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firstly be addressed, not, however, as a binary expression of either praxis or poiēsis, but rather, in the first instance, of their nexus in a common materiality. In his discussion of radical philology, Lernout cites Ferrer citing Derrida on the “possibility of disengagement and citational graft which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written, and which constitutes every mark in writing before and outside every horizon of semio-linguistic communication (‘Signature, événement, contexte’).” Despite the evident irony of this situation, it is worth taking Lernout’s objection seriously, that whatever stands “before and outside every horizon of semio-linguistic communication” constitutes—as in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus—“that whereof we cannot speak.” For Lernout, the anteriority of signification is a matter simply of intuition, and therefore characterises a failure of rigorous methodology. It is precisely the question of methodology or rather of method, however, which may be regarded as being at stake here. For Derrida, the anteriority of signification is indicative of the tautological relation of the instantaneousness of the present (posed in the form of the signifier) to technē, and which via the concept of “testimony,” devolves in large part upon the impossibility of generalising the instant, while nevertheless confronting the necessarily generalising condition of “iterability” as the structural constraint and pre-condition of its signifier as such (i.e. of “the instant” as “une série de contiguïtés matérielle”).6 Derrida argues at length in his 1996 collaboration with Bernard Stiegler, Échographies: “que technicité ne soit pas technique, que la pensée de la technique ne soit pas technique, c’est la condition de la pensée.”7 And yet in speaking thus we necessarily generalise this concept, as Derrida warns, both as an exemplum and as an ideality (viz. the supplementarity of method). The point for Lernout, however, is that whatever stands as an object of intuitive knowledge is unverifiable; it is not an object of knowledge at all and is therefore irrelevant to the project of textual genetics. What the project of textual genetics properly is may be debatable, although consensus seems to lean towards a definition based upon “direct treatment of the avant-texte.” By “direct treatment” we may assume any number of meanings, from classical hermeneutics or empirical method, to considerations of textual genesis or textual materiality; in whatever context, from historicity to the technics of literary composition, to classical or radical philology, and so forth. In any case the term needs to be qualified, if only for the very practical reason that textual genetics begins with a necessary if apparently contradictory assumption of incompletion, and that at every point it must take this into account, above all in its definition of “verifiability.” Between a conception of semio-linguistic anteriority and of genetic verifiability, there arises the problem of “prediction.” If anteriority is purely a 75

matter of intuition, as Lernout argues, then verifiability itself succumbs to the indeterminacy inherent to all forms of predictive modelling. What is significant is not that this indeterminacy arises as a consequence of the “incompletion” of genetics—or from any other limitation of empirical knowledge—but that it is structural and structurally inherent; which is indeed the point of Derrida’s statement regarding “possibility” (“the possibility of disengagement and citational graft which belongs to the structure of every mark”). Lernout is obliged to concede that textual genetics, viewed in the context of “radical philology,” can never be more than an approximative method or, rather, an approximative system of knowledge, whose tenets must therefore at some point violate the principle of verifiability. Approximation is in this sense not merely a practical necessity with regards to a certain limit implicit to the technē of knowledge, but as a condition bound up with the materiality of “knowledge”—that is, semio-linguistic or signifying materiality. The logical consequences of viewing “knowledge” as an approximative system which will never be verifiable are thus crucial to an understanding of why the argument about the intuitive character of semio-linguistic anteriority does not hold. With “radical philology,” a fictive definitive system of knowledge is established as the basis of epistemological enquiry, with the result that the schematised character of this basis is soon forgotten, and the fictive construction is identified with the actual system. It is with regard to the limits of this construct that semio-linguistic anteriority assumes its “intuitive” character, for Lernout, as that which exceeds “verifiability.” The relativism of this system not only contradicts its basic premise of generalisability (something must be generally verifiable, not merely a special instance of verifiability), but it also exposes the system to further logical violations with regard to what we might call “locality” (vis-à-vis Derrida’s “disengagement and citational graft”) and the systems over-dependence upon context. In short, the predictive limits of textual genetics require that all recourse to context be provisional, and at the same time that the probabilistic feature of this “recourse” NOT be regarded as provisional. Indeed, probability invests the genetic project at every level, consequent upon precisely the “possibility of disengagement and citational graft,” as Derrida says, “which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written, and which constitutes every mark in writing before and outside every horizon of semio-linguistic communication.” As Hans Reichenbach has pointed out, “It is one of the elementary laws of approximative procedure that the consequences drawn from a schematised conception do not hold outside the limits of approximation; that in particular no consequences may be drawn from features belonging to the nature of the schematisation only and not to the co-ordinate object.”8 The question that 76

obtains here is how approximation avails itself in any way of a consequent realisation of its “co-ordinate object,” as Reichenbach says. Before proceeding, it may well be worth going back over one of Reichenbach’s assumptions about language and signification in general, before proposing anything like a response to the above question. According to the tenets of logical empiricism, “symbols” are physical bodies or processes like any other, irrespective of their “function.” It makes no difference if we consider a symbol to obtain meaning through its correspondence to “facts” or to other “symbols.” A symbol itself is a fact. In structural terms it is irrelevant what “class” of fact a symbol “corresponds” to, or why it is taken as corresponding to it. It’s significance, and that of language as a whole, resides in the possibility of treating a physical body as a symbol; and symbolisation as a function of a possible (meaningful) correspondence between facts. By treating symbols as facts in this manner contradicts, on the level of semio-linguistic materiality at least, the principle of verifiability. That is, the principle of “truth value,” which, as Reichenbach demonstrates, is consequent upon a schematised conception. Moreover, the principle of verifiability is required, in the first instance, to account for the possibility of “correspondence,” and subsequently to account for the ultimately approximative nature of correspondence as such. In this way verifiability cedes to probability and is consequent therefore upon prediction rather than upon a determinate “state of affairs.” * During a conversation at the 2002 Trieste Joyce Symposium, Fritz Senn made a comment which I initially mis-heard as being: “There is no language in Finnegans Wake”—assuming at the time that this was one of Senn’s typically elliptical and provocative statements. Nevertheless I found myself in qualified agreement, having earlier made the claim at the Rome Symposium [1998] that in order to begin “reading” Finnegans Wake, we are first of all obliged to make certain assumptions of translation—that we must in fact “translate” the apparent marks on the page into some determinate semio-linguistic system or language—that we must literally read in or into a lapsus of language—or “nolanguage” (or as Joyce says, “nat language in any sinse of the word”)—so that we might indeed say there is “no-language” in Finnegans Wake. What is at once most striking about Joyce’s text, and at the same time most overlooked, is the power of its resemblant quality: the marks on the page resemble (in most instances) the conventional signifiers of the latin alphabet, and appear in part to correspond to particles of any number of languages, both 77

current and extinct. The problem is that this correspondence cannot be generalised, or indeed schematised according to any conventional notion of language, and that it arises in the “first place” out of the fact of this nolanguage. The question—and it is a very interesting one—is how, then, we can assume to “read” Finnegans Wake. What makes such a “reading” possible? What, to complicate things, is its “co-ordinate object,” as Reichenbach says? Such questions are evidently not idle, as a vast amount of philological activity has indeed been devoted to enumerating sets of “facts” that correspond, in some way, with Finnegans Wake—whether on a micro- or macro-scale; whether “foreign word lists,” place maps, historical narratives, source texts, or whatever. Each of these assume a decipherment of the text; that Finnegans Wake is in fact a type of textual object to be deciphered, dissected, anatomised, classified, and so on. And indeed this too is a fact; is a kind of fact, one among others, that corresponds in some way to an idea of Finnegans Wake. And in and of themselves, each of these facts is “verifiable,” to a certain degree, and yet no idea of Finnegans Wake is verifiable. It is because the idea is already a schematisation—the outcome of a set of predictions centred upon a causal arrangement of symbolic “correspondences”—whose actual “co-ordinate object” has effectively been suppressed because (we may assume) it renders the very notion of verifiability nonsensical. How does it do this? We might say it does this by exposing all presuppositions about language to the broadest implications of semiolinguistic materiality and to the radically probabilistic organisation of language as a whole. What would it mean to verify the materiality of a “symbol”? One problem is that to verify already entails symbolisation—here, with regard to a measure of “truth value.” Another problem is that to assign “truth value” to materiality is tautological. In philosophy the formula S=P provides a simple expression of this effect of semiological “complementarity.” It is evident enough that S is not P, and yet the structure of equivalence or correspondence described here is the one which underwrites the entirety of signification: whether it is in the conventional model of the sign (signifier-signified); in the organisation of rhetorical tropes or figures (metaphor, metonymy, allegory, analogy, parataxis, and so on); or in the overarching notion of narrative and schema. We might say, therefore, that language proceeds on the basis of what we might call an “inequality” theorem, and that inequality itself provides the measure of verifiability. It may be that language occurs as such in the “suspension” of verifiability. Or, we might equally characterise language as proceeding from a structural dependence upon a principle of the “arbitrary” (S=P, where S and P 78

can be any terms whatsoever) which is nevertheless tied to “correspondence” (S≠P, where S and P are nevertheless mutually determined and interdependent)—a form of complementarity from which symbolisation emerges as an effect of what I will call “entanglement.” * In the section of Gulliver’s Travels devoted to the “Academy of Lagado,” Jonathan Swift describes a form of parodic random text generator “for improving speculative knowledge by practical and mechanical operations.” Swift’s machine operates on the basis of lexical (or sublexical) combination and recombination, producing random “propositions” which are subsequently analysed for their philosophical content. The analysts, nominally philosophers, are reduced to the role Alan Turing envisaged for computer technicians: that is, as mere attendants. Swift’s prototypical computer operates on a basis of non-predictability as the principle, in fact, of what remains a purposive form of textual production. However, the mechanism of recombination or “material variability” is not only arbitrary, it is indifferent to outcomes, no matter how purposive these may appear as “objectives,” implying (in more than a satirical manner) that semio-linguistic correspondence is an entirely accidental matter—but more, that it describes something like a statistical outcome; the work of virtually infinite possibility within the (normative) constraints of finite probability. The history of writing and of forms of encoding or encryption returns constantly to the fact of symbolic substitution, abbreviation, displacement, and so on. Anagrams, acrostics, acronyms, algebraic summarisation, etc, are all commonplace demonstrations of “meaningful” symbolic variability. This is precisely the phenomenon that attracted Ferdinand de Saussure in elaborating his differential approach to general linguistics based upon phonemic and lexical variability. For Saussure, variability underwrites both the semantic identity of a particular symbol in relation to other symbols, at the same time as it opens up the possibility of ambiguity and ultimately of a “limit of meaning.” Like genetics, morphological process can be modified and extended beyond what Lernout terms “a saturable and constraining context.” The material indifference of semio-linguistic fragments to the constraints of context reminds us that in fact there is nothing purposeful about language— that language harbours no secret design or intent; that it is not a subject replete with its own psychology or psychological agency. At the same time, to speak of language as such, as of an entity, is to distort the fact of what we might call its “incompleteness.” We might say, indeed, that language can only be defined 79

against completion, if not against its possibility, and that it is this incompletion, or condition of possibility, which lends a semantic complexion to these “material fragments.” Without such a possibility as this, it would be impossible to claim to read Finnegans Wake, or indeed to read at all. If we think of the possible combinatory outcomes of a textual machine like Swift’s speculative apparatus, we can see that, structurally at least, reading does not begin with “a saturable and constraining context,” but rather with the possibility of bringing otherwise disparate, non-contiguous elements into “correspondence.” As with the formula S=P, signifiance operates in the possibility of both affecting and arbitrating a “semantic gap”—a disposition with regards to symbolisation that affects itself in a way that may be described as “equally structured.” That is, the function of (in)equivalence is mutually affective: there is no purposive or relativistic attribute of tenor or vehicle, for example, but rather a network or simultaneous influence that “determines” the virtual character of a text at any point. And it is here that we may profitably begin to look again at what has come to be called “Joycean hypertext.” * Hypertext as defined by Theodor Nelson, who coined the term in the 1960s, constitutes a “non-sequential writing”—which may be understood in the postMallarméan sense of non-sequentiality, or “simultaneity” as later defined by Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars. The “hyper” prefix is taken here to refer, not to a meta level of textuality (a form of semantic epiphenomenon), but to an “internal” mechanism of semantic entanglement or linkage, by which any textual element could be brought into “communication” with any other. Nelson’s conception of hypertext was by and large a response to a paper published by Vannevar Bush in 1945, in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled “As We May Think”—which proposed a primitive form of cybernetic apparatus, in effect a non-sequential information retrieval system. The major feature of Bush’s proposal was that it sought to overcome the limitations of existing indexical structures, which required a search thread to be directed along a branching structure whose organisation was rigidly linear. This “tree-diagram” model was to be replaced by what has since come to be called a rhizomatic model, and subsequently—in the computing application of hypertext—any particle of information could conceivably be linked to any other, according to the minimal existing unit of the pixel. In certain respects, Nelson, who was also involved with the development of artificial intelligence, regarded hypertext as at least analogous to a form of mechanical cognition—extending Alan Turing’s conception of the “Automatic Computing Engine” as an electronic 80

“brain.” In many respects, hypertext and artificial intelligence are seen as analogous, largely upon the basis of symbolic connectivity and the way in which “thought” (intelligence as a particular configuration of consciousness and a particular set of interrelated processes) seems to arise on the basis of what we might call non-local events brought into communication. An important characteristic of hypertext has since come to be its resemblance to physical systems that possess global properties which continue to evolve globally even as the system becomes spatially (or temporally) separated. In this sense, non-locality and entanglement may be useful terms for understanding the “non-sequential” aspects of signification which constitute hypertext, and the consequent effect of “modification” which attends upon interpretive events. Psycho-linguistics has described the phenomenon of “encincturing,” whereby reading is seen as contingent not upon decidability but upon a synthetic and arbitrary mechanism of closure (or semantic “completion”). Significatory possibility is “closed off” for each lexical term within a sequence in order for a propositional structure to obtain; just as the possibilities of sub-lexical recombination must be “closed off” in order for lexical structure to obtain; and so on. At the same time, each event of encincturing brings about a simultaneous modification of the existing signifying structure within which the encinctured term is embedded, as well as modifying the predictive context for those terms which then “follow” (Derrida, referring to the “hypermnesiac machine” of Finnegan Wake, speaks of “quasi-infinite speed” while Joyce himself talks of “infinite probability” [VI.B.14]; cf. the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox, 1935). This process of encincturing has become a commonplace in descriptions of how Joyce’s portmanteau words are taken to operate in Finnegans Wake within a more or less conventional linguistic structure. In doing so, it allows for simultaneously divergent possibilities encoded in the portmanteaux, as in the paranomasian character of Joyce’s poetics in Finnegans Wake generally. In effect, Joyce’s writing exacerbates the question of materiality by reaching constantly beyond the assumes limits of signifying probability, and by situating the “nexus” of semio-linguistic structure in its materiality and not in some form of anima or agency “deposited in it”—as Frederic Jameson, among others, suggests when he states that the “pure temporal movement of signification itself, as it deposits itself in object or letter, is retained, without any ultimate sense of the direction or meaning of that movement.”9 On the other hand, it may be argued that what hypertext implies— extending the implications of Saussure’s sub-lexical approach—is that the phenomenon of signification arises on the basis of “fundamental” material particles in a pre-linguistic state. Particles which, in non-local communication 81

with one another, may assume a schematic or macro-state dimension, as in, for example, the “group triads” HCE and ALP, or more radically in regard to the Wakean sigla; the “doodles family.” As with the Wake’s language taken as a whole, the sigla present nonlinguistic particles which also function as figures or tropes whose “co-ordinate object” is, in a certain sense, language itself. It is only by such typogenetic means that we can account for the way in which certain sigla (e.g. ⊕) are able to attain allegorical and schematic dimensions in the Wake. Or, on the other hand, how acrostic or acronymic figures like ALP and HCE attain the status of structural paradigms (or what Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon term “contextual invariants”).10 That Joyce himself provided an index to the sigla in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, is of no real consequence here. Most of the sigla do not in fact appear in the published version of Finnegans Wake, nor do HCE and ALP appear beyond a number of brief mentions. What does appear, instead, is the very mechanism of material recombination which these figures may in some ways be taken to exemplify. HCE and ALP represent, in other words, a matrix of associative structures, whose limits of permutation are arbitrarily determined by the interpretive process—a subject Joyce himself discusses at length in the Wake. What hypertext shows us, however, is that semio-linguistic materiality, taken by itself as an empirical fact, is equally as meaningless as the generalisation of the text from either a phenomenal or ideological point of view. Signification arises alone upon the possibility of a network of transverse relations—non-local communication between material elements or particles which themselves define anterior transverse relations. Each particle is a set of co-ordinates in n dimensions, a variant point of articulation which is at variance with itself while at the same time producing an effect of structural contiguity. Or, to extend the metaphor, we might say that Joyce’s “geometry lesson” provides instructions about how to proceed from Euclidian 3-space (point, line, volume, etc.) to a semio-linguistic multi-demensionality: from an incipient diagrammatics of “marks on the page” to a “system” of language—a movement that I have come to term, as an elaboration on hypertextuality, vortext. * But what do these almost Joycean terms mean, “hypertext” and “vortext”? To say hypertext—is it to speak in the same manner as Derrida when he discusses the Wake as a hyper-mnesiac machine? How does this hyper- prefix effectively signify? Could we say hypo-text, perhaps, and thereby arrive at a binary 82

understanding of what hyper-text might signify, at least etymologically or in terms of some measure of relativity; hyper or hypo, which presupposes a norm or normative conception of “text.” And by such means might we not also find in the term vortext an echo of the Derridean pro-grammē, of a certain fore-text or avant-texte (which is the concern, as one says, of textual genetics)? Laurent Milesi has pointed to the possible meaning of hyper-text as something over, above, or beyond text; something which exceeds or which is in excess of “text”; something “hyper-linguistic.” But in saying so, it is important to keep track of what this could mean: a form of text over, above or beyond “text.” As one might say, for example, “poetic language”—as opposed, presumably, to “normal” language. And here we may be reminded of Wittgenstein’s contention that there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as poetic language; or as Derrida says, there is no outside of (the) text. The underwriting of poiēsis is, and must be, a general condition of language “as a whole”: just as “hypertextuality” must remain an inherent possibility of text, of all text, of any text, and so on. One reason for proposing the term “vortext” (and I discuss this usage in far more detail elsewhere), is to get around the highly distracting business of distinguishing “hypertext” from those meta-textual functions or devices to which it has so often been compared (index, citation, cross-reference, and so on). To some degree the term is intended to structure a way of thinking about language that takes a more general account of programmatics per se, and of material “anteriority” above all. Of course, this is not to summon up a notion of antecedence, or of causal sequentiality, between hypertext and “text,” etc., but rather a means of addressing that condition of materiality upon which textuality, broadly speaking, devolves. In this way it may be more advised to speak of hypertextuality, being a condition, rather than hypertext as some sort of denotative term for a distinct class of text or of textual operations. The term “vortext” may consequently also be taken, beyond its Poundian echoes of Vorticist dynamism and flux, as a form of internally constituted “textual genetics.” (And I am conscious here of the fact that the term may suggest an extension of the genetic conception of avant-texte into the realm of avant-garde procedure and “ideality”—as though the vortext were rather an object of some compositional intention encoded within the modernist project.) The issue here, however, is not so much one of terminology or praxis, but of a general poetics of materiality which must not only be able to account for its models—and increasingly hypertext, in its popular “application” (and despite the term’s original coinage) has come to be little more than a “model” for certain apparently mysterious aspects of textuality or of cognition—but to 83

account also for the conditions upon which such models are founded, and the dynamics which cause or allow them to operate or in other ways extend or limit their operations. I do not mean here the instrumentality of hypertext, but its conditionality; vortex would thus suggest a type of on-going event of semio-linguistic instigation or solicitation, rather than of a “simple” technological extension, incrementation or inflation of textuality post facto— as though technē were something applied to language. One of the problems here, as Daniel Ferrer has pointed out, is one very familiar to textual genetics, and is at base a problem, not of acknowledging or describing, but of accounting for and indeed coming to terms with what it means to speak of “non-sequential writing.” It may be that the involutions of discussion about hypertext, and Joycean hypertext in particular, are equally linked to the tautological nature of this formula: non-sequential writing—in which case to evoke hypertext at all is already a redundant gesture; a rhetorical exercise in over-categorisation and schematisation. But at the same time a practical view points to the necessity of re-organising “textual theory” according to the ongoing genesis of techne in its various forms, and the need to “come to terms” with what amounts, institutionally, to a continuing disavowal of a techno-poetics, as Donald Theall says, which has underwritten the project of modernity since at least Mallarmé, and which arguably finds its most comprehensive expression in Finnegans Wake.

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NOTES 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10

Jacques Derrida, Demeure. Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) 41-2. Geert Lernout, “The Finnegans Wake Notebooks and Radical Philology,” Probes: Genetic Studies in Joyce, eds. David Hayman and Sam Slote (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995) 19-48. Cf. Louis Armand, Technē: James Joyce, Hypertext & Technology (Prague: Karolinum/Charles University Press, 2003). Martin Heidegger, “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. David Farrell Krell, introduction to Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” Basic Writings, 310. Derrida and Stiegler, Échographies, 146. Derrida and Stiegler, Échographies, 149. Hans Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction: An Analysis of the Foundation and the Structure of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961) vi. Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974) 121. Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon, Understanding Finnegans Wake (NY: Garland, 1982) xiv.

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Daniel Ferrer THE WORK OF JOYCE IN THE AGE OF HYPERTEXTUAL PRODUCTION I would like to begin with an epiphany. Like all epiphanies, it is multi-layered so I will only unfold a couple of those layers, in relation with our subject. It was a few years ago, I was visiting an exhibition called L’âme et le corps in Paris. There was a room that was devoted to Étienne-Jules Marey. In the English speaking countries you may be more familiar with Muybridge. They were contemporaries and invented, almost simultaneously, chronophotography, a device meant to give a static representation of movement, cutting it up into snapshots in order to analyse its components. It was, for instance, this device that made it possible for the first time to see how horses really move their legs when they gallop. Painters soon made use of that discovery. The epiphany I experienced was induced by a series of little films that were being shown in this exhibition room, running in loops. There was a moustachioed man like this one jumping.

Another man with big whiskers was running naked. A dry leaf was spiralling down. A pussy cat was being dropped and was falling on its feet. The organisers of the exhibition had taken some of Marey’s snapshots and put them together in order to reconstruct a film or they had taken some of his 86

chronograms and they had cut them up and they had juxtaposed them to make films.

I was deeply moved by the fact that I was seeing this cat falling, this man jumping—although the jump and the fall had occurred several years before cinema was invented. It was a sort of technological and temporal transgression, in the manner of the Shroud of Turin, which shows the X-ray image of a man that was crucified several centuries before photography or Xrays were invented. To me, this was particularly striking because it seemed to send me back the image of my own activity as a genetic critic. The organisers of the exhibition had used these documents for a purpose that was directly opposite to their original intent: those images were used to recreate a movement, whereas originally they had been produced in order to freeze motion into a plurality of snapshots (so that each of its phases could be studied at leisure). Paradoxically, Marey is often acclaimed as a precursor of cinema, while his main contribution went in the opposite direction. Genetic criticism is based on a similar paradox: it makes use of writers’ manuscripts in order to reconstruct the dynamics of the creative process, whereas those manuscripts were originally documents that were intended by the writer as temporary resting places for the flow of his ideas, in order to transform these ideas into a fixed textual object. This reversal, this hi-jacking of choronograms or manuscipts illustrates the fact that a technological device such as chronophotography—or hypertext (but manuscripts are also technological devices) can be used in very different and even contradictory ways. This raises two questions that should be relevant to our subject. Can we use hypertext in relation to Joyce in different and perhaps contradictory directions? And can we or should we consider Joyce as a precursor of hypertext?

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This is from section XV of Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”1: One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies. In recent years, such barbarisms were abundant in Dadaism. It is only now that its impulse becomes discernible: Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial—and literary—means the effects which the public today seeks in the film.

It could be said with the same plausibility that, with Finnegans Wake, Joyce was striving to do what MTV video-clips achieve with ease. Should we consider in the same way that Joyce, as a kind of fumbling precursor of hypertext, managed to do with the limited means at his disposal what electronic hypertexts can now do much better? I am sure that most of us will refuse such a proposition. On the contrary, most of us will agree with Derrida’s contention that Joyce’s text is: in advance, decades in advance, [a] 1000th generation computer […] beside which the current technology of our computers and micro-computerified archives and translating machines remains a bricolage of a prehistoric child’s toys. And above all its mechanisms are of a slowness, incommensurable with the quasi-infinite speed of the movements on Joyce’s cables.2

Or to put it in Joyce’s own terms in Notebook VI.B.14 (32b): “JJ no gambler because his style gambles—infinitely probable.” That is to say that Joyce cannot lose. His computer cannot be faulted because it is built on so simple a principle: complete trust in the signifier makes its success infinitely probable. The text of Finnegans Wake is a machine that cannot fail: none of its connections can be broken, none of its links can be empty. Whatever the question, it has the answer whether or not Joyce ever thought about it. If this is the case, then what can the actual “micro-computerified archives,” as Derrida calls them, that is to say for our purpose the existing electronic hypertexts, teach us about Joyce when they are, structurally, years behind in technology? The answer could be that each generation of computers and hypertext acquires unexpected properties, unexpected before they appear and, although we are far from having reached the “thousandth generation computer” which would be equivalent to Joyce’s text, each time a technical or 88

conceptual progress is achieved, we are made to see new aspects that had been hitherto invisible to us. According to Benjamin, one of the reasons why photography is a threat to the traditional (auratic) conception of the work of art, is that it shows things that escape the normal vision. in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, it extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. [“The Work of Art,” section II]

It is interesting and curious that almost a quarter of a century before Benjamin, in 1919, similar ideas (the association of a technical image with a psychoanalytic or psychiatric image), were being used about Joyce or in connection with Joyce. Now, let’s see if you can guess who wrote these lines: On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins—Its very close. rather exquisite—but how without blood & flesh & brains —perhaps it simply is the way one thinks if one holds a pen & writes on without coherence — interesting perhaps to doctors. […] Funeral perhaps the best thing. but isn’t it always the same mind is that true of everyone? The interest is that this is psychology Possibly like a cinema that shows you very slowly how a horse does jump; all pictures were a little made up before. here is thought made phonetic-taken to bits

This is from Virginia Woolf’s private notes on her first reading of Ulysses (or rather, to be more accurate, of the first seven episodes published in the Little 89

Review). In these notes we find this same idea of the modern work of art making us see something that we did not see before, using an analogy with a new technology, slow motion. (I am told that the term used by Benjamin in German is Zeitlupe, a time lens or magnifier, a temporal close-up, a curious blend of temporal and spatial realities). According to this view, the new devices (modern means of reproduction for Benjamin, Joyce’s style for Virginia Woolf and perhaps hypertexts for us) would be similar to photographic or cinematic devices that make us see things that we do not see without them. This raises another double question. Should we consider that the Joycean text, as a technical artefact comparable to slow motion, to chronograms, or to hypertext, is revealing unknown aspects of reality (for instance psychological phenomena)? This may have been Joyce’s purpose for some time, but I would say that half way through Ulysses this stopped being the case. I am not sure that we still learn anything about psychology from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, we rather have a pleasure of recognising, or thinking that we recognise familiar patterns. At any rate this is not (not any longer?) the distinguishing characteristic of Joyce’s text. I have just hinted at the fact that our perception of Joyce’s text changes. Can we rely on a technical device, such as hypertext, to reveal new aspect of it in the same way as chronophotography reveals new hitherto invisible aspects of the horse’s behaviour or in the same way as psychoanalysis reveals imperceptible aspects of human psyche? We must distinguish between the practical usefulness of hypertext and its use as a metaphor. As a metaphor, it has been a useful until now, but is it still so? I guess that this conference will help us to answer this question. What I think at the moment is that the usefulness of the metaphor is rejuvenated with the apparition of new aspects of the hypertext. I’ll give an example of this later. Then there is the question of hypertext as a tool, and particularly as a tool of annotation. Nobody can deny that it is most practical, when you read such works as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, to have a very large quantity of notes available at a click of the mouse. But I don’t think it fundamentally changes our relation to the text. It’s a bit easier to click here and there on the screen than to go to an annotation at the end of the volume or to go to a companion critical work. But does it make a radical difference? I would say that the most important point is the choice of level of annotation: with electronic annotation you can hide different categories of links and reveal them according to your own preferences, your own method, your own level. But after all isn’t this what we already do when we choose to consult Cole’s Notes on Ulysses rather than the Pléiade notes? We are adapting to our own needs the choice of the book we take from the shelf. Of course with hypertext everything is so much 90

easier and more effective, but perhaps not radically different. A very important feature also is the building of a path through the material, this is, to me, the main point of a hypertext edition. But isn’t it also what we do when we write a paper on Ulysses: we build the equivalent of a hypertextual path upon/through the material. On the other hand, hypertext does make a huge difference for genetic and manuscript studies. It is a completely different mode of presentation and there is no way in which the traditional modes can solve the problems of the genetic material because a genetic archive is a complex multidimensional object and it cannot be accommodated into a book in any satisfactory way. But what is the point of this genetic project, one might ask? Granted that hypertext is the best (or the only) way of achieving it, why should we attempt it at all? This quest for a perfect genetic reconstruction, is it a fetishistic attempt at restoring the lost aura of the text or is it on the contrary the best acknowledgment of the plurality of the text, a continuation of the process of desacralisation that Joyce wanted to achieve? I’ll quote Benjamin’s “Work of Art” once more, but this time in the 1936 French version that was the only one published in his lifetime (L’oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée). On the whole, it is not very different from the version that we know, but this particular passage does not exist in the later version. Les Grecs ne connaissaient que deux procédés de reproduction mécanisée de l’oeuvre d’art: le moulage et la frappe. Les bronzes, les terracottes et les médailles étaient les seules oeuvres d’art qu’ils pussent produire en série. Tout le reste restait unique et techniquement irreproductible. Aussi ces œuvres devaient-elles être faites pour l’éternité. Les Grecs se voyaient contraints, de par la situation même de leur technique, de créer un art de valeurs éternelles. C’est à cette circonstance qu’est due leur position exclusive dans l’histoire de l’art, qui devait servir aux générations suivantes de point de repère. Nul doute que la nôtre ne soit aux antipodes des Grecs. Jamais auparavant les oeuvres d’art ne furent à un tel degré mécaniquement reproductibles. Le film offre l’exemple d’une forme d’art dont le caractère est pour la première fois intégralement déterminé par sa reproductibilité. Il serait oiseux de comparer les particularités de cette forme à celles de l’art grec. Sur un point cependant, cette comparaison est instructive. Par le film est devenue décisive une qualité que les Grecs n’eussent sans doute admise qu’en dernier lieu ou comme la plus négligeable de l’art: la perfectibilité de l’oeuvre d’art. Un film achevé n’est rien moins qu’une création d’un seul jet; il se compose d’une succession d’images parmi lesquelles le monteur fait son choix—images qui de la première à la dernière prise de vue avaient été à volonté retouchables. Pour monter son Opinion publique, film de 3 000 mètres, Chaplin en tourne 125 000. Le film est donc l’oeuvre d’art la plus perfectible, et cette perfectibilité procède directement de son renoncement 91

radical à toute valeurd’éternité. Ce qui ressort de la contre-épreuve: les Grecs, dont l’art était astreint à la production de valeurs éternelles, avaient placé au sommet de la hiérarchie des arts la forme d’art la moins susceptible de perfectibilité, la sculpture, dont les productions sont littéralement tout d’une pièce. La décadence de la sculpture à l’époque des oeuvres d’art montables apparaît comme inevitable. [L’oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée, section VIII]3

This perfectibility of the modern work of art, represented by the film, comes from the fact that it renounces any eternity value. It is a very surprising idea and I think this is a very weak passage. Benjamin did well to take it away from the final version. What he is saying about sculpture before that is not convincing at all, but, more importantly, he is completely ignoring or repressing the most perfectible of arts, and yet the most eternal. You remember Horace’s “Exegi monumentum aere perennius.” Benjamin seems to forget that writing is something that is also built with the help of drafts, of many drafts as we Joyceans know all to well. And it has never renounced its “eternity value” for that reason, on the contrary. It is significant that Benjamin, at the same time acknowledges this perfectibility by the very fact that he is modifying his own text, by cancelling this weak passage, by excluding it from the later version. I think this comes from the fact that he realised that the biggest threat to the auratic unicity of the work of art is not its reproducibility, as he is trying to say in the whole essay, but it is indeed its perfectibility, its variability. And what genetic criticism does is precisely to foreground this variability of the work, showing that it is not something unique but something which is a result of a process that exists in multiple form. On the other hand, it must be acknowledged that genetic investigation can be seen in very different light. I’ll quote Benjamin for the last time: Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership. The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analyses which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original. The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. Chemical analyses of the patina of a bronze can help to establish this, as does the proof that a given manuscript of the Middle Ages stems from an archive of the fifteenth century. [“The Work of Art,” section II] 92

Genetic investigation carries this history beyond the limits envisaged by Benjamin to its prehistory, beyond the time of its existence to the time when it did not yet exist as a finished object. Genetic hypertexts are helping to ensure the greatest possible continuity in a material that is destined to remain discontinuous. So in this respect, yes, this is indeed what genetic reconstruction can be: a fetishistic restoration of the contiguity from the text to the pen, to the hand, to the very person of its author. This is a very strong temptation, but we must resist it. We are reminded of an anecdote told by Ellmann. A young man met Joyce in Paris and begged to “kiss the hand that had written Ulysses.” Joyce discouraged him, telling him that the hand in question had indeed written Ulysses, but that it had done many other things since. Beyond the possible obscene or scatological implications, Joyce was warning his admirer (and warning us through him) of the dangers of contiguity, of the fact that metonymy is always impure and uncontrollable. And when we are trying to ensure this contiguity, we are running on very dangerous grounds. This is precisely what Joyce’s work demonstrates and this is what hypertext in its contemporary form helps us to understand. With the web we are back to Derrida and his “hypermnesiac machine.” His contention that Joyce’s texts, but also, ultimately, every text, is “in memory.” In memory of a myriad of other texts. I think that this is extraordinarily embodied in the Internet and in something like Google. Search engines in general, and Google in particular, have really helped me to understand this by illustrating it in a very concrete way. When I began to realise, a good many years ago, what was going on in Joyce’s notebooks, when I saw all the obscure, undetectable sources that they revealed, it came as a real enigma to me. I was wondering what the aesthetic relevance of this kind of submerged intertextuality could be. It was so submerged that nobody could perceive it, unless one consulted the notebooks and even then we know all too well that it is often extremely difficult or impossible to perceive it. What was the point? It really was an unsolvable problem for me. But the fact of being now, thanks to Google, in almost instantaneous connection with the archives of the world has really helped me to understand what the status of those texts was, how Joyce’s words could be “in memory” of the whole of culture. It is nothing but an image, but for me it has really played an important part. Beyond this metaphorical value, this is illustrated by the way in which the Internet can be a most useful research tool for those of us who work on the notebooks: as a rule, it is very rarely productive of direct results. Very often the kind of sources used by Joyce are not (yet) on the web, so we cannot 93

retrieve them directly. But I will give one example of how it turned out to lead us to the real sources. And I think this is quite representative of the intertwining of references, of the way textual entities are related to one another. Let me show you an example from our edition of the notebooks. On page 136 of notebook VI.B.16, we find a list of words: troop of dreams / Night—Eubu / mother good counsel / Noctulius / Nocturne / parsemés d’étoiles / lamp upside down / poppyheads

which seems to continue on the next page: Chaos Erebus = Night / thricemightiest […] peacock sees with / eye of its tail

This isn’t very significant in itself. One clue is the fact that it is a mixture of French and English, so presumably it would be a French source, because Joyce would normally translate French into English rather than the opposite. But then mythological references like these could be found in thousands and thousands of French volumes. Actually, it turned out that if we had looked at all the French mythological books that were in print at the time Joyce was writing this notebook, we would have found the right one. But Joyce could also have looked at a much older book in a library or it could have been a newspaper reference. So before embarking in what could very well be a bibliographical wild goose chase, I checked some of these collocations on Google, and curiously it lead me to a very silly esoteric site that was dishing out bits of mythological lore. The style of the sentence in which these phrases were embedded was clearly much too good for the level of such sites. So it was certainly taken from somewhere else, but I couldn’t see any connection with Joyce. Then I remembered that these sites usually copy one another. So I looked at a few of these esoteric web-sites and then in one of them I found a longer quotation on the same subject. It didn’t include the particular words I was looking for, but it included other words that sounded as if they could have been taken from the same source and they gave a reference, but it was to a modern Greco-Roman mythology, published in the seventies. So it couldn’t be Joyce’s source, but it could be a new version of an old book. After some more focused bibliographic research, I found that the recent book was an adaptation of an older best-seller, a Greek and Roman mythology that was very widely used in schools from the beginning of the century and that an edition of this manual had been printed in 1924, the year when Joyce had taken those notes. I located it at the BNF and it turned out to be the source I was looking for. This is just one example of the kind of research we have to do to edit these notebooks, but the interesting point is the fact that Google allowed us to 94

identify the source indirectly, through the faint ripples that it had induced in a disparate series of electronic and printed texts that are “in memory” of each other. Virginia Woolf’s notes on Ulysses, mentioned earlier, provide us with another, more sophisticated, example of a process of complex, Joyce related, intertextuality. They show another way in which texts are “in memory” of one another. This time I would like to emphasise hyptertext not as research tool but as a mode of presentation of this complexity. Indeed, we could say that these notes are already hypertextual. The Acrobat demo that I have built is only a translation of that private paper hypertext into an electronic hypertext that displays externally some of Woolf’s implicit links. Let’s have a look at the manuscript.4 It is an ordinary sized copybook, with a marbled cover bearing the inscription “—MODERN NOVELS—” and a white label with the words “MODERN NOVELS (Joyce).” The contents are divided into two main parts: a series of notes on James Joyce’s Ulysses is followed by a very rough draft of an article on recent fiction based on those notes, with the heading “Sketch[es] of an article.” This is the first draft of an essay that would eventually be published as “Modern Novels” in the Times Literary Supplement on April 10 1919, and republished in a slightly modified version under the title “Modern Fiction” in The Common Reader (1925). A simple division in two parts, however, will not do justice to the diversity of the document. The Ulysses notes are preceded by a half a page of enigmatic, apparently unconnected notes and before that, on top of the first page, we find a remarkable piece of material bibliography: a listing of the first seven episodes of Ulysses matched with a list of colours. This is not an attempt to grasp Joyce’s colour symbolism, but a description of the precise shades of the covers of the successive magazine issues in which the episodes were published. As some of you know, the numbering system of the Little Review is not very clear and it overlaps the numbering of the Ulysses episodes, so Woolf probably realised that the best way to keep track of episodes was to note the colour of the covers. At the other end of the notebook, after the draft part, the note form resumes briefly with a reference to Pendennis and a few related remarks. The spatial disposition visibly reflects the heterogeneity of the document. The sections are separated by titles and blanks or dividing lines. The left-hand pages are mostly blank, with a few additions to the main text written on the right-hand pages, and a series of floating notes, with no definite point of insertion in the text. A pencil line is neatly drawn on the left of the right-hand pages, defining a marginal zone that is mainly used for precise references to the text being read (Ulysses and then Pendennis). This is a kind of inversion of the common marginalia system: instead of commentaries being inscribed in 95

the margin of the text being read, the text is called up concretely in its material incarnation (the page and episode numbers are accompanied by a reminder of the colour of the issue cover), and then placed in the margin of the commentary. It can be also interpreted as an anticipation of the hypertextual link—and it is, indeed, very easy to create a clickable link between the digital representation of the manuscript and a (colour) image of the cover of the review and the relevant passage of Ulysses in the precise textual form that triggered Woolf’s note and in the full context of its environment in the journal issue. The general layout of the manuscript is not unlike a musical score: it arranges diagrammatically on the page various registers of expression, various voices whose interventions can be simultaneous as well as successive. The French word for musical score, partition, might seem even more appropriate in so far as it suggests spatial division and even an active process of separation. One of the major stakes of this notebook is indeed a process of self-definition through opposition: Woolf is striving to assimilate the novelty of Joyce’s writing, making an ally of his in her literary endeavour, but also trying to find fault with what she is reading so as to get out of the formidable shadow that it casts over her and clear a space in which to inscribe her own writing.

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But before being used ultimately as an instrument of distanciation, the notebook serves as a transitional space (defined by Winnicot as “the space between inner and outer world, which is also the space between people[, the space where] creativity occur[s]”). It acts very concretely as an interface between the text of the other and the writing in progress. The thin pencil line drawn by Virginia Woolf in order to create a marginal zone is less an instrument of segregation than a kind of permeable membrane through which the nutritive substance of the “other text” filters into Woolf’s writing, where it is assimilated or rejected—or submitted to a metabolic process that combines assimilation and rejection. I said that the notes were in some respects similar to a musical score. The essential component of this “score” is obviously the duet of voices between Joyce and Woolf, the open “intertextual” relation between these notes and Ulysses. But there are much more than two voices involved and it is not quite accurate to speak of intertextuality because on Woolf’s side there is no text but a vague project of a future novel and some fragmentary notes for an article. We could speak of an interaction between a manuscript and a book, but, as I said earlier, Ulysses as a whole was not published (or even written) in 1919, and Woolf was confronted only with the first seven instalments, as published in the Little Review (that is to say in a form that was far from final), so we would have to describe it as an interaction between printed fragments and manuscript fragments, or perhaps more interestingly as an interaction between a number of reading and writing agencies. For Virginia Woolf, serious reading could only be done with a pen in hand. In her diary, she says how grateful she is for the reviews she had to write for the TLS: because of them, she was “made to read with a pen and notebook, seriously.”5. The notes in question are precisely made in preparation for one of those reviews, not the review of a particular book, but a general overview of contemporary fiction in its relation to the tradition of the novel. The task Virginia Woolf had set for herself was very comprehensive indeed: “But oh, dear, what a lot I’ve got to read! The entire works of Mr. James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, so as to compare them with the entire works of Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell; besides that George Eliot; and finally Hardy.”6 It is interesting to juxtapose this project and her actual readings as far at they are reflected in these notes and in the resulting essay. Of the writers mentioned here, only Joyce and Hardy are present, but in the case of Hardy, Woolf relies on her previous knowledge and does not engage in any new reading of his work. As she expresses it in the notes, he has become a fixed quantity, not something to be read, but a point of reference, a sort of yardstick applicable to other readings: “Hardy is planted beyond reach of change; only seems 97

desirable when we read novels not by Hardy.” The entire works of Dickens, Gaskell and Eliot have been replaced by a few pages of Thackeray. But we see the traces of an intense reading effort relating to the first seven episodes of Joyce’s Ulysses. The input from this work has been so massive, so difficult to assimilate that it absorbed Woolf’s reading energies and inflected her writing project. Unpremeditated references appear, generated by the necessity to deal with Joyce: Sterne and Byron on the one hand, as examples of eccentricity among the classics, Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy on the other, as foils (“It is from them we wish to start. We see how much fails to get into their books.”). Woolf’s engagement with Joyce is not a one-to-one confrontation. It is influenced by a complex historical and literary situation and we cannot understand it unless we relate these notes not only to their “source” (the Ulysses chapters), but to a host, a web, of other texts. We should also link them not to the abstract text of Joyce but to the material documents that Woolf was reading: the volumes of the Little Review in which the texts are embedded, surrounded by other texts and protected by those covers whose colour she was careful to note. Take one of Woolf’s objections to Joyce: “Always a mark of the second rate, indifference to public opinion.” This appears in a different light if we have before us those covers, bearing the motto: The Little Review: A magazine of the arts making no compromise with the public taste.

Consciously or unconsciously, Woolf’s objection to Joyce is a direct retort to this claim. And if you look at the contents table of the magazine, you see this other motto: The Little Review: The magazine that is read by those who write the others. This is interesting because it emphasises the fact that people who write are also readers, that one writes with an eye on other texts, contemporary or not. And these notes of a writer trying to come to terms with another writer provide an excellent illustration of this. Among many other things, the interaction that is taking place in this manuscript is a confrontation between a pillar of the establishment, the Times 98

Literary Supplement, where Woolf’s projected essay was to be published, and the Little Review, the avant-garde magazine where Ulysses was being published by instalments.

A few hypertextual links help to demonstrate graphically how much Woolf’s reaction to Joyce’s text is predetermined by the context. On top of the first manuscript page, before the Ulysses notes begin, we find these notes, which we described earlier as enigmatic: Modern Novels Reality is thick and deep. novelist must confine himself to this knowledge at first hand. he must “plunge in.” What we call the “objective method” is a method of after-thought, of spectacular reflection By presenting what happens in the mind Miss R seizes reality alive. The ordinary life richer than the extraordinary—the fabric of life—life itself. Rémy de Gourmont, Promenades Littéraires 99

But the key of the enigma is in the margin. The tags that we find there (“Miss Sinclair,” “Little Review” and “9”) provide a virtual link that we can easily implement electronically. They send us to the issue of the Little Review (dated April 1918) in which the second episode of Ulysses was published. Its first article is indeed an article by May Sinclair on “The Novels of Dorothy Richardson” and all these notes, which sound so Woolfian (including the words “plunge in”) are quotations from this article, even the second-degree quotation of Rémy de Gourmont. The sentence “The firsthand, intimate and intense reality of the happening is in Miriam’s mind and by presenting it thus and not otherwise Miss Richardson seizes reality alive.” on page 9 of the article.

It seems that what happened was that Virginia Woolf, as she was gathering the episodes of Ulysses and preparing the colour-table of their covers prior to reading them, let herself be distracted by this article, thinking that it would be useful for her own piece on modern novels. Those liminal notes did play an important part in Woolf’s reflections in this manuscript, in the famous “Moden Novels”/ “Modern Fiction” article and ultimately in Woolf’s own subsequent fiction. But before that, they certainly influenced her reading of Ulysses. She read Joyce through Dorothy Richardson, or to be more accurate, through May Sinclair’s view of Richardson (although neither of their names appear in the published essay—but that is another side of this story, another region of the hypertext that is beyond the scope of our 100

current endeavor). I am not saying that this view was inappropriate or biased: let us remind ourselves again that Woolf was confronted only with the first seven episodes in their 1918 state (“Aeolus,” for instance didn’t have its headings). She had no idea of “Sirens,” let alone “Circe” and “Ithaca.” It was not an unreasonable assumption (perhaps it was even true at this stage, as we said earlier) that Joyce’s aim was to present a new vision of psychological reality. Now a possible bifurcation presents itself here. Joyce certainly saw this issue of the Little Review since “Nestor” was published in it. His attention can hardly have failed to be attracted to May Sinclair’s article, since it was the opening article and the cover story, that is to say that it was mentioned on the cover of the magazine at the very place that announced “‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce” in the previous issue.

Superficially at least, Joyce’s work was superseded by this essay as the hottest new feature. It is likely that Joyce at least glanced through it and perhaps, consciously or unconsciously, decided to differentiate himself from the kind of stream of consciousness novel that was depicted here (it is in May Sinclair’s article that the expression “stream of consciouness” was first used in a literary context). The latest hypotheses based on the newly discovered manuscripts now at the National Library of Ireland suggest that Joyce’s major stylistic reorientation took place around this time. So this essay, through its presence in this strategic place, on the cover of the Little Review, may have affected the development of modern fiction in several directions at the same time. 101

To come back to Woolf’s notes, it is impossible to understand what is going on in those pages without following a series of explicit and implicit links to the text of Joyce, but also to many other texts that interfere, positively or negatively, in the reading of Joyce. Woolf is doing her best to understand what is going on in those Ulysses episodes, to assimilate their startling novelty, to use Joyce as an ally in her own fight against the novelists of the preceding generation, the Edwardians. But she is also trying to find arguments against Joyce, because the power of what she is reading is felt as a threat to her own potential position as a novelist. In this respect earlier novelists are summoned as allies to diminish Joyce’s stature. Finally the main weakness that she identifies, or thinks that she has identified in Joyce will suggest, in a form of negative intertextuality a direction for the development of her own style, a development that will find its expression, in two different stages, in her next novels (Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway). It first expresses itself as direct objections: But the worst of Joyce a[nd] c[ompany]: is their egotism […] perhaps this method gets less into other people & too much into one.

Those objections then acquire a more generalised status: Funeral perhaps the best thing. but isn’t it always the same mind? is that true of everyone? […] Then the summing up. The necessity of magnanimity & generosity. Trying to see as much of other people as possible, & not oneself

In the published article this is replaced by an impressionistic image: it is possible to press a little further and wonder whether we may not refer our sense of being in a bright yet narrow room, confined and shut in, rather than enlarged and set free, to some limitation imposed by the method as well as by the mind. Is it the method that inhibits the creative power? Is it due to the method that we feel neither jovial nor magnanimous, but centred in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside itself and beyond?

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And indeed Virginia Woolf’s next novel would go in the opposite direction: instead of being shut up in the claustrophobic room of a particular mind Jacob’s Room explores the space of a room which is a locus of interaction between the mind and its environment. And in the next novel, Mrs Dalloway (a book which is, in many respects, pervaded with the influence of Ulysses), published at about the same time as The Common Reader, in which “Modern Novels” is reprinted under the name of “Modern Fiction,” Woolf will develop her own characteristic technique, based on free indirect speech and the fluidity of borders between centres of subjectivity. This is of course a very simplistic presentation of a very complex web of attractions and repulsions, involving a much wider web of texts in positive and negative memory of each other. This is all but inexpressible within the limits of a printed text, except at the cost of gross overemphasis and simplification. You will have understood what I am suggesting: only an open hypertext can begin to address those important issues.

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NOTES 1 2 3 4

Translation by Harry Zohn in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1988). Widely available on the Web. Jacques Derrida, “Two Words for Joyce,” Post-structuralist Joyce, eds. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 147. Reproduced in Walter Benjamin, Ecrits français (Gallimard: Paris, 1991). The notes are part of a notebook, now at the Berg Foundation, classified as notebook XXXI in Brenda Silver’s Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1983). They have been published by Suzette Henke in The Gender of Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990). Virginia Woolf’s writing, in her reading notes, is extremely difficult to decipher. The following emendations should be applied to Henke’s excellent transcription: Page 642 the transcription: for “plunge in!” read “‘plunge in.’” for “The ordinary life reaches then the extraordinary” read “The ordinary life richer than the extraordinary” for “Minor […] minds lack quality—and as you get nothing but minor minds!” read “Their minds lack quality—and as you get nothing but their minds!” Page 643 for “The inner thought” read “In inner thought” for “The—thrush—throstle—” read “tre—thrust—throstle—” (Woolf notes an alliteration in a Joycean paragraph) for “how a hare does jump” read “how a horse does jump” Page 644 for “mainly an excuse for writing” mainly “merely an excuse for writing” for “(which makes us [?urgent])” perhaps read “(which makes us regress)” for “of any like art” read “of any live art” for “provincial and temporary” read “provisional and temporary” for “new versions of beauty” read “new visions of beauty” for “We see stories where people did not see them in the past …” read “We see stories where people did not see them in the past. Gusev” (Chekov’s paradigmatic short story) Page 645 for “It’s possible that the novel to us is what the drama was to the Greeks” read “It’s possible that the novel to us is what the drama was to the E[lisabethans]” for “by no means are of finality” read “by no means aim at finality” for “Yet it seems just possible” read “Yet it seems quite possible.”

5 6

Moreover, in accordance with the general format of the collection, the notes were published not in a diplomatic transcription but in a format as close to a finished text as possible. This is partly misleading and does not do justice to their aspect. The interested reader should consult the CD-ROM Major Authors: Virginia Woolf, which provides a digital image of the manuscript (unfortunately in a very low definition). For a study of those notes from a different angle, see also Daniel Ferrer, “Les bibliothèques virtuelles de James Joyce et de Virginia Woolf,” Bibliothèques d’écrivains eds. Paolo D’Iorio and Daniel Ferrer (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2001). A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1953) 293. A Writer’s Diary (“5 March 1919”) 8.

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Marlena Corcoran SIRENS TO CYCLOPS: MOMENTARY JUXTAPOSITION IN GENETIC HYPERTEXT Sirens to Cyclops is the title of a hypertext I have created to demonstrate how electronic media might help us juxtapose two different modalities of James Joyce’s Ulysses, namely the process of writing and the printed book. The hypertext reconstitutes on the computer screen several of the genetic documents known as placards: large-format proofs of eight typeset pages sent by the printer to James Joyce for his approval. The printer undoubtedly expected that Joyce would correct any errors, presumably mainly typographical, and return the placards. Joyce however took this as an occasion to expand upon the text. The many insertions mean that the placards became a stage in the history of the composition of Ulysses, and thus part of the genetic dossier. Looking at a placard, one sees a juxtaposition of solid, printed text and swirling, handwritten changes; in effect, just the sort of double vision I am here advocating. The ten placards I chose to work on mark the transition from one chapter of the printed book, “Sirens,” to the following chapter, “Cyclops.” This essay follows a path that links the conclusion of a unit of the printed book, namely a chapter, with the beginning of a genetic unit, namely a placard. The path cuts across print and process, on the field of the placard. My point is that without a sense of the placard as a material object, such as I present it on the computer screen, we might well not “see” it as a conceptual unit, and we would tend to overlook such developments in the writing process as I here propose. The conclusion of this essay proposes that the best use of our scholarly time would be to use electronic formatting not for archiving absolutely everything, but for creative reformulation of certain moments in the composition of the text, where the capabilities of hypertext make a genuine difference. Choosing these moments requires scholarly judgment, and the critical ideas so encoded would be subject to the standards of discussion and dispute that currently prevail in the scholarly community. Rather than removing the editor from the edition, which seems to be the goal of many projects that see hypertext as a way of shifting responsibility from the editor to the reader, my way of understanding the potential of electronic formatting would foreground the conceptualisation of each new hypertext, and acknowledge that the hyperlinked paths that matter are those forged by an individual trailblazer.

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UNITS OF STUDY

Electronic media present us with an unprecedented opportunity for studying documents such as the placards. The conventions of the book, especially the physical convention of individual printed pages, shoehorns a document like the placard into a format that is not congenial to the original document. With the advent of electronic possibilities, however, we are faced with a new opening question: What are the units that would be appropriate to our study? Units are constituted not only by objects, but by actions. The ten placards in my study, numbers 28-37, first version, were all corrected, or taken as an occasion for insertions, as one batch (according to Michael Groden, the date lies between 28 September and 7 or 8 October 1921). The insertions made on this set of placards may be considered as one gesture of composition, and thus one genetic unit of a special kind: what we might call a gestural unit. This is a unit that can be readily coded as such in a hypertext, but might otherwise tend to be overlooked. Another kind of unit in my hypertext is the individual document; that is, each one of the ten placards. This is the unit that suffers the most in the reproductions available in The James Joyce Archive.1 As all Joyce scholars know, the JJA is an extremely valuable work of scholarship that reproduces photocopies of all extant genetic documents. The JJA might in fact be considered a high point of the age of photocopying technology. The images of the placards suffer however from having been broken up into units that could conveniently be accommodated by the format of the printed JJA. An individual page of the JJA reproduces only one eighth of a placard; that is, one provisionally typeset page. A practical advantage is that this solution results in greater legibility. One senses nonetheless the call of page to page, and the undertow of our habits as readers educated in the age of the printed book. Looking at the placards as they appear on the pages of the JJA, it would be easy to forget that one is looking at only a fragment of an original document. The individual placard in its original form is therefore the level of unit that receives the most attention in my hypertext. The unit of the chapter is both obvious and important in any discussion of Ulysses, and remains significant in my hypertext. The chapters as such can however be well accommodated by a printed book. My interest lies in the juxtaposition of the units of print with the units of composition; in this case, the chapters of “Sirens” and “Cyclops” with a particular placard. One of the special interests of studying the placards as such lies in the fact that the gesture of composition documented by the handwritten inserts cuts across the division into chapters of the printed book: the typeset pages on these placards are the last pages of the chapter “Sirens” and the first of “Cyclops.” In this 106

essay, I will analyse the handwritten insertions to demonstrate the conceptual coherence of the genetic unit, which is lost once the text is reduced to the chapters of the printed book. I will also discuss the importance of the electronic recreation, and not merely gathering together, of the materials of the placards, as these are documents which in real life will never again be seen in their original form. That is, my hypertext is an example of a scholarly work in which the electronic presentation of genetic materials is not only helpful, but essential. THE REAL THING

Some summers ago, I was fortunate enough to be granted permission to consult the placards for the “Sirens” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses that are found in Harvard College’s Houghton Library.2 “You’re lucky,” said the curator.3 “They just got back from the laboratory today.” She didn’t look too happy, though. That was because the laboratory report was not encouraging regarding the prospects for conserving these large, fragile documents. They were, after all, designed as throw-aways in the late nineteen-teens and early nineteen-twenties. The documents are a scholar’s dream and a conservator’s nightmare. The lab had hoped to wash the placards in a chemical bath to de-acidify the paper. Unfortunately, the test results showed that Joyce’s ink is water-soluble. The goal, of course, is to preserve the writing, not the paper, so the curator was stumped. She said I could examine the placards, but only if she, not I, turned the pages. I offered that I would not even breathe on them. She stood by patiently, handling only the protective overlays, never the documents. I literally held my breath. I drew diagrams of each placard, noting blips and drabs that might be misconstrued in reproductions. Ink over type? Added later. Pencil mark or eyelash? Make a note. The experience impressed me with the fact that these documents will not be with us forever. And in their size and format, not to mention the ritual attendant upon reading them, they were utterly unlike a book. A PRELIMINARY GENETIC HYPERTEXT OF “SIRENS”

A few weeks after examining the placards at the Houghton, I undertook a research stay at the Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes in Paris.4 Daniel Ferrer and I, with the help of Françoise Antiquario, created a hypertextual archive of the genetic documents for “Sirens,” largely by scanning and linking the relevant pages of the James Joyce Archive.5 The hypertext offers a panoramic view of the genetic dossier of “Sirens”: about 500 documents and a 107

basic structure. It can serve as a sort of mother program for genetic research or critical interpretation. The useful thing about that hypertext is its scope and its neutrality. The links are very basic and uncontroversial; for example, it links pages seriatim. This strength is its weakness: what is uncontroversial is rarely interesting. Yet even the choice of basic units is not always obvious. We are accustomed to think in units of pages, such as were ready to hand in the JJA. Pages are practical and discrete, and they can be numbered. This unit is well suited to some kinds of documents, but less adequate for others. This prompted the question that guided my subsequent research, namely: What are the units that are pertinent for our textual research, and how might hypertext help us establish and juxtapose these units? The units establish themselves along paths of information already presented in the hypertext of “Sirens.” Some of those paths are, as it were, vertical, and link different levels of documents in the genetic dossier. When we first demonstrated the provisional hypertext at the International James Joyce Symposium in Zürich in 1996, Daniel Ferrer and I presented two different kinds of paths one might take through the data. Ferrer traced the permutations of the phrase, “practise preaching,” in its meanderings through the various stages of Joyce’s writing process.6 One of the advantages of this kind of path, which we might think of as vertical, is that it gives one a chance to look at the very different formats of the several categories of documents that make up the genetic dossier of “Sirens”: handwritten notes, typescript, manuscript additions and corrections, fair copy, placards, proofs and printed text; not to mention the da capo of Scribbledehobble. All these are seen in image form in the preliminary hypertext of “Sirens.” There were, as Daniel explained in setting out the overview of Joyce’s composition of this chapter, several side-ventures from category to category; but the extensive path of “practice preaching” takes us pretty thoroughly through the more-or-less vertical structure of the genetic dossier. My example complements Ferrer’s, and I hope it will enlarge our sense of the many different kinds of work that can be done with a genetic dossier hypertext once the documents are in digitised form, and archived in a given— though always alterable—structure. My path is instead horizontal, remaining at the level of the placards. It examines not a semantic unit, such as the phrase “practice preaching,” but a technique. And—it goes backwards. Usually we expect that a text develops from handwritten notes to a printed page; but I have chosen a case where Joyce’s composition moves from text that had already been set into type, to a handwritten marginal annotation.

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The example also shows the complex interrelations that obtain between the units of the printed book—in this case, chapters—and genetic units—in this case, placards. THE APPEARANCE AND STRUCTURE OF SIRENS TO CYCLOPS

I created a new hypertext specifically about the transition from “Sirens” to “Cyclops” at the level of the first version of placards.7 Considerably more effort went into the visual and conceptual design of the new hypertext. Most importantly, the new hypertext does not merely reproduce and link pages, but rather recreates on the screen several placards in their original format. Unlike many scholarly hypertexts which present bulleted lists of verbal information, “‘Sirens’ to ‘Cyclops’” is designed to convey a great deal of information visually, and only as needed. The bright colours of much design for the web seemed to me inappropriately loud. The palette of this hypertext is neutral: the background colour is a grey-beige, titles and the navigational cross are black, and the images of the documents are black on white. The opening screen announces the title and presents ten icons in a single line across the bottom of the screen. The icons depict the first half-page, that is, the first four typeset pages, of each placard. The number of the placard is displayed only when the user’s mouse rolls over a given icon; for example, if one rolls over the first icon, at the left of the row, a large number “28” appears over the icon. One can roll over the icon of each placard in the row, from left to right, until reaching number “37.” The placard I would like to discuss in detail is number 32. It can be opened by clicking on its icon. What appears then is a page entitled, “Placard 32 First Version,” in the upper left-hand corner, with a directional cross consisting of four arrows—up, down, right, left—in the lower right. A border of neutral grey-beige frames an almost full-screen image of placard 32. We see the placard in its full extension, that is, as if it were unfolded, with all eight typeset pages visible at once. I’d like to remind you that this was possible to achieve on the computer screen, but can no longer be done in real life, as the paper in question is too fragile ever again to be unfolded. The order of typeset pages on the placard is not what readers who are not textual critics might expect. The numbered order can be revealed in my hypertext by clicking on the word “Placard” in the title. The numbers 1-8 will appear one after the other over the respectively-ordered pages: number one is on the upper left, two is next on the right, three is below one; and four is to the right of three; the next four are similarly laid out, with number five in the upper row next to three, six to the right of five, seven below five, and eight to the right of seven. The numbers remain in view over the page icons for several 109

seconds, and then disappear. The numbers are only conventions for referring to a given page as it appears in the disposition of a placard, and are meant to be instructional. Progressive close-ups of the placard can be called up. They are not simple zooms, but rather structured units, each of which is a separate file. Clicking on the left-hand half of the placard brings up a closer view of pages 1-4. Click on the right-hand half for a closer view of 5-8. These are the two units of four provisionally typeset pages formed by folding the physical unit of the placard, and thus are the units that first meet the eye when facing the original document as it exists today. In other words, it is the unit created by the fold. One can continue closing in by clicking on the upper half to get a close-up of the top quarter of the placard, for example, pages 5-7 together. Click on page 5 to display that provisionally typeset page alone. At this point, by the way, we see a unit equivalent to the unit displayed on a single page of the printed version of the JJA: one typeset page of the placard, including any proof marks and insertions, equals one book page of the JJA. I trust it is clear by now how different this is from the larger views of the original documents, as they appear in life and as I have reconstituted them in this hypertext, namely the unit of eight, representing the unfolded placard, and the units of four, representing the unit one sees on a folded placard.8 Now that I have explained the digital reconstitution of the placards, and the different views of the placard itself in the hypertext I have created, I will proceed to a brief, particular analysis of the text and insertions of Placard 32. I hope that this analysis will demonstrate the usefulness of the hypertext, and the suggestiveness to scholars of using the computer to work with genetic documents in the visual form in which the originals exist. KRAAAAAAA

Page five of placard 32 is the provisionally typeset final page of the “Sirens” chapter, the moment of a famous fart in western literature. The sound is rendered onomatopoetically by “Kraaaaaaaa.”9 Clicking on “Kraaaaaaaa” in the hypertext brings up an enlargement of Joyce’s word. Clicking on the enlargement brings up a related sound word, “kran-kran-kran.” I would like to link these two moments, “Kraaaaaaaa” and “kran-kran-kran,” to what seem to me to be two closely related moments: closely related not only in terms of their final poetic form, but of the gestural genetics of placard 32. If one were to encounter them in the printed book, one might well notice—though I don’t know that anyone has—the poetically similar nature of these two units. The first, we have just looked at : “Kraaaaaaaa” and “kran-kran-kran.” The second is “Waaaaaaalk” and “Walk. Walk. Walk.” The first half of each is created by 110

drawing out the letter “a”: “Kraaaaaaaa” and “Waaaaaaalk.” The second is created by repeating three times sounds or words with the same initial consonant, either “K” or “W,” and an internal vowel “a.” WORKING BACKWARDS

In order to quite literally see, visually, the development of this particular tiny poetic structure, it is very useful, perhaps indispensable, to consider not only the provisionally typeset pages as units, as they are presented in the printed version of the JJA—but to see the large, reconstituted image of the entire placard, as it appears in my hypertext. Looking at the placard as a whole, one can appreciate both the units of chapters, signalled by the visual break between “Sirens” and “Cyclops” on page five of the placard, and the placard itself, the physical, visually-surveyable document comprising eight provisionally-typeset pages and the transition from “Sirens” to “Cyclops.” Why does this matter? The elaboration of the “Kraaaaaaaa-kran / Waaaaaaa-walk” construction takes place at two different marginal moments: the end of a chapter—and the beginning of a placard. As I mentioned, the “Kraaaaaaaa” moment has a poetically-similar sister moment on this placard. On page one of placard 32, paragraph six ends, “Walk, walk, walk.” Joyce made a handwritten insertion, just here, which consists of a list of names ending with the word, “walk,” drawn out by seven a’s: “Waaaaaaalk.” Clicking on the insertion brings up, in the hypertext, an enlargement of the insertion, which makes it easier to read; clicking on the enlargement brings up an enlargement of “walk, walk walk.” I put them on the same screen in order to conveniently consider them together, as they are separated on the placard page. The “Waaaaaaalk” unit and the “Kraaaaaaaa” unit thus form a pair of brackets; it is clear, even in the printed book, that the “Kraaaaaaaa” unit helps to end the chapter; it is clear only (or perhaps especially) by looking at the digitally-reconstituted placard that the foreshadowing “Waaaaaaalk” unit is at the beginning of something, namely, the genetic unit of the physical placard. If we were to consider only pages, we would miss the sense of bracketing, a certain understanding of how the “Waaaaaaalk” unit came into being where it is. LISTS, ETC.

Clicking on the enlarged views brings us back to page one of placard 32. Clicking repeatedly on the “up” arrow in the navigational cross brings us back through progressively higher views of the placard: two, four, and finally, all eight pages. Click once more, and we are back to the main screen, with the row of icons of all ten placards.

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Now, remembering the insertion of the list of names on page 1 of placard 32, just after “Walk,” let us turn to a related moment in placard 34. Clicking on the icon on the main page, as we have seen, opens the overview of all eight pages of the placard, this time number 34. The overview shows quite a bit of handwriting on the first half of the placard, which can be enlarged with a click. The handwriting is concentrated in the bottom margin, and a click brings up the enlargement of pages 3-4. Here we see how useful it can be to be able to read across typewritten pages, as opposed to the difficulty in reading across pages that have necessarily been separated out onto the pages of a printed book, the JJA. One insertion lies in the margin between pages 3 and 4; and the largest insertion continues from the bottom of page 3 to the bottom of 4, though the whole is meant to be inserted into page 3. Clicking on the insertion of the list of names of the clergy brings up an enlargement of the insertion. Clicking again brings up a further enlargement of the first half of the insertion, and clicking on the right directional arrow again brings up its continuation to the right, on page 4 of the placard. This half contains an insertion within the insertion, as Joyce added yet more names of the clergy. The insertion ends, “The laity included P. Fay, T. Quirk, etc.” The “etc.”—“and others”—is Joyce’s own. One could go on. Joyce often did. The final screen of this hypertext is indeed a super-enlargement of the Joycean insertion, “etc.” ZENO’S HYPERTEXT

One of the temptations of hypertext, both in practice and in theory, is to conclude the same way; that is, by saying, “One could go on.” I would, however, like to warn against the dangers of “Zeno’s Hypertext”: a project that splits into endlessly smaller units, and endlessly greater links, and never gets to the finish line. Were there but world enough and time—oh yes, and money, too—perhaps no harm would come of endlessly coding smaller and smaller units, and endlessly linking from one spot to another. But life is short, and I for one value too highly the training and intelligence of human scholars to think it should be spent recreating documents in a new medium, where the old one will do. That time would be better spent using the new medium for new thinking. For what we find encoded in a successful hypertext—and this is a point I cannot stress too strongly—is human thinking. What we follow is the path of another person’s thought. It is not the computer that decides what constitutes a unit, or which units should be linked. It is not the computer that decides—what gets left out. This is a matter of critical judgment, usually arrived at by years of training and experience. It is experience that tells us which links are significant, and which should be thrown overboard. 112

Navigation, as Aristotle taught us, is a matter of judgment, of experience, and there are no more rules for navigating digital seas than there were rules for Aristotle’s captain in a storm. Furthermore, a link is like a thesis: a thesis is something about which we can disagree. The greatest links are the farthest-flung, conceptually. The greatest links are leaps: they are metaphoric. No computer understands the link between “love” and “rose.” That is because computers compute—they do not understand. A computer will record for you any link you want. But once again, I say, many links, and even categories of links, such as those from one page to the next, come at great cost of time and money; and in the end, they are not interesting. Interesting links are signed with one person’s intelligence— and they are contestable. I warn us therefore against a vision of a hypertext in which finally everything will be coded, all files will be linked, and we need never read again. Joyceans might remember the historical lesson of the reception of Finnegans Wake: for years scholars looked for the final solution, the key that would explain everything. Scholars got tired, and for the most part gave it up; but we must take care that the same urge to finally explain, once and for all, the work of James Joyce—the urge to establish, in George Eliot’s term, “The Key to All Mythologies”—does not surface again as a hidden impetus behind the excitement over hypertext. I have not said the digital vision is pointless. Far from it. It is challenging and useful. Useful, I say, as I quietly close out my own hypertext, level by level, closing through levels of one placard, until I reach that overview that shows us what we will not see again in the material world: an all-too fragile document from 1920, covered with the handwriting of one man. Useful. Interesting. “‘Sirens’ to ‘Cyclops’”—a path taken by one reader. So let us not lust after a Tower of Babel, or a vaguely technical vision of the internet as an almostinfinitely-large Alexandrian filing cabinet, but rather let us continue our individual, idiosyncratic, hypertextual journeys. For human thinking, as Parmenides knew, has a long way to go.

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NOTES 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

The James Joyce Archive (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1977-79), photoreprint edition, general editor, Michael Groden. The volume most significant for the work discussed in this essay is Vol. 19, Ulysses: “Sirens”—“Oxen of the Sun.” A Facsimile of Placards for Episodes 11-14, ed. Michael Groden. The limitations of book format are well known to Michael Groden, who is in fact one of the greatest proponents of electronic media in scholarship. I very much appreciate his open and cooperative spirit with regard to the use of these materials, and his interest in my work. The second version of the placards for the transition from “Sirens” to “Cyclops” are found at Princeton University. I am grateful to the Centre for Literary and Critical Studies of Harvard University for welcoming me as a visiting scholar during the first eight months of 1995. An earlier version of this section of the essay was published in a different context as part of “Recording Angel,” an essay in my series, “The Corcoran Gallery,” in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Spring/Summer 1999. I would like to express my gratitude to Leslie A. Morris, Curator of Manuscripts in the Harvard College Library. When I asked to consult the placards discussed in this essay, her response was cordial, quick and remarkably uncomplicated, considering the delicate state of the documents in her charge. Joyceans should be grateful for her competence and concern. I thank her for the time she took to turn the pages. A grant from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique enabled me to complete this and other related research, and to present my research in several venues. I am grateful for their support. I very much appreciated the opportunity to work closely with colleagues at ITEM and at the Atelier internet, a research group at the Ecole normale supérieure. I would like to stress that this hypertext was intended for private scholarly use only, and not for publication. I am nevertheless grateful that neither Hans Walter Gabler nor Michael Groden objected to our use of work they had edited; on the contrary, both scholars expressed lively interest. The hypertext was created using software from Storyspace. Storyspace enabled us to link files easily and rapidly; the drawback of the version then available was that it was difficult additionally to target units smaller than the whole file. As of this writing, links between images and text remain problematic no matter what method is chosen. I would like to thank Jean-Louis Lebrave for the invitation to present, in June 1996, the “Sirens” hypertext at the research seminar “Philèctre,” which is supported by the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, and is, as its name suggests, dedicated to electronic philology. There I first ventured to voice publicly an early version of the reservations about hubristic hypertext that form the conclusion to the present essay. This research has been published as “’Practise Preaching,’ variants pragmatiques et prediction suspendue dans un manuscript des ‘Sirènes,’” in Writing its Own Runes for Ever. Essais de critique joycienne. Essays in Joycean Genetics, eds. Daniel Ferrer and Claude Jacquet (Tusson: Du Lérot, 1998). Sirens to Cyclops was created using Apple Mediatool. For technical assistance with this project, I am grateful to “Second Look,” a multimedia centre at The University of Iowa; especially to the then-director, Michael Ascroft, and my undergraduate assistant, John Brogan. They were wonderful. I am also grateful to Heather Wagner for design tips. I presented this hypertext at the conference “Hypertexte litéraire,” organised by Jean-Louis Lebrave and held at the Ecole normale supérieure in September 1996; the following points about “Kraaaaaaaa” and the lists Joyce inserted on placard 34 were made at that time. This hypertext too was designed for private use.

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8 9

The one hypertext unit that is non-natural is the unit of two provisionally typeset pages. Other fart-related sounds occur on the final printed page of the chapter, namely “Prrprr” followed by “Pprrpffrrppfff,” and the sound that links those two to the “Kraaaaaaaa” words by uniting two of the former sounds, namely “p” and “r,” with the “kra” sounds: “Frandlkrankran.”

"*

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Michael Groden PROBLEMS OF ANNOTATION IN A DIGITAL ULYSSES The footnote, once considered the treasure of a special artistic talent, has sunk in reputation to a bauble at the bottom of a scholar’s page. And yet a footnote—an expository addendum to the text, an annotation, a reference— exhibits a fascinatingly complex set of possible relationships with the text to which it refers. When a text like James Joyce’s Ulysses enters the picture, and digital hypermedia is the medium, the entire question of footnotes and annotations needs to be rethought. Undergraduate English students probably first encounter annotations and footnotes in The Norton Anthology of English Literature or another college textbook. They squint to decipher the tiny bits of information at the bottom of the page and then return to the text at the top either appreciative or frustrated. They seem to form a judgment quickly that footnoted annotations are either useful places to find what they need to know or repositories of strangely arcane and irrelevant displays of knowledge.* Graduate students learn that creating footnotes as references to, and also as extensions of, the main text’s argument is an essential part of scholarly work, and the first stage in my professional relationship with footnotes consisted of becoming proficient at writing them. The second stage involved reading other people’s footnotes with interest and also skepticism, occasionally reading the footnotes before and maybe even in place of the main text. In the third stage, I stopped reading footnotes entirely, simply skipping them whenever a text included them. In the fourth (current) stage, I try to write whenever I can without using them. Because this is an essay about annotation, however, I will include a few notes. Doing this in a print article is a routine activity, but it is a different matter in a digital text. On a screen, for one thing, I can’t provide footnotes at all. The bottom of the screen doesn’t mean the same thing spatially as the foot of a page (text on top, note at bottom). I could provide notes at the end of long electronic “page,” but that would be just a screen imitation of a printed text. Since notes can appear as new screens, no longer at the bottom or end and no longer necessarily subordinate to a “primary” text, they do not have to be short in order to meet printing requirements or to avoid overwhelming the main text. In The Footnote: A Curious History, Anthony Grafton documents how, for a long time, the writing of footnotes involved particular, uncommon skills and was even considered a special artistic talent. For the most part, this isn’t the case 116

now, as several examples illustrate. Gérard Genette, appropriately in a footnote, quotes a clever disparaging remark about footnotes from the French writer Alain: “A note is the mediocre attached to the beautiful.”1 In his poem “The Scholars,” William Butler Yeats contrasts “young men, tossing on their beds” and writing poems inspired by passionate emotions with the “old, learned, respectable bald heads” of their editors and annotators. And, sustaining the unlikely combination of footnotes and beds, Grafton relates a wonderfully witty quip from Noel Coward—to the effect that having to read a footnote resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while making love. (In a footnote—where else?—Grafton notes that Coward attributed a stronger version of the remark to John Barrymore.2) Scholars have talked about footnotes in various ways. Patricia White uses Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological account of space, in which the attic represents pattern and framework and the cellar stands for irrationality, to account for our tendency to value the text on the top of a page to the detriment of the footnote at the bottom.3 John Lavagnino neatly captures the sense of frustration that footnotes can elicit when he talks about what he calls commentary’s “social ineptitude”: it is never there when you want it, invariably there when you do not.4 Demonstrating how hot and controversial a topic annotation currently is, in a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education Rodger Beehler gives several examples of intrusive footnotes as part of his claim that modern annotation “gives new meaning to the idea of wrestling with a text.”5 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writers sometimes included their own footnotes and marginal commentaries in their novels and poems for serious, comical, or satirical purposes, as in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and Pope’s Dunciad. In the late twentieth century, they appear in novels usually to be ridiculed or caricatured, often to stunning or hilarious effect.6 In Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1961), for example, a novel in the form of an annotated edition of a poem, the annotator desperately tries to commandeer the poem to give it a meaning the poet refused to provide. In one chapter of Jonathan Coe’s novel The House of Sleep (1997), a sleepy film-journal editor inadvertently omits one footnote number from a filmmaker’s annotated memoir, causing all the subsequent notes to refer, sometimes scandalously, to the wrong cue in the text (note 4 is supposed to annotate what is erroneously numbered 3 in the text, etc.).7 And, an extreme case, a mock mathematical-theory article that occupies twelve pages of Gilbert Sorrentino’s novel Mulligan Stew (1979) contains 114 footnotes, all of which are essentially non sequitors.

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In a text destined for print publication such as this one, I can refer to footnotes without reproducing most of them because we are all so familiar with footnotes and annotations that we know what is meant. But mistakes such as those in The House of Sleep don’t make sense in a digital environment, where there is no need to number notes. (A parallel error in a digital text might involve misconnected links.) I recently sold my two-story house and bought a one-floor apartment, so I have to relate even to the part of the Coward quip about going downstairs to answer the door from memory and no longer from direct experience. Talking about annotating Ulysses in hypermedia is about changes of these kinds. Annotations can seem to exist at a level of fact, but Martin Battestin lists three variables that always affect annotation: the assumed audience, the nature of the text being annotated, and the nature of the annotator.8 Traugott Lawler emphasises the second variable, the text being annotated and its presumed attitude towards annotation, when he suggests that “perhaps the central question to ask, before we start annotating a text, is whether the text itself embodies an attitude to annotation.”9 Several critics have attempted to describe this complex relationship. For example, Peter Cosgrove remarks that a footnote leads a “double existence,” both outside the text giving information and inside it hindering its progression.10 John Lavagnino considers ways in which this double existence can be seen in terms of conflict: the text vs. the commentary or the commentary (as supposedly objective “fact”) vs. the more valued act of criticism. Less neutrally, Ralph Hanna characterises annotation in terms of power and aggression both towards the author and towards the presumed audience.11 Jacques Derrida captures these paradoxes neatly when he describes the “double bind” of annotation: the text says to read it in silence but also at the same time cries out for response from the reader: [W]e see how [the] law text, which makes the law, produces at the same time a double bind: it says to the reader or auditor, “Be quiet, all has been said, you have nothing to say, obey in silence,” while at the same time it implores, it cries out, it says, “Read me and respond: if you want to read me and hear me, you must understand me, know me, interpret me, translate me, and hence, in responding to me and speaking to me, you must begin to speak in my place, to enter into a rivalry with me.”12

This response, of course, often appears in the form of commentary and annotation in footnotes.

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Ulysses is an excellent test case of Lawler’s suggestion that an annotator should always ask about the text’s attitude to annotation. Texts are exhibited throughout Ulysses, and its characters respond to, comment on, even actually annotate texts. An entire chapter features Stephen Dedalus’s theory of Hamlet, in which Stephen interprets detail after detail in Hamlet and Shakespeare’s other works in the light of biographical information. Less loftily and less aggressively, Leopold Bloom annotates an ad for Alexander Keyes, Tea, Wine, and Spirit Merchant as he talks to the editor of the Evening Telegraph about placing the ad in the newspaper. And the newspaper editor recounts how a Dublin newsman cabled classified information about a local murder to a New York newspaper by providing an elaborate annotation of an ad which his New York colleague had in front of him. In many different ways, then, Ulysses is a work in which texts exist to be commented on and to be annotated. Because so much information in the book is obscure—Dublin details from 1904, specific information from Irish history, allusions to popular culture from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, references to Homer’s Odyssey and phrases in Latin and Greek (which maybe readers of Ulysses could have been expected to know when the book was published in 1922 but which are increasingly beyond the experience of its readers now)—readers have often looked for help in annotations, and such information has been provided for them. Four collections of annotations exist. Two are book-length: Weldon Thornton’s Allusions in “Ulysses” (1968) and Don Gifford and Robert Seidman’s “Ulysses” Annotated (1988). The other two are editions of Ulysses, the Oxford World’s Classics paperback with notes by Jeri Johnson and the Penguin TwentiethCentury Classics Annotated Student’s Edition with notes by Declan Kiberd, both of which offer endnotes to accompany the text. All these notes have proven both useful and frustrating. In different ways, they provide much valuable information and leave a great deal out that a reader might want, they make mistakes along with providing reliable information, they mix interpretation with more factual details. To use them, a reader must either keep a separate book next to Ulysses or flip to the back of a large paperback. The annotations in the Ulysses editions are, understandably, aimed at students and provide the kinds of information that beginning readers probably need and want. The Thornton and Gifford books provide information that more advanced readers as well as beginners might look for. These annotators necessarily take a pragmatic approach: they have a job to do, and they set out to do it. They do not worry much about the relationship of the notes to the text—although Gifford offers the bizarre suggestion that a reader might want to look at his notes first and then turn to Ulysses (xvi). But, 119

as soon as the medium changes, and especially when, as in a hypermedia presentation, the notes can begin to occupy the same visual space as the text, such questions have to be addressed. I began thinking about issues of annotation as Director of “James Joyce’s Ulysses in Hypermedia,” a presentation of Joyce’s book in an electronic, hypermedia format. A major component of the project, which is now called “Digital Ulysses” and which I am doing in collaboration with the Poetry/Rare Books Collection, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, is a multilevel, multimedia annotated text of Ulysses. A great deal of material will be part of the presentation, including: • the full text of Ulysses, in more than one version • specific words and phrases linked to definitions and annotations and to extended analyses and commentary • photographs of places and people • maps • audio versions of songs and other music mentioned or sung in the book • audio readings from quoted or cited works • an oral pronunciation guide

More extended sections of Ulysses will be linked other kinds of materials, all coordinated to the passage of Ulysses that is on the screen: • • • • •

an archive of published scholarship biographical and historical background material newly written hypertext criticism oral readings of Ulysses literary works that are quoted or referred to or echoed • filmed excerpts of Ulysses

Readers will be able to bookmark their place and take notes for future use. The presentation is designed to allow the simplest possible ways of navigating through the vast amounts of available material. As with any hypertext, readers will be offered multiple pathways through the materials, and they can choose which information and how much detail they want to see. Presenting any print-based text in digital format inevitably changes it, and those changes affect annotation in important ways. In the decentered writing that is hypertext, there is nevertheless a kind of center to a structure built 120

around a preexisting text like Ulysses. Reading this kind of hypertext, you move out from and back to the central text. You might stay away from that text for quite a while. You might even read all of the Odyssey or follow several newspapers for June 16, 1904 or watch a slide show of photographs from the Dublin of that day. But most likely you will eventually go back to Ulysses, to wherever you were in it. Ulysses on the screen, and Ulysses as part of an electronic hypertextual network, can never be the same as Ulysses in the pages of a book. The digital text loses all sense of the book’s physical pages and also of the bulk that makes the printed versions so distinctive and also so imposing. More important, the text cannot exist in isolation, separated by its covers from other books on the shelf. The book on the shelf is like a house in a neighbourhood. The digital text is more like an apartment in a high-rise complex. If it is part of a hypertext system, the words of Ulysses (or of any other work) will be linked to all kinds of other material, including to other parts of itself. George Landow has characterised a print-based work like Ulysses as “incomplete” in a digital environment,13 which for Landow also means an intertextual network. On one level, of course, Ulysses is as complete as any literary work; it is even what Richard Ellmann has called “one of the most concluded books ever written.”14 But it is problematical whether a book called Ulysses, which uses Homer’s Odyssey as a structural grid, can ever be considered “complete” in itself. Readers hardly ever approach it that way: they almost always accompany their reading with secondary books such as Gifford and Seidman’s “Ulysses” Annotated or the other available annotations or any of the hundreds of books of criticism and analysis. They bring their previous reading and cultural experiences with them; they store information about Ulysses in their heads or in notes; they annotate the page margins of their books. If Ulysses can be called “complete” in print form, that largely means that its pages can exist within covers that contain no other works. A digital hypermedia Ulysses has to dispense with the covers and the boundaries they provide and with the physicality of the pages, but as compensation it can provide a great deal of flexibility and openness in the way it can present secondary information. A passage from Ulysses can help to illustrate the issues about both annotations in general and Ulysses in hypermedia that I have been talking about. The three variables for annotation that Martin Battestin mentions—the nature of the text, the assumed audience, and the annotator—all figure into the example. So does the question of an annotation’s social ineptitude or grace that John Lavagnino raises: is the annotation needed or unnecessary? does it say too much or too little? does it try to answer the right questions or the 121

wrong ones? does it provide the information that its presumed audience wants and needs? is it appropriate to the text it is annotating, that is, in this case, to Joyce’s Ulysses? The passage I want to focus on occurs at the end of the fifth episode, “Lotus Eaters.” Leopold Bloom is walking along a street in Dublin after spending a few minutes in a church, and he is approached by Bantam Lyons, a man he knows slightly and likes even less. Bloom mainly wants to get rid of Lyons as quickly as he can, and after a brief conversation Lyons walks away. Bloom is pleased with himself for extricating himself from Lyons so easily and effortlessly. He strolled out of the shop, the newspaper baton under his armpit, the coolwrapped soap in his left hand. At his armpit Bantam Lyons’ voice and hand said: —Hello, Bloom. What’s the best news? Is that today’s? Show us a minute. Shaved off his moustache again, by Jove! Long cold upper lip. To look younger. He does look balmy. Younger than I am. Bantam Lyons’s yellow blacknailed fingers unrolled the baton. Wants a wash too. Take off the rough dirt. Good morning, have you used Pears’ soap? Dandruff on his shoulders. Scalp wants oiling. —I want to see about that French horse that’s running today, Bantam Lyons said. Where the bugger is it? He rustled the pleated pages, jerking his chin on his high collar. Barber’s itch. Tight collar he’ll lose his hair. Better leave him the paper and get shut of him. —You can keep it, Mr Bloom said. —Ascot. Gold cup. Wait, Bantam Lyons muttered. Half a mo. Maximum the second. —I was just going to throw it away, Mr Bloom said. Bantam Lyons raised his eyes suddenly and leered weakly. —What’s that? his sharp voice said. —I say you can keep it, Mr Bloom answered. I was going to throw it away that moment. Bantam Lyons doubted an instant, leering: then thrust the outspread sheets back on Mr Bloom’s arms. —I’ll risk it, he said. Here, thanks. He sped off towards Conway’s corner. God speed scut. Mr Bloom folded the sheets again to a neat square and lodged the soap in it, smiling. Silly lips of that chap. Betting. Regular hotbed of it lately. Messenger boys stealing to put on sixpence. Raffle for large tender turkey. Your Christmas dinner for threepence. Jack Fleming embezzling to gamble then smuggled off to America. Keeps a hotel now. They never come back. Fleshpots of Egypt. [U 70; 5:517-44]

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First-time readers are unlikely to pay much attention to Bloom’s repeated words, “I was just going to throw it away” and “I was going to throw it away that moment.” Bloom himself does not consider them to be anything special. They are just part of his attempt to shoo Lyons away. But Lyons seems to treat them as very meaningful, although the text doesn’t say why or even which of the words he responds to. Three of the four sets of notes that I’ve mentioned annotate these lines. Don Gifford and Robert Seidman, in a first, long note to the race itself, mention the event that Lyons thinks Bloom is alluding to: Ascot. Gold cup: The Gold Cup, one of the two main annual events of the British racing calendar, was to be run that day at Ascot Heath, twenty-six miles from London, at 3:00 p.m. “The Gold Cup, value 1,000 sovereigns with 3,000 sovereigns in specie in addition, out of which the second shall receive 700 sovereigns added to a sweepstakes of 20 sovereigns each […] for entire colts and fillies. Two miles and a half. The field: M.J. de Bremond’s Maximum II; age 5. Mr. W. Bass’s Sceptre; age 5; A. Taylor. Lord Ellesmere’s Kronstad; age 4; J. Dawson. Lord Howard de Walden’s Zinfandel; age 4; Beatty. Sir J. Miller’s Rock Sand; age 4; Blackwell. Mr. W. Hall Walker’s Jean’s Folly; age 3; Robinson. Mr. F. Alexander’s Throwaway; age 5; Braime. M.E. de Blashovits’s Beregvolgy; age 4. Count H. de Pourtale’s Ex Voto; age 4. Count H. de Pourtale’s Hebron II; age 4. M.J. De Soukozanotte’s Torquato Tasso; age 4. Mr. Richard Croker’s Clonmell; age 3.” “Selections for Ascot Meeting. Gold Cup—Zinfandel.” “Tips from ‘Celt’: Gold Cup—Sceptre.” (as reported in the Freeman’s Journal, 16 June 1904, p. 7.) The race was won by the dark horse Throwaway, a twenty-to-one shot; see [reference to a note to a later passage] [the ellipses and italics are Gifford’s].15

In a follow-up note to Bloom’s words, Gifford and Seidman emphasise a second time why Lyons thinks the words are significant: throw it away: See preceding note. The point is that Bloom has just unwittingly given a tip on the Gold Cup race.16

Declan Kiberd in his note combines some factual information with an interpretation of Joyce’s passage: throw it away: later, when a horse called Throwaway wins the Ascot Gold Cup, Lyons will circulate a rumour that Bloom has won money on the bet: another example of the treachery of misunderstood language. The newspaper-phallus is now ‘thrown away’ by Bloom before he opts for his narcissistic bath.17

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In contrast, Jeri Johnson tries to limit her brief note to the race to factual information: Ascot Gold Cup: an important event for Dubliners in Ulysses; the actual Gold Cup, an annual event, was run in 1904 at Ascot (in England) at 3:00 p.m., 16 June.18

Some clear and certain statements—factual and with an unproblematical relationship to the passages—can be said about Bloom’s two remarks, “I was just going to throw it away” and “I was going to throw it away that moment.” There really was a horse race, the Gold Cup, at Ascot in England on June 16, 1904. Lyons mentions this when he asks to see Bloom’s newspaper, and Bloom recognises this, even though he seems to have no idea which horses are entered in the race. There really was a horse named Throwaway in the race, a horse that ran as a 20-to-1 outsider. Throwaway went on to win the race. All this becomes clear later in Ulysses. A group of Dubliners—all of whom bet on Sceptre (even Lyons, who temporarily followed up on what he thought was Bloom’s tip but who was later dissuaded from the bet)—talk in a pub, and one of the men reports Bloom’s conversation with Lyons. As a result, the men believe that Bloom, in what they see as typical of Jews, had an inside tip on Throwaway, won a pile of money on the race, and stingily failed to share his winnings with the other men by buying them a round of drinks. Bloom is almost injured in an attack as a result (U 274-75; 12:1548-58). He eventually reads a newspaper account of the race, but it is not clear even then if he connects the results of the race with his remark earlier in the day to Lyons (U 529; 16:1274-85). An annotation can point out all kinds of details, including, as in the Throwaway passage, information that the book will reveal later on. But how much should it say? Should beginning readers, in a note to a passage at this early point in Ulysses, be told information that they will learn only later on in the book? There is no clear answer to this question. People will respond according to their sense of the experience of reading a book like Ulysses, or what they think it should be—and this will affect their answers to questions of whether readers should or shouldn’t be told things ahead of when they will encounter them in the book, or whether the task of guiding readers through the book sometimes involves violating some of Joyce’s patterns of revealing information. My students tend to be divided, or, perhaps more accurately, conflicted: in the abstract, they say they do not think they should be told anything ahead of its appearance in the book, but, in practical terms, they welcome any information 124

that gives them a sense of how this bewildering and mystifying book (which is how Ulysses appears to most of them as they read chapter 5) actually works. Thus, even if annotators agree on an assumed reader who is experiencing Ulysses for the first time, they will not necessarily agree about how much information should be included in a note. The audience might be constant, but the annotators’ sense of how Ulysses works will crucially affect how they construct the note. And what if the presumed audience changes? For secondtime or more experienced readers, there is no need to maintain the secret of Throwaway. For these readers, the questions annotators have to ask themselves involve such issues as how much to say, in what order, and whether anything should be left out. Thus, we are talking about a rhetoric and even an ethics of annotation: how to present information effectively, what order to present it in, how much to say and to omit, how to distinguish indisputable fact from interpretation. This is a matter both of accuracy and also of tact. A change in the medium can affect the way annotators might think about both. The general situation regarding annotation, and some questions about the activity (such as how much information to include and how to order the information), remain relatively constant no matter what the medium. They are equally relevant and problematical for print annotations and for digital ones. But, for several reasons, digital presentation opens up new possibilities and therefore new angles to the questions. For one thing, there is much less restriction regarding the space that annotations can take up in digital presentations. Print annotations typically need to be kept short, or to take up less space than the primary text, or to fill up fewer than, say, five hundred pages, but these kinds of limitations disappear in digital presentations. Also, there is no need to posit only one kind of audience, whether first-time readers, or students plus some more experienced readers, or scholars. Because information can be doled out as users request it, a digital presentation can plan for several different levels of readers. In the Throwaway example, it is possible to posit a readership that includes both people who should not be told anything about Bloom’s throwaway phrase, “I was just going to throw it away,” and also people who will not be bothered or compromised by being told everything that can be said about the phrase. For digital presentation, the question then becomes how to present the information, how to be tactful. I helped run and participated in a month-long discussion regarding annotation on the University of Utah’s J-Joyce email listserv in November and December 1998, and we considered questions like this.19 One possibility is to construct the information in layers, so that a series 125

of screens starts with basic factual and identifying information and then expands into more elaborate information and ultimately into various interpretations. Beginning readers can start with the basic information and, only if they want it, move on to more elaborate information. Advanced readers can choose to start with the more advanced information and skip the basic identifications that they probably already know. A related question involves how much information beginners should be told. It is counterproductive (and one of the reasons that students often do not read printed annotations) to give beginners more information than they want. If they are looking for a simple definition of a word or identification of a detail, a long paragraph full of scholarly information is overkill—it might turn them off the annotations, and maybe even off the book itself. It seems most useful to make the first-level annotation as simple and short as is realistically possible (five words? ten? twenty-five? whatever will suffice in each case?) and then give readers easy access to more information. If a reader wants only a quick fix on a word or phrase in order to keep reading, the least intrusive annotation is probably the most successful one. From the Throwaway example, or from almost any other passage from Ulysses (or, for that matter, from any other work) that might be given—and with the differences between print and screen presentation in mind—several questions about annotation can be formulated. I will close this essay with seven questions and some thoughts in response to them: • What should be annotated? • What, if anything, should be not annotated? • Should information be presented differently for first-time readers than for later ones? If so, how can this be done? • How should the information be presented, given the many possibilities opened up by computer links? • Can there be too much information? Too little? Is there a desirable mean? • Is there a line between information and interpretation? If so, how do we proceed in order not to cross it? If not, how do we construct annotations? • Do these questions change for different categories of information (historical, other languages, intertextuality)?

None of these questions have clear answers, and, in some cases, the possible answers for a digital presentation of the Throwaway example will be different from those for a print one.

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What should be annotated? Clearly, something needs to be said about the conversation between Bloom and Lyons, which at first glance seems either inconsequential or bewildering. But, since the digital format permits a layered series of screens, it is possible, even desirable, to resist mentioning in the first instance the reason why Bloom’s remark about the newspaper—“I was just going to throw it away”— becomes so significant. An initial note to those words might be a simple “watch-this-space” symbol, or the note might be limited to the mention in the text of the horse race and say something similar to Johnson’s note, which simply indicates that there was a horse race in England on that day. A link from that initial note can take readers to more information. What, if anything, should be not annotated? There probably is nothing that is known that should be kept out of the annotations, but most of the details should be reserved for second- and higher-level notes. Should information be presented differently for first-time readers than for later ones? If so, how can this be done? In a hypermedia presentation the note aimed at beginning readers should present only the barest factual information. More elaborate options, such as highlighting the relationship of Bloom’s remark to the horses in the race (as Gifford and Seidman’s first note does) or indicating what Bloom has inadvertently conveyed with his remark (as does Gifford and Seidman’s second note), or presenting the annotator’s interpretive spin on the passage (as Kiberd does in his note), can be reserved for the notes aimed at more advanced readers. How should the information be presented, given the possibilities opened up by hyperlinkage? There are many options, each with advantages and disadvantages. The one option that should not be followed is the print one, in which whatever information is presented comes out as one short or long note. Since it takes little time or effort to get from one screen to another, the information can be parceled out in increasingly complex layers, and different kinds of materials, such as words and images, can be presented on different screens. There are various options for presentation, such as putting the annotations in pop-up windows or in frames, indicating that certain words are triggers for links or hiding that fact, and requiring the reader to click the mouse or merely to hold the cursor on a word for a few seconds to call up an annotation.

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Can there be too much information? Too little? Is there a desirable mean? Obviously, an annotator can present too little information. In print, space considerations sometimes force the annotator into this position. Too much? This is probably a matter of context. Beginning readers who want a quick definition of a word or identification of a person or place or historical event in order to understand a passage will probably find an annotation less than helpful, to the point of uselessness, if it goes on and on with all kinds of scholarly knowledge, especially if the information the readers want isn’t easy to find within the exposition. And yet other readers will probably desire the extra information, and even some beginners will become interested enough in the topic to be inspired to stop their reading to learn more. The best solution to this situation, and one that digital presentation can do well, is the method I’ve already outlined: give in the first instance only a short introductory note but provide clearly marked links in that note that lead to more information. Readers who do not want anything more can quickly move back to the text, and those who do can follow the links that are provided. Is there a line between information and interpretation? If so, how do we proceed in order not to cross it? If not, how do we construct annotations? In one sense, any annotation is interpretation. Even if the information is completely factual (historically, there was a Gold Cup race run at Ascot in England on June 16, 1904), the decision to provide the annotation involves an interpretation regarding what matters in the text of Ulysses. Of the existing annotations to the Throwaway passage, Johnson’s stays most strictly at what might be called a factual level. The first Gifford and Seidman annotation to some extent, and the second one to a much greater degree, move into the realm of interpretation by deciding, or assuming, that telling readers information that they will not encounter in the book for hundreds of pages is an acceptable practice. Kiberd’s note rests at the other extreme on the factinterpretation scale from Johnson’s: it seems to exist mainly to provide the annotator’s interpretation of the passage. We are constructing the annotations to the digital Ulysses so that the ones at the first level come close to Johnson’s practice. Annotations aimed at advanced readers can adopt procedures like Gifford and Seidman’s, and eventually the annotations become fully interpretive. However, digital presentation does not need to remain single-voiced in the way a print book usually is, and so whenever an interpretation appears, a conflicting or complementary one, or one simply in a different voice, can also appear. Readers can choose to close off all interpretations except one, but the default

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position will be that Ulysses can be interpreted in many ways and in many voices and not by a single “authority.” Do these questions change for different categories of information (historical, other languages, intertextuality)? A short note with links to more detailed information might be a desirable norm for annotations, but not all details from Ulysses will lend themselves to such well-ordered annotations. Some passages cannot be discussed at all except at the level of interpretation. In the J-Joyce listserv discussion of annotation, Andrew Blom suggested one such detail: it involves an Italian exclamation, “Già,” near the end of episode 3 (“Proteus” 42; 3:392-96). Gifford and Seidman annotate the word as an adverb, meaning “already” or “Let’s go. Let’s go.”20 Blom suggests, however, that the word is an exclamation and derives from the German ja; he translates it as something like “yes,” “sure,” “ of course,” or “right,” as in “That’s me, all right. Yeah, sure.” If neither translation is erroneous, then no single note can provide a quick first annotation. The initial note will itself be an interpretation. A similar and even more direct situation exists regarding an incomplete phrase that Leopold Bloom writes in sand on a beach at the end of episode 13 (“Nausicaa”). He writes “I.” and then “AM. A.” before he covers over the letters with sand (312; 13:1256-69). The text never specifies what else Bloom intended to write, if anything. Annotators who choose to comment on “I. AM. A.” can do so only at the level of interpretation, since any consideration of what Bloom might be writing can be only speculation. The complications that this question opens up do not affect the appearance of the annotations or the ways in which readers call them up, but they do suggest that the separation between factual information and interpretation is a thin, perhaps nonexistent, one and also that some first-level notes will have to be content to say something like “Critics disagree on the meaning of this detail.” Early on in Ulysses, Bloom thinks about a time when his wife Molly asked him to make love with her. She said, “Give us a touch, Poldy. God, I’m dying for it” (74; 6:79-80). A reader can interrupt an experience of this memory by turning to one of the published sets of annotations to find “a touch” defined as “slang for sexual intercourse”21 and might find the note helpful in increasing the erotic implications of “touch” or even in extending the response into the emotional (“touched,” since Bloom is remembering the love-making that produced his and Molly’s son Rudy, who died eleven days after he was born). Or the reader might find the note intrusive, socially inept, even 129

“touched” in the sense of unbalanced or demented. Footnoted annotations, whether in print or in electronic hypermedia, can be all of these. It is our challenge in “Digital Ulysses” to demonstrate, perhaps in a new way, the value and utility of annotations.

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NOTES This essay was originally written in digital hypertext format for the Web and reconceived for print here. I want to thank the Clemson University Centre for Electronic and Digital Publishing for inviting me to speak at the “Colloquium on New Technology and the Future of Publishing” at Clemson on April 5, 2001 and for commissioning the HTML version for the Clemson University Digital Press; John Lavagnino for calling Jonathan Coe’s novel and Paul Meahan for calling Yeats’s poem to my attention; and Molly Peacock for giving me ideas for improvements to the essay. The Web version of this essay is available online at the Clemson University Digital Press’s Web site. * 1

Alain, cited in Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 319 n.1.

2

Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) 69-70 and n. 16. According to Cole Lesley, John Barrymore’s biographer,

3 4 5 6

“Barrymore expressed the opinion that having to look at a footnote was like having to go down to answer the front door just as you were coming” (Lesley xx). A second book-length study of footnotes appeared in 2002: Chuck Zerby’s The Devil’s Details: A History of Footnotes. Patricia S. White, “Black and White and Read All Over: A Meditation on Footnotes,” Text 5 (1991): 84-85. White, “Black and White and Read All Over,” 82. Rodger Beehler “In Editing a Good Novel, the Best Footnote Is0” Chronicle of Higher Education (March 9, 2001): B14. In the nineteenth century, a self-annotating text could sometimes be unintentionally comic. In Very Bad Poetry (New York: Vintage, 1997), the editors Kathryn Petras and Ross Petras present an excerpt from “The Homeward-Bound Passenger Ship” by the midnineteenth-century, and appropriately named, English poet Edward Edwin Foot. In it, a footnote at the end of the line “The captain scans the ruffled zone” helpfully describes the last phrase as “A figurative expression, intended by the Author to signify the horizon,” and a note to the word “See” in the line “See, if you can, their lifeless forms!—” annotates the word as “Imagine” (39). The editors also provide a complete untitled short poem by Foot, which they say “deserves special notice for the ratio of poem text to footnote text” and also for the footnotes’ startling ability to fail to clarify the poem in any way (39): Altho’ we1 mourn for one now gone, And he—that grey-hair’d Palmerston,2 We will give God the praise,— For he, beyond the age of man,3 Eleven years had over-ran Within two equal days. 1 2

3

The nation. The Right Honourable Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, K.G., G.C.B., etc. (the then Premier of the British Government), died at “Brockett Hall,” Herts., at a quarter to eleven o’clock in the forenoon of Wednesday, 18th October, 1865, aged eighty-one years (all but two days), having been born on the 20th October, 1784. The above lines were written on the occasion of his death. Scriptural limitation.

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7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

As a result, a sentence from the memoir in which the director talks about his wife— “Marsha is delightfully candid about her earlier career, and has never made any secret of the fact that she started out in the business by starring, under my own direction, in a series of sex movies”—which is supposed to be annotated with the a note identifying the films (“Their titles, for the record, were Wet Knickers, Pussy Talk and Cream on My Face”), is instead annotated in this way: “Much praised, recently, by Denis Thatcher, who said that they had given him ‘six of the most enjoyable hours of my life.’ His wife Margaret later joked that he was ‘stiff for hours afterwards.’” The note with the porn-film titles ends up annotating the sentence, “Among the most prized possessions in our library are several books recommended to her during an audience with Pope Paul VI, who said that they were among the most inspiring and influential works he had ever read.” The Thatcher note is supposed to be a note to “This [country] club, the flagship of my chain I might add, has already played host to some distinguished visitors, and boasts among its attractions no fewer than two rather challenging eighteen-hole golf courses.” Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep (New York: Vintage, 1999) 270-71. Martin C. Battestin, “A Rationale of Literary Annotation: The Example of Fielding’s Novels,” Studies in Bibliography 34 (1981): 4. Battestin, “A Rationale of Literary Annotation,” 97. Battestin, “A Rationale of Literary Annotation,” 147. Battestin, “A Rationale of Literary Annotation,” 181-82. Jacques Derrida, “This Is Not an Oral Footnote,” Annotations and Its Texts, ed. Stephen A. Barney (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) 202. George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0.: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) 79. Richard Ellmann, Preface to James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Vintage, 1986, 1993) xiv. Don F. Gifford, with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses, revised and expanded edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) 98. Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, 99. James Joyce, Ulysses. Annotated Student’s Edition, introduction and notes Declan Kiberd (London: Penguin, 1992) 979. James Joyce, Ulysses: The 1922 Text, ed. Jeri Johnson (London: Oxford University Press, 1993) 801. A condensed version of the messages is available on the Web at http://publish.uwo.ca/~mgroden/annocond.html . Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, 66. Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, 107.

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Dirk Van Hulle AN ELECTRONIC STEREOPTICON: DISTRIBUTION AND RECOMBINATION IN JOYCE’S “GUILTLESS” COPYBOOK (BL 47471B) The edition of The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo (eds. Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer, Geert Lernout) is what Pierre-Marc de Biasi classifies as a “horizontal” genetic edition, presenting not the whole (“vertical”) development of a work, but only one phase in its composition. This edition invites researchers to approach Work in Progress not just from the perspective of the published text(s) of Finnegans Wake but also from an atomic perspective. The basic unit is the notebook entry. Even though the edition is “horizontal” it does provide a wealth of “vertical” information that links this “horizontal” phase with other phases in the process. In this sense, the edition is fully aware of the hypertextual nature of the writing process and provides a new operating base to think about the possibilities of representing this work in an electronic format. INTERACTIONS

Because markup languages are based on textual structures, it is necessary to first analyse the complex of sources, notesheets, notebooks and drafts, and the way they interact. Joyce’s own notions of “decomposition” and “recombination” in his apparently metafictional reflection on the writing process of Finnegans Wake1 may serve as a guideline for the organisation of such an electronic edition: the decomposition of source texts in the notebooks is followed by the recombination of separated elements in the drafts. The decomposition is what the edition of The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo focuses on. It consists of a double movement. The publication of the notebooks as separate units reflects this double movement and creates an effect that could be visualised by means of the shape of an hour-glass: from the mass of source texts, one linguistic element is separated; in a second phase, Joyce decided whether he could use it or not, and if he could, it ended up in one of the numerous drafts. The hour-glass effect has the great advantage that it spotlights the notebook entry as a central unit in the writing process of Finnegans Wake, thus confirming Bernard Brun’s emphasis on the distinctly “paradigmatic” nature of Joyce’s writing, in contrast with e.g. Proust’s way of working with “syntagmatic” units of text. The double movement of the decomposition phase is reflected in the (at least) two layers of inscription of the notes, correspoding to two functions in the writing process: jotting down notes and (usually) cancelling those that could be used in the drafts. Of these two writing acts, the former is primarily 133

the act of a writing reader, the latter of a reading writer. The colour crayon cancellations are the material evidence of the distribution of entries over several different drafts. For instance, the following three successive entries on notebook page VI.B.10:012 were cancelled in three different colours and distributed over three different chapters in three different Books of Finnegans Wake: VI.B.10:012 FW (Book) II (a) rhearing his name / called very / sagaciously he / turned III (b) gafter honourable sleep I (c) - ba draught of obvious / water

Draft II.4§1.*0 (FDV 211.20-22) III§3A.*1 (FW 475.28) I.2§1.*0 (FW 031.11-12)

The Buffalo notebook edition already indicates these destinations by referring to the page number in the facsimile edition, the section and the number of the manuscript where the entry was used for the first time in the drafts. From this perspective, each of the notebooks is a reservoir from which Joyce distributed notes over the different sections of his work in progress. Each notebook is presented as a unit from which different routes emanate. But this distribution can also be mapped from the reverse perspective. From this point of view, another aspect of the work’s progress becomes apparent: here Joyce acts as a collector, rather than a distributor, gathering entries from different notebooks and creating a new text by means of their confrontation and interaction. The Finnegans Wake notebooks also played a crucial role as a whole. The pivotal role of the notebooks in the writing process is to a large extent due to their functioning as a set of combinable units. The contents of all the notebooks thus become one collection of data. It is an editorial challenge to show how, in the processing of these data, the separate notebooks were made to interact. In a paper edition this is hard to realise. Here, the electronic medium may prove its use. Whereas the paper edition already explicitly treats the notebooks as separate units, the extra value of an electronic edition may be the revaluation of the interaction of the different notebooks in the processing of the entries, showing how entries from several notebooks are recombined in one draft. THE “GUILTLESS” COPYBOOK

As a test case, the Antwerp James Joyce Center has tried to combine the “decomposition” and the “recombination” on the basis of the “Guiltless” 134

copybook, preserved at the British Library (BL 47471b; “Guiltless” is the word with which the copybook opens). Unlike the Buffalo notebooks, this so-called “red-backed notebook” is a copybook, a “cahier” rather than a “carnet”: it does not contain loose jottings and notes, but drafts. In these drafts Joyce processed many of the extratextual material of the Buffalo notebooks, so that their origins gradually became hardly recognisable. The electronic transcription of this notebook can also be called a “horizontal” genetic edition, i.e. the reconstruction of a particular phase in the writing process. The “Guiltless” copybook is the material evidence of one of the most intensive creative periods in the writing process of Finnegans Wake. All the drafts contained in this ninety-page copybook were composed between November 1923 and March 1924, at the beginning of the writing process of Finnegans Wake. It contains first and second drafts of parts of Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8, as well as three drafts of ALP’s letter and an early version of its delivery—which eventually became Book III. Joyce used at least seven Buffalo notebooks (VI.B.1, B.2, B.3, B.6, B.10, B.11, B.25) to compose the drafts in this copybook. In “The Transfer from Notebooks to Drafts in ‘Work in Progress,’” Finn Fordham signaled an area that was “not perhaps sufficiently covered” by the Brepols notebook edition. He suggests that the editors might incorporate tables that with the pages of a particular draft stage indicating “for each page, the location of the notebook entries transferred to it.”2 This would indeed be a very useful tool, but perhaps the printed edition is not the best medium to provide it. The advantage of encoding the textual material is the possibility to let the computer generate such lists of notebook usage. In order to link all the notebook entries that were used in the “Guiltless” copybook to the exact place where they were incorporated in the drafts, the corresponding words were tagged as an . For instance, the words “Sylvia Silence, the girl detective” in the first draft of the first section of chapter 3 (“Guiltless” copybook p. 47471b-03) were tagged and linked to the entry “rSylvia Silence, the girl / detective” in notebook VI.B.10 (page 67). These tags can also be used to rearrange the same material in different ways, to study it from another perspective. The tags make the entries and their corresponding uses computable so that they can be used to visualise both the distribution and the recombination. Thus, for instance, a list of draft use (from the perspective of the notebooks) can be provided as well as a list of notebook use, such as the one Finn Fordham suggests, both generated computationally from the same encoded data. In some cases the manuscript evidence generates a fairly clear picture of the way in which Joyce must have been working, probably surrounded by several of his notebooks opened on his desk. Sometimes Joyce would create 135

entire units of texts without making use of his notebooks, but usually the montage of different entries was a crucial aspect of the writing. The processing of the B-notebooks can be divided into three categories: creation ex nihilo [e.g. 5§1.*0], creation on the basis of one notebook [e.g. 4§1.*0], and creation on the basis of several notebooks [e.g. 2§2.*0] The first category occurs relatively seldom, expecially when compared to the second category. An example of heavy notebook use is page 47471b-03, for which Joyce relied almost exclusively on notebook VI.B.10, notably the notes on the Bywaters case discovered by Vincent Deane. This is the most straightforward interaction between notebook and draft in Work in Progress. But even though the Bywaters notes on page VI.B.10:71 are clearly the core of this passage, Joyce recombined them with entries from all other parts of the notebook, derived from completely different sources. He used almost thirty entries to write a text of little more than three hundred words, which can be represented as a set of basic textual materials (the entries in the left column, in the order of their appearance in the notebook); Joyce reshuffled them to write the passage of the plebiscite, FW 58-61 (i.e. the same entries in the second column, this time in the order of their appearance in the narrative sequence on page MS 47471b-03). Notebook VI.B.10 1 [B.10.022 (h)] 2 [B.10.039 (h)] 3 [B.10.047 (l)] 4 [B.10.052 (c)] 5 [B.10.052 (i)] 6 [B.10.057 (a)] 7 [B.10.071 (e)] 8 [B.10.071 (f)] 9 [B.10.071 (g)] 10 [B.10.071 (h)] 11 [B.10.071 (i)] 12 [B.10.071 (j)] 13 [B.10.072 (a)] 14 [B.10.072 (k)] 15 [B.10.074 (b)] 16 [B.10.075 (a)] 17 [B.10.078 (i)] 18 [B.10.080 (k)] 19 [B.10.082 (e)] 20 [B.10.082 (l)] 21 [B.10.097 (b)]

MS 47471b-03 (JJA 45:138 Nov 1923 I.3§1.*0) 2 [B.10.039(h)] 3 [B.10.047(l)] 6 [B.10.057(a)] 9 [B.10.071(g)] 23 [B.10.101(a)] 5 [B.10.052(i)] 26 [B.10.113(h)] 22 [B.10.100(n)] 21 [B.10.097(b)] 8 [B.10.071 (f)] 7 [B.10.071(e)] 18 [B.10.080(k)] 12 [B.10.071(j)] 28 [B.10.115 (a)] 25 [B.10.103(f)] 11 [B.10.071(i)] 15 [B.10.074(b)] 24 [B.10.102(f)] 4 [B.10.052(c)] 17 [B.10.078 (i)] 14 [B.10.072(k)] 136

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

[B.10.100 (n)] [B.10.101 (a)] [B.10.102 (f)] [B.10.103 (f)] [B.10.113 (h)] [B.10.113 (k)] [B.10.115 (a)]

20 27 1 19 13 10 16

[B.10.082(l)] [B.10.113(k)] [B.10.022(h)] [B.10.082(e)] [B.10.072 (a)] [B.10.071(h)] [B.10.075(a)]

Usually, however, Joyce used more than one notebook to compose his texts. The third category is a less straightforward kind of interaction between notebooks and drafts. This form of “recombination” can be highlighted in the electronic notebook edition by linking each reference to the relevant notebook entry, using a different code for each document (e.g. a different colour for each notebook). For instance, page 47471b-33 (the last page of the Revered Letter’s first draft) is based on entries from notebooks VI.B.2, 10, 11, and 25, all of which are cancelled with a red crayon. Thanks to the visualisation in the electronic transcription it becomes clear at a glance how Joyce made the entries from different notebooks interact. NEW MEDIA

Both TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) and the MLA’s Committee on Scholarly Editions (in its revised “Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions”) advise a non-proprietary or “platform-independent” format for electronic archives and editions, so that they do not depend on specific software but can be exported to any medium of publication. For the “Guiltless” copybook project the textual material is encoded in TEI conformant XML (eXtensible Markup Language). The tags with which additions, deletions, etc. are encoded indicate explicitly what happens in the text, where it happens, and how it happens. For instance, an addition is encoded as , with an attribute indicating where the addition is inscribed on the page: supra- or infralinear, inline, margin left, margin right, margin top or bottom, or facing leaf. Starting from the information in this encoding the transcription can be visualised in different ways.3 In an essay in Literary and Linguistic Computing Vincent Neyt discusses the advantages and disadvantages of multiple XSLT stylesheets to visualise the XML-encoded transcription in a variety of ways, ranging from a simplified to a more complex transcript by making use of colours, diacritical signs or for example the system David Hayman applied in A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake. One of the advantages of the linear, XML-encoded transcription is the resulting flexibility of the textual material. Depending on the appoach one chooses to follow, the material can be rearranged in several different ways. 137

Thanks to the encoding, this rearrangement can be generated by the computer. One can either focus on the spatial aspects of the document, or emphasize the temporal dimension of the composition history, which can be approached either clockwise or counterclockwise, i.e. starting where Joyce started (without a clear idea where he was heading for), or starting from the final narrative structure. The “Guiltless” Notebook is an excellent document to confront these different perspectives. The teleological approach arranges the facsimiles of the drafts according to the final structure. In the case of Work in Progress Joyce’s preferred working unit was the section (which, in the early stages, consisted of only half a dozen pages on average). Since most readers of Finnegans Wake, even genetic critics, read the published text before starting a genetic analysis, the final structure of Finnegans Wake is inevitably at the back of the mind. Following this approach the user has the opportunity to arrange the transcriptions according to the order of chapters and (sub)sections of the published text of Finnegans Wake, and view the material “section per section.” This teleological approach may give the impression that Joyce knew from the start where he was going, and thus confirm what Richard Ellmann contends in his biography: “Since the earliest passages to be written were from different parts of the book, it is clear that, in spite of his disclaimers, Joyce had a general notion of how to proceed in the later sections, but had not yet worked them out in detail” (JJII 555). A documentary approach (“page per page”), however, shows that Ellmann’s statement should at least be nuanced, for this “notion of how to proceed” was quite “general” indeed, and as soon as one takes a closer look at the manuscripts, one discovers numerous side-paths and blind alleys that should be mapped as well. We originally transcribed the material, making use of the division in sections, following the example of David Hayman’s FirstDraft Version of Finnegans Wake. By making use of the place attributes in the encoding it was possible to make this material more flexible, and present it not only section per section, but also “page per page,” reconstructing the document structure on the basis of the encoded information. In other words, the encoded narrative sequence (“section per section”) can be rearranged in such a way that the texts appear in accordance with the document structure. The “page per page” rearrangement of the encoded transcriptions (i.e. following the order of pages in the “Guiltless” copybook, preferably in combination with facsimiles) shows that Joyce did not have a clear structure in mind from the very start. Since Joyce sometimes wrote “backwards” or used (parts of) verso and recto pages that had been left blank during the writing of earlier versions, the order of the pages in the notebook does not correspond with the order in which the texts are written. 138

If one wishes to reconstruct the writing sequence, one would have to opt for a chronological approach, reconstructing the writing sequence. But even then, one has to make choices, depending on different degrees of temporality. It is possible to apply the chronology to a macro-level, arranging the transcriptions section per section, indicating e.g. that in Chapter 5 the first draft of section 1 was written after the first draft of section 2. A reconstruction of the writing sequence within one draft stage requires more critical judgement. The danger of a linear transcription is the possible confusion between the narrative sequence and the writing sequence, both of which may be represented in a linear way. In order to represent a draft’s toposensitive aspects a topographic transcription is a great help, but a facsimile is even better. Jean-Louis Lebrave rightly argues that a linear transcription reduces the manuscript to a textual model. On the other hand, one could argue that if the reader is provided with facsimiles to study the topo- and chronosensitivity, it is an extra service if the edition also provides a narrative sequence. The linear transcription is an interpretation of the manuscript, which Daniel Ferrer calls a “protocol for making a text.”4 It openly admits that it “reduces” the manuscript to a textual model and makes no claim to near-identity, but rather emphasises that any transcription is merely an “approximation.” The advantage of the encoded transcription is that Joyce’s original manuscripts can be “approximated” from different perspectives. Because the encoding starts from the narrative sequence in which additions are embedded, the generating of the “page per page” transcription takes the verso-page additions out of their narrative context. In order not to lose the link between the addition and the body of the text, Joyce’s own system of pointers proves to be useful for the electronic edition as well: the alphabetical and other signs he uses to connect an addition to the place where it is supposed to be inserted lend themselves naturally to hyperlinking. In most cases this results in an unambiguous bidirectional link between text and addition. But some cases are more difficult. For instance, on page 36 of the “Guiltless” copybook, the second draft of the Revered Letter (I.5§2.*1) follows immediately after the second draft of section two of chapter I.4 (I.4§2.*1). They are separated only by a marker “M” that refers to an addition on the left-hand page (35v), preceded by the corresponding M-marker: (a) Would we vision her (subconscious editor) with stereoptican relief

This is apparently a reference to yet another passage, on page 25v:

139

(b)

Wonderfully well this explains the double nature of this gryphonic script and while its ingredients stand out with stereoptican relief we can see peep ^tour^ beyond the figure of the scriptor into the subconscious editor’s mind.5

But Joyce eventually never incorporated this passage. As a consequence, “Would we vision her (subconscious editor) with stereoptican relief” remains a loose end between the two relatively complete textual units. On a spatial axis (a) and (b) are separated by several pages (25v—35v), but on the temporal axis the distance is much shorter. When Joyce made the addition on page 35v, he had probably just written the text on page 25v (he wrote section I.5§1.*0 in retrograde direction—wherever he found some blank space between the sections he had already written—on pages 33v/34, 29v, 29, 28v, 26v, 27, and 25v). Joyce’s markers such as the “M” were part of an efficient method to remind himself where he wanted to incorporate certain additions when a draft was copied. Perhaps Joyce even relied so much on this marking system that it resulted in the failure of other systems. The parenthetical addition “(subconscious editor)” on page 35v seems to be such an alternative marking system, since it most probably refers to the passage on page 25v. When Joyce copied the first draft of section I.5§1 (that ends on page 25v), he seems to have deemed it better not to add this last paragraph to this section (for he deleted all the other paragraphs of this section with his customary large red cross, except this one). One hypothesis is that Joyce, when he copied this section, thought it might be more suitable to insert this “subconscious editor” sentence just before the opening of the Revered Letter, but that he lost track of it in the textual confusion when he started shuffling and reshuffling the letter and its commentary. This is evidently not the only lost passage. Several Joyceans, such as Bill Cadbury, Sam Slote, Jack Dalton, Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, have pointed out instances where words got lost in the work’s progress. During their work on the Dutch translation of Finnegans Wake, Robbert-Jan Henkes and Erik Bindervoet have found numerous “transmissional departures,” which are listed at the back of their translation. In the “Lost and Found” section of Genetic Joyce Studies, we made a start on a record of these instances. Paradoxically, however, the length of this accumulating list seems inversely proportional to the desirability of a restored text, as Sam Slote explains in his “Soundbite Against the Restoration.” In spite of the feeling of euphoria accompanying the discovery of a lost line, one has to stay levelheaded. For it is an editorial fact that it could never have been rediscovered had it not been lost in the first place. What is being discovered is 140

an absence that until then had not been noticed. Therefore, instead of restoring what was found, it may be more important to emphasise its loss, to indicate where and under what circumstances it went missing, and to refer the reader to this site of loss. This is evidently just a change of perspective (vis à vis the restorative viewpoint advocated in the 1950s), but it is indicative of a changed attitude toward the work, regarding its progress as an integral part of the Wake. This attitude is inspired by the very text under scrutiny, notably the “subconscious editor” sentence in connection with the preceding passage. If “the double nature of this gryphonic script” can be elucidated, one wonders of course what might be this “this” that explains it so “wonderfully well.” “This” refers to the preceding sentences, which explain—in photographical terminology—how a negative that melts while drying results in a positive that distorts values, tones and masses, suggesting that this must have happened to the missive “unfilthed” by the hen from the mound. The “heated residence” in this mound “had partly dissolved the first impression.” If this passage may be interpreted as a metafictional reference to Finnegans Wake as a whole, the “subconscious editor” passage is indeed such a dissolved first impression. As the manuscript further suggests “the farther back we seem to get the more we need the loan of a lens to see as much as the hen saw.” (25v). So instead of inserting or linking the “subconscious editor” to this passage, it seems more advisable to indicate its loss and refer the reader directly to its “heated residence” in the mound, which was the cause of its dissolution. Although the “subconscious editor” sentence did not make it into the published text, its content is not irrelevant. If Joyce excerpted a few words from an article in the Irish Times, this context is important. And each of the subsequent versions of the text (manuscripts, typescripts, proofs) constitutes an equally relevant context. The “Guiltless” notebook is such a context: a creative space that stimulated Joyce during the writing process. An electronic edition can be an adequate means to recreate this site of creation. Hence this suggestion to present the “Guiltless” copybook as such a unique site of creation and loss, which may benefit from a “horizontal” editorial treatment. By presenting this document as a separate unit, connected to the relevant notebooks and subsequent draft stages, it is possible to show how the different sections in this copybook are intertwined and how their juxtaposition and interaction in this chaotic creative space had an effect on Joyce’s writing. The narrative structure of the final text is no longer the only way of organising the “avant-texte.” Apart from this teleological perspective, a documentary and a chronological approach offer the reader the opportunity to see as much as the author saw (when he did not yet have a clear idea of the book’s final 141

structure) and look at the document “with stereoptican relief.” The stereopticon—the precursor of the Viewmaster—is based on the principle of binocular vision as explained by Euclid, who demonstrated that the left and right eyes see a slightly different version of the same object and that it is the combination of these two perspectives that creates the perception of depth. By means of the encoded transcription, the electronic medium may provide the user with such a stereopticon to view the same material from different perspectives. Thus even a horizontal edition can create the perception of depth and draw the user’s attention to the double movement of distribution and recombination in Joyce’s notebooks and drafts.

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NOTES The following texts have been drawn upon in this paper: Bernard Brun, “Proust et Joyce, à leur manière,” Genèse de Babel: Joyce et la création, ed. Claude Jacquet (Paris: Éditions CNRS, 1985) 21726; Bernard Brun, “Variante, Variations, Tissage: Point de vue d’un proustien sur les archives de Joyce,” Writing Its Own Wrunes for Ever: Essais de génétique joycienne, eds. Daniel Ferrer and Claude Jacquet (Tusson: Du Lérot, 1998) 163-7; Pierre-Marc De Biasi, “Édition horizontale, édition verticale: Pour une typologie des éditions génétiques (le domaine français 1980-1995),” Éditer des manuscrits: Archives, complétude, lisibilité, eds. Béatrice Didier and Jacques Neefs (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1996) 159-193; The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo, eds. Vincent Deane, Daniel Ferrer, Geert Lernout (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001-); Vincent Neyt, “On the Advantages and Disadvantages of XSLT for Manuscript Transcription,” Literary and Linguistic Computing (2004); Sam Slote, “Soundbite Against the Restoration,” Genetic Joyce Studies 1 (Spring 2001). http://www.antwerpjamesjoycecenter.com/GJS/; Sam Slote, “A Second Look at the First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake,” Genetic Joyce Studies 2 (2002). http://www.antwerpjamesjoycecenter.com/GJS/; Dirk Van Hulle, “The Wake’s Progress: Toward a Genetic Edition,” TEXT: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies 13 (2000): 221232. 1

2 3

4

5

“Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer […], autokinatonetically preprovided with a clappercoupling smeltingworks exprogressive process, […] receives through a portal vein the dialytically separated elements of precedent decomposition for the verypetpurpose of subsequent recombination […]” (FW 614.27-35) Finn Fordham, “The Transfer from Notebooks to Drafts in ‘Work in Progress,’” Genetic Joyce Studies 3 (Spring 2003). http://www.antwerpjamesjoycecenter.com/GJS/ I wish to thank Edward Vanhoutte and Vincent Neyt for their expert advice and help, and the stimulating exchange of ideas. We presented parts of the “Guiltless” copybook project—at different stages of its development—at ITEM/CNRS in Paris and at the 2002 Joyce Symposium in Trieste. Daniel Ferrer, “The Open Space of the Draft Page: James Joyce and Modern Manuscripts,” The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print and Digital Culture, eds. George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998) 261. In The Wake in Transit David Hayman transcribed the last words as “editor’s mind,” thus revising his earlier reading in the First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake where he transcribed it as the “writer’s” mind (FDV 87). The word “see” is overwritten with the word “peep”; “tour” was added in the margin and probably intended as a substitution, as Hayman indicates. For a more detailed discussion, see also Dirk Van Hulle, “The Wake’s Progress,” and Sam Slote, “A Second Look at the First Draft Version of Finnegans Wake.”

143

Thomas Jackson Rice I DO MINCE WORDS, DON’T I? ULYSSES IN TEMPORE BELLI Towards the end of the Nestor episode of Ulysses, Mr. Garrett Deasy gives Stephen Dedalus a letter concerning the hoof and mouth disease that he “want[s …] to be printed and read” as soon as possible (U 2.338). At this moment in the text, Stephen’s eyes evidently glance down the page of Deasy’s pompous and cliché-ridden letter, and a string of fragments follows: May I trespass on your valuable space. That doctrine of laissez faire which so often in our history. Our cattle trade. The way of all our old industries […] [U 2.324-26]

And so on. In one of the wittier moments in this chapter, Joyce allows Deasy to interrupt Stephen’s skimming to remark: “I don’t mince words, do I?” Through the next paragraph Stephen continues to skim, continues in fact to mince Deasy’s words through the balance of the letter. I will return the favour by further mincing Joyce’s minced text: Foot and mouth disease. Known as Koch’s preparation. Serum and virus. Percentage of salted horses. Rinderpest. […] In every sense of the word take the bull by the horns. Thanking you for the hospitality of your columns. [U 2.332-37]

Several things are happening here. Most readers will probably conclude that Deasy’s language is so bloated that he should have considered mincing some of it himself. Many will deduce that Joyce fragments Deasy’s letter to suggest that it is so tediously predictable, for Stephen if not for them, that it doesn’t need to be read in the same completeness and detail as, say, Milly Bloom’s letter to her father in Calypso, which Bloom reads and rereads for every possible nuance, or Martha Clifford’s letter in Lotus Eaters, refrains from which will echo in Bloom’s mind throughout the day. Joyce gives us the full texts for Milly’s and Martha’s letters, yet leaves us only the minced version of Deasy’s. But the fact remains that this foot-and-mouth letter is not predictable or readable for the readers of Ulysses. In its minced text, it contains a number of non sequiturs that will send most of them to Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated, or some other guide, to puzzle out the references to the “Galway harbour scheme” (U 2.326), perhaps to “Cassandra” (U 2.329), and certainly to the Emperor of Austria (U 2.333-34). I would argue that Joyce’s technique here emphasises the gaps in the text, or what Wolfgang Iser calls the “blanks,”1 rather than promoting in his readers any sense of their easy fill144

ability. Joyce leaves them searching, as the book will later have it, for “The Man in the Gap” (U 12.186). Accordingly, Deasy’s “I don’t mince words, do I?” becomes one of those many self-reflexive moments in Ulysses when Joyce calls attention to the textuality of his text, more or less announcing “But I do mince words, don’t I?” One could argue that Joyce’s technique in this passage furthers the theme of “disappointed” bridges in the Nestor episode (U 2.39), or in other words, that the textual non sequiturs correspond with and emphasise the failure of culturally constructed systems of meaning such as history to tell a coherent story or to connect with observed reality. This demand that the readers of Ulysses read between the lines and connect them for meaning thus establishes Nestor’s otherwise curious technical parallel to Ithaca in Joyce’s schema, as a “Catechism (personal)” to the later episode’s “Catechism (impersonal),”2 just as its theme of the social construction of meaning culminates in Ithaca’s undermining of all logical orders, including the novel’s own matrices of symbols, as “ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void” (U 17.1014-15). Here, however, I want to argue that Joyce owes his inspiration for this mincing of the text, not exclusively to this theme or to the literary tradition that his book both sustains and resists, but particularly to the technological influence of the cinema, an art composed “in principle,” as Friedrich Kittler notes, of “nothing but cutting and splicing.”3 And ultimately I will contend that this debt is one more of many signs that Ulysses is a liber in tempore belli, reflecting the contemporary World War, for it demands that its readers will bring its “life” into being in its gaps, animating meaning in the noman’s land between the lines of his text. Of course, Joyce has practiced his mincing technique from the beginning of his career, drawing his readers’ attention to Old Cotter’s “unfinished sentences” (D 11) in the first story of Dubliners, for instance, and elsewhere in this text creating similar gaps for his readers to bridge, gnomons for them to complete (D 9). Furthermore, logical and syntactical gaps become a primary feature of his interior monologue technique as it matures and gains complexity from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into Ulysses. There’s no reason, however, to believe that Joyce developed this fragmenting of discourse to promote the reality or psychological depth of his representation of his characters’ inner lives; Henry James had done as much with no violations of standard English diction and syntax. If anything, Joyce’s strategy calls attention to his characters’ status as textual representations rather than intensifying the illusion of their reality. Joyce’s principal motivation for his mincing of text is to draw his readers even more actively into the making of meaning, animating the inanimate symbols on the page in their imaginations, and thus investing these 145

readers with the task of wilfully constructing a reality out of the fragments of his partial text, giving life to partial bodies littering the field. What do I mean by asserting that Joyce’s mincing of language is indebted to the battlefield of the World War and, further, that this debt is implicated with the emergent technology of film, both developments exactly contemporaneous with his composition of Nestor between 1915 and 1917? Simply this: first, that the art of cinema and the art of war developed concurrently, mutually supporting one another and supported by the same technological advances, and second, that Joyce’s fragmentation of his text places his readers in exactly the same relationship to his book as that of the audience in the cinema. Paul Virilio records how Colonel Gatling, inspired by a steamer’s paddle-wheel in 1861, “hit upon the idea of a cylindrical, crankdriven machine gun”—the ancestor of the weapon that redefined warfare on the Western Front—and then how Étienne-Jules Marey, inspired in turn by the Gatling-gun, “perfected his chronophotographic rifle, which allowed its user to aim at and photograph an object moving through space.”4 Is it any surprise that today we refer to photographs as “shots” and make a films by “shooting”? Friedrich Kittler has well-described the symbiosis of these two arts: This history of the movie camera thus coincides with the history of automatic weapons. The transport of pictures only repeats the transport of bullets. In order to focus on and fix objects moving through space, such as people, there are two procedures: to shoot and to film. In the principle of cinema resides mechanised death as it was invented in the nineteenth century […] With the chronophotographic gun, mechanised death was perfected: its transmission coincided with its storage.5

All that remained was to solve the problems of projecting these stored sequential photographs in a manner that a audience of many could view— unlike with Edison’s single-viewer kinetoscope—problems that were solved by some of the same technological advances that allowed a pilot, for example, to fire his machine gun without cutting off his propeller blades. It seems counterintuitive to connect the cinema with death, “mechanised” or otherwise, as Kittler does, because of all art forms it would seem that film has the greatest capacity to generate the illusion of life. But this is precisely the point: the cinema, also paradoxically called “motion pictures,” is an illusion, creating both an impression of life in motion and its negation in the frozen frames of the individual pictures. The film thus shares this curious initial association to death with two other late-nineteenth century technologies whose preservation of the living was inevitably wedded to the contemplation 146

of death. I refer to the now familiar, and macabre, vogue of memorial photography and to Edison’s ambitious plan to preserve historic voices for posterity, with his phonograph. And Joyce was not alone in understanding this association between “Cinema and the Kingdom of Death,” as Peter Donaldson nicely puts it in a recent essay. Donaldson quotes, for example, Maxim Gorky’s initial reaction to the motion pictures in an 1896 review of a Lumière program: Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. […] If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there—the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air—is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is no life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre. […] And all this is in a strange silence where no rumble of wheels is heard, no sound of footsteps or of speech. Nothing. Not a single note of the intricate symphony that always accompanies the movements of people.6

Antonia Lant has extensively explored connections “between cinema and the cult of the dead” similar to Gorky’s, to demonstrate “that related ideas of living death, spectral life, and mummification were already a pervasive presence in the discursive world into which the film was introduced.”7 This association between the cinema and death was not simply a result of the technological limitations of early films, their lack of colour and sound that Gorky seems most affected by, although it is clearly true that the advances in film technology have made it less likely that an audience would draw this association today. Other viewers of the early cinema, however, and I would contend that Joyce was among them, were equally affected by their awareness of the “psychotechnological” trick—the term is Hugo Münsterberg’s—by which the mind of the viewer, rather than the medium of the film, creates the perception of movement in the act of viewing and so gives life to inanimate images.8 Müsterberg, whom William James invited from the University of Freiburg to Harvard in 1892 on the strength of his world-famous studies of the relations between “psychology and media technology,”9 makes this case in his book The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, probably the first essay in film theory, published in the Nestor-year of 1916. I can find no evidence that Joyce knew of Münsterberg or his work, yet the central thesis of The Photoplay that “film presents its spectators with their own processes of perception”10 is an insight that Joyce could have arrived at, as easily as Müsterberg, while he was writing a book that constantly draws its readers to a consciousness of their act of reading, focusing their attention on the processes of literary perception. But 147

there is literally a vital difference between what Münsterberg and Joyce make of their similar recognitions. In The Photoplay Münsterberg surveys the evolution of the motion pictures—noting along the way one stroboscopic device intriguingly called the daedaleum11—and ultimately discounts the prevailing assumption among psychologists that an audience perceives motion in the rapid succession of photographic stills through a combination of two optical phenomena: the eye’s retention of afterimages and the stroboscopic effect.12 “What objectively reaches our eye,” Münsterberg writes, Is one motionless picture after another, but the replacing of one by another through a forward movement of the film cannot reach our eye at all. Why do we, nevertheless, see a continuous movement?

From a review of research into optical phenomena, he concludes: that the apparent movement is in no way the mere result of an afterimage and that the impression of motion is surely more than the mere perception of successive phases of movement. The movement is in these cases not really seen from without, but is superadded, by the action of the mind, to motionless pictures. [… In] the film world, the motion which [the viewer] sees appears to be a true motion, and yet is created by his own mind. The afterimages of the successive pictures are not sufficient to produce a substitute for the continuous outer stimulation; the essential condition is rather the inner mental activity which unites the separate phases in the idea of connected action. […] It is only a suggestion of movement, and the idea of motion is to a high degree the product of our own reaction. Depth and movement alike come to us in the moving picture world, not as hard facts but as a mixture of fact and symbol. They are present and yet they are not in the things. We invest the impressions with them.13

Although Müsterberg’s insistence on the audience’s mental engagement with the cinema would explain his lofty expectations for this art form—he signedon as a contributing editor to one of the earliest screen magazines, Hodkinson and Zukor’s Paramount Pictograph in 1915—nevertheless, his analysis of audience response has a double-edge. His four-fold discussion in The Photoplay of the various cinematic devices that direct attention, represent memory, and evoke imagination and emotion in the viewers, unintentionally suggests the degree to which the film both enacts and usurps the audience’s “processes of perception.” A close-up may replicate the viewers’ act of attention, for instance, but they also have no choice but to attend; when a cut-flashback simulates the mind’s memory operation, the viewers cannot choose but to share the act of remembrance. Thus, in a brilliant analysis of Paul Wegener’s 148

film The Golem (1914; remade 1920), Kittler argues that “the transformation of a psychic apparatus into film-trick transformations,” such as Münsterberg describes, “is lethal for the mind [Geist] as such,” and that “film theories based on experimental psychology are at the same time theories of the psyche (soul) based on media technologies.”14 Hence, the “deceased soul” of the Golem becomes a “doppelgänger” for both the protagonist Pernath who confronts him and for the inert audience that perceives him in the film. “All the historical attributes of a subject who around 1800 celebrated his or her authenticity under the title literature,” Kittler concludes, “can around 1900 be replaced or bypassed by Golems, these programmed subjects.”15 If Hugo Münsterberg’s affirmation of audience engagement and response in the cinema was a losing battle, it was not his only one. Over the years from 1892 to 1914 Münsterberg had “rationalised his long stay in the United States,” Richard Griffith writes, “on the then-common premise that the future of civilisation lay in an increasing rapport between Germany and the ‘AngloSaxons’—the United States and Britain. He saw himself as a missionary of that rapport, cementing bonds, forging links.”16 Accordingly, Münsterberg published books about America in Germany and, acted as “the friend and councillor of both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson” in the States.17 When the European war broke out in 1914, he saw it as an “unimaginable catastrophe, nearly the wreck of everything” he had stood for. In the two remaining years of his life, Münsterberg “tried to use all his influence to stop the war, or […] to ensure that the United States did not enter it on the British side,”18 ultimately failing on both counts and along the way earning for himself public ridicule, the loss of his political friendships, suspicion of being a secret agent, and academic ostracism. Münsterberg died, appropriately of heart failure, in December 1916. “Even twenty years after his death,” Griffith remarks, “American intellectuals felt toward Hugo Münsterberg and his fate and the fate of his work, a kind of guilt.”19 The Photoplay languished out of print until its reissue by Dover Publications in 1970 and recovery of importance under its new title The Film: A Psychological Study. Joyce’s conviction that a work of literature can present “its spectators [or readers] with their own processes of perception,”20 not only resembles Münsterberg’s analysis of cinematic effects, but also shares with him the medium of film for its inspiration by fostering this recognition through the textual strategy of “cutting and splicing”—mincing words.21 I would further argue, to paraphrase The Photoplay, that the demand of Ulysses that its readers unite the “separate phases” of its text in “the idea of connected” meaning, through their “inner mental activity”22 is likewise an essential, although un149

noted, element in this book’s frequently-discussed debt to the contemporary cinema. There is at least one book-length study of this topic, Craig Barrow’s Montage in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and numerous Joyceans have described his avid interest in motion pictures, in Trieste and after, as well as his abortive Cinema Volta project in Dublin. I myself have discussed the end of the final story in Dubliners, “The Dead,” in terms of Joyce’s understanding of the motionpicture projection technology called gnomonic projection.23 What I want to stress here, however, is that Joyce took from the cinema only what he could use for his art, as he always did when he borrowed, and ignored—or in this case, rejected—the rest. In other words, by actively engaging his readers’ inner mental activity and promoting their consciousness of their own processes of perception, Joyce makes them the creative participants in the making of the art that Münsterberg envisions in the movie-goers, animating the meaning between its lines, rather than turning them into the revenants, automata, or Golems that Münsterberg’s analysis of the cinema portends. This has everything to do with the cultural status of literature though the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, and particularly the status of the novel, as the bright book of life, as the art of the mind, the soul, the Geist—as Kittler observes24—a role that liberates literature from cinema’s “Kingdom of Death.” The novelist thus becomes a “resurrection man”—in the better sense of the term—and so also do his readers, as they bring to life that which lies dismembered and inert between the lines. The affirmative vision that Hugo Münsterberg sought and failed to realise for cinematic art, Joyce achieves in fiction, while both men share in a common political desire that deeply motivates their ideas, in the time of trench warfare, to affirm the value of life over death between the lines.

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NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) 167-70 and passim. Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study (New York: Random House, 1952) 108; 369. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) 117. Cited in Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 124. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 124. Cited in Peter S. Donaldson, “Cinema and the Kingdom of Death: Loncraine’s Richard III.” Shakespeare Quarterly 53.2 (2002): 241. Donaldson, “Cinema and the Kingdom of Death,” 242-3. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 159-60. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 160 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 161. Hugo Münsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study (New York: Dover, 1970) 3. Münsterberg, The Film, 25-26. Münsterberg, The Film, 29-30; italics in original. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 166. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 166. Richard Griffith, forward to The Film, ix. Griffith, forward to The Film, viii. Griffith, forward to The Film, ix. Griffith, forward to The Film, vi. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 161. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 117. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 30. Thomas Jackson Rice, Joyce, Chaos, and Complexity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997) 49-50. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 166.

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Alan R. Roughley ENTEN: SUBJECTS: BURGESS, SHAKESPEARE, JOYCE [TEXT, INTERTEXT; HYPERTEXT, VORTEX] ELLER: FLATULENCE IN PRAGUE

I wish to solicit the concept of the subject. More precisely, the subjects of the names, Burgess, Shakespeare and Joyce. These are simultaneously proper names ruined by writing and signifiers of different sets of textual practices. As signifiers of egos that are the effects of discrete unconscious networks structured by different configurations of the same linguistic corpus, these signifiers operate within the texts of historical biographical context while simultaneously triggering certain intertextual effects as they radiate towards both the texts to which they are attached, to which they are appended in a counterfeit that can longer signify presence, and in which they remark the transposition of multiple systems of signs in a vertiginous, inter- and hypertextual play. I recite a set of fragments signed Anthony Burgess, which is always already in that writer’s history a countersignature of John Anthony Burgess Wilson and an alternative signature for the pseudonymic counterfeit, Joseph Krell, a northern Catholic who, like James Joyce, had been brought up on sounds:1 My audience remained narrow, and it would never make me much money. It was the audience of James Joyce, though not necessarily of Joyce scholars. But Nothing Like the Sun […] found favour with actors too: they knew Shakespeare in a way that Shakespeare academics did not, and my portrait of a player with a mad irrelevant talent fixed to his back like Richard’s hump, bisexual and unsure of himself, rang some kind of bell backstage. We must all be thankful for what we can get.2 The inability to entertain is supposed by some to be an aspect of high seriousness. The trouble with most of my contemporaries, in my view, is that they do not seem to have heard of James Joyce … whom … I was always dragging irrelevantly into my reviews.3

Certain words in these fragments are axiomatic. These axiomatic, atom words trigger an intertexual play with the texts of Joyce and Shakespeare while sustaining the spectral haunting of language by ghosts as real as that of Hamlet’s father. The transpositions from text to intertext do not mitigate historical context nor do they exorcise the ghosts. The Joyce dragged “irrelevantly” into Burgess’s reviews is paradoxically as relevant to Burgess’s texts as Shakespeare is to both Burgess and Joyce. This irrelevant relevancy 152

functions as an anchor in the hypertext of which I dream: the tripartite set of texts signed Burgess, Shakespeare and Joyce: a hypertext composed of novels, plays, poems, scholarly texts, music, musical scores, theatrical performances, radio and television performances, film and documentaries as well as writing practices that evade any clear generic classification. HYPERTEXT

Cf. the work of Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN and the establishment of the protocols Universal Resource Locators, Hyper Text Transfer Protocols, and Hyper Text Mark-up Language.4 T.H. Nelson: a “non-sequential writing text that branches and allows choices to readers.” “For Nelson, a hypertext is not determined by its assumed physical or conceptual boundaries, but by communications between texts, between textual structures and between textual elements where every apparent ‘limit’ suggests […] the possibility of a further linkage.”5 Although Nelson’s definition ignores the obviously sequential display of the language and codes that create the commands for assembling the hypertext and the textual lines on which the hypertextual anchors and tags are located, his perception of the determination of the hypertext by communications between texts and their structures an elements suggests that the hypertext functions along very similar lines to the intertext defined by Kristeva. By what force, and through which causal chain, is hypertext engaged in a solicitation of the ideological form of the book? Jay David Bolter: “the ‘written text’ is a stable record of thought” and for this to be the case, “the text has to be based on a physical medium: clay, papyrus or paper: tablet, scroll or book.” From the perceptive of a non-theorised, and one might thus say, limited, empirical, and perhaps naive, view of this materiality, the material quality of clay, papyrus and paper would seem to be more material than the electronic impulses by which the encoded, mathematised data that constitutes electronic versions of writing is stored and transmitted. The text is “caught in the materiality of the ‘book.’” It is “also tied to the book’s paper, cardboard, ink, and glue, to the historical and economic conditions of its production and distribution.”6 Is it possible, as some have suggested, that electronic texts provoke some sort of “crisis to the integrity and meaning of literary [and other] texts” or is it simply the case that the VDU’s, CPU’s, keyboards, chips and other elements of hardware as well as the languages and software written and designed to operate with this hardware constitute yet another mode of the materiality to which language has always been bound and from which language is itself is 153

constituted? Are the bits and bytes of language stored electronically any less material than papyrus or clay? Does the electronic storage of a text necessarily entail what J. Hillis Miller describes as a “detach[ment] from its local historical context”?7 The answer depends of course on whether or not one chooses to publish this local, historical context along with the text. The metonymic terms sustaining the metaphor of the voraginous hypertext as a vortext that consumes the text of the other even as it is consumed by the operations of reading performed by reader as the other of the text: 1) Vortex: [a. L. (var. of vertex ), f. vort-, vertere to turn.] 1. a In older theories of the universe (esp. that of Descartes), a supposed rotatory movement of cosmic matter round a centre or axis, regarded as accounting for the origin or phenomena or the terrestrial and other systems; a body of such matter rapidly carried round in a continuous whirl 1653. b. In mod. scientific use: A rapid movement of particles of matter round an axis; a whirl of atoms, fluid, or vapour 1847. 2. An eddying or whirling mass of fire of flame 1652. 3. A whirl or swirling mass of water; a strong eddy or whirlpool 1704. 4. A violent eddy or whirl of the air; a whirlwind or cyclone, or the central position of this 1700. 5. fig. A state of condition of human affairs or interests comparable to a whirl or eddy by reason of rush or excitement, rapid change, or absorbing effect 1761. b. A constant round of excitement or pleasure 1792. c. A situation into which persons or things are steadily drawn, or from which they cannot escape 1779. (OED) 2) Voraginous, a. 1624 [a. L. voraginosus, f. voragin-, vorago.] Of or belonging to an abyss or whirlpool; resembling a chasm or gulf -1747. 2. Devouring, voracious 1691. (OED) 3) Vorant, a. 1618 [ad. L. vorant- vorans, vorare, to devour.] […] 1. Devouring (rare) 1639. 2. Devouring or swallowing something 1766. (OED)

Kristeva: “By establishing the status of the word as a minimal unit of the text, Bakhtin deals with structure at its deepest levels, beyond the sentence and rhetorical figures. The notion of status has added to the image of the text as a corpus of atoms that of a text made up of relationships, within which words function as quantum units. If there is a model for poetic language, it no longer involves lines or surfaces but rather, space and infinity—concepts amenable to formalisation through set theory and the new mathematics.”8 Kristeva’s attention to the word as a Bakhtinian, “minimal unit” and her adaptation of the “notion of status” facilitates a perception of the word as an atomic unit within a network of relationships that can be troped or figured with the metaphors of the intertext and hypertext. The minimal unit of the word and its status can also be extended to that of the consonant, vowel, sigla 154

or graphic mark as it is in Joyce’s writing. The modern scientific usage of vortex as “a rapid movement of particles of matter round an axis” enables the atomic units of the graphic mark and the word to be seen as the axes of a network of intertextual vortices which sustain the limitless play of semiosis. Derrida: “Whether in the case of what is called language’ (discourse, text, etc.) or in the case of some ‘real’ seed-sowing, each term is indeed a germ, and each germ a term. The term, the atomic element, engenders by division, grafting proliferation.”9 Derrida’s metaphor of the “graft” for “‘quotations,’ ‘collages’ or even ‘illustrations’” sustains Kristeva’s view that the intertext has “nothing to do with matters of influence by one writer upon another, or with the sources of a literary work.”10 His idea that: “Each grafted text continues to radiate back toward the site of its removal,” provides a trope for the sustained relationship between the textual graft and the text from which it was taken that can also be troped with the metaphor of atomic or particle exchange. The textual graft as a textual atom or particle can whirl or eddy around the axes of its new textual locus or function as one of those axes and simultaneously remain in motion around the axis or axes of the text from which it was taken. AXES OF THE VORTEXT

Four “minimal units,” four atomic axes around which the linear and circular writing of Finnegans Wake’s text-as-vortex(t) whirls: The abnihilisation of the etym by the grisning of the grosning of the grinder (FW 353.22-23, emphasis added) Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational gazebocroticon […] autokinatonetically preprovided with a clappercoupling smeltingworks exprogressive process (FW 614. 27-31, emphasis added)

So, Joyce’s words, phonemes and/or sememes as those well-know “etym”s or etymological atoms that emerge and disappear in the arche-writing that brings them out of nothing in the very process of “abnihilisation” by the “grisning of the grosning of the grinder” (FW 353.22-23) that is and simultaneously is not “Our wholemole” circular “millwheeling vicociclometer” and tretradomational gazebocroticon” (614.27-28). INTERTEXTUALITY

“It has nothing to do with matters of influence by one writer upon another, or with the sources of a literary work; it […] involve[s] the components of a textual system such as the novel […]. It is defined […] as the transposition of 155

one or more systems of signs into another, accompanied by a new articulation of the enunciative and denotative position. Any SIGNIFYING PRACTICE […] is a field (in the sense of space traversed by lines of force) in which various signifying systems undergo such a transposition.”11 0 - 2 “logic”

0 - 1 “logic”

Practice God “Discourse” “History” Dialogism Monologism Correlational Logic Aristotelian Logic Phrase System Carnival Narrative _________________________________________________________ Ambivalence Menippean Discourse Polyphonic Novel

C.f. Burgess: Class 1 writing: “language is a zero quantity, transparent, unseductive, the overtones of connotation and ambiguity totally damped.” Class 2 writing: “the opacity of language [is] exploited […] ambiguities, puns and centrifugal connotations are to be enjoyed rather than regretted, and whose books, made out of words as much as characters and incidents, lose a great deal when adapted to a visual medium.” “Elegance […] is the most that Class 1 can achieve; for dandyism one must go to Class 2 writers […].James Joyce is “irredeemably entrenched in the very heart of Class 2 writing and that to him literary development was a matter of digging himself more and more deeply in.”12 “I was considered an accomplished writer who had set out deliberately to murder the language. It was comforting to remember that the same thing had been said about Joyce.”13 Is not this double, Joycean and Burgessian, murder of language another restaging of the parricide enacted by all writing that solicits and destabilises the phallogocentric model of the line which governs and restricts the general economy of capitalised, punctual epic writing? BURGESS’S “AMBIVIOLENCE” TOWARDS JOYCE

On the one hand Burgess carried a grave awareness of the importance of Joyce’s writing. He was almost painfully aware of the necessity of trying to

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teach his work. At the same time, he was aware of the frustrating and depressing impossibility of this task. “Thus it was necessary to teach [his students at the City College in New York] the Odyssey before engaging Joyce’s parody of it. Before they could appreciate the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ […] they had to know something of the history of English prose style. They had to have read some Edwardian novels in order to see precisely what Joyce’s innovations were. For that matter, they had to be made to read Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to see the progress in his innovation. Dubliners disappointed them because nothing happened in it: they were uneasy about the whole point being that nothing happened. They expected literature to be didactic; they all knew, which no Europeans did, the novels of Ayn Rand.”14 On the other hand, Burgess continually struggled to develop strategies to distance himself from Joyce’s writing in a way that provides an almost textbook example of Harold Bloom’s Freudian theorising of the contest between an ephebe and his or her precursor. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his writings about Joyce during the centenary celebrations of Joyce’s birth. “I was not happy about Joyce. I had done my best for him, as so many had. I had produced three books, innumerable articles, a musical work, all in his honour. I did not expect, despite the Joyce magic, the grateful touch of a hand that is still. The gratitude should be all mine: Joyce, more than any man, had taught me the value of literature and tried to instil in me a sacerdotal devotion to art. But he had not lived the Johnsonian life, he had never known the proud debasement of Grub Street. He had practised high art under the umbrella of the Maecanas, rejecting literature and its grubby journalistic offshoots as a way of making a living. His son George had ended as a pathetic unemployed alcoholic, his daughter Lucia in a madhouse. He had squandered everything except his talent. It was not good enough and Dublin knew this […] A city is not something enclosed in a book: it is a living people trying to earn for their wives and sons and daughters, and among these were little Wilson’s transubstantiating word into bread.”15 HYPERTEXTUAL “ONEIROPARONOMASTICS”

(Joycean atomic axes in the vortices of the Joyce-Burgess intertext): Burgess’s triple interest in what he terms Joyce’s “oneiroparonomastics” were grounded in his education as a linguist and composer as well as in his own writing practices. He sees Joyce “forcing words—whether as phonemic or orthographic structures—into a semiotic function which shall be more iconic than conventional. Words must not only stand for their referents: they must 157

mimic them as well, even at the risk of their own disintegration.”16 Exploring some of the “wholly visual device[s]” in Finnegans Wake, he formulates the theory that “some of the onomatopoeia of Ulysses is […] also addressed primarily to the eye.” Mr Bloom’s cat “walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high. —Mkgnao; —Mrkgnao! the cat cried. —Mrkrgnao! the cat said loudly (U 45)

“Mr Bloom’s cat cries ‘mkgnao!,’ then ‘mrkgnao!’ and then, at her intensest, “Mrkrgnao!’ Given milk, she runs to lap it with a Gurrhr!’ S.J. Perelman […], describes a cat that goes ‘Mrkgnao!’ but adds that it had obviously read Ulysses.”17 A CHANGE IN THE WIND “Prrpprr. Must be the bur. Fff! Oo. Rrpr […]. I’m sure it’s the burgund. Yes. One, two. Let my epitaph be. Kraaaaaa. Written. I have. Pprrpffrrppffff. Done.” (U 238).

The alliterative resonance of the alternating, voiceless labial stop and voiced, retroflexive liquid of “Prrpprr” in the voiced labial stop and retroflexive liquid of “bur” creates a semiotic link between the terms; the introduction of the graphic “u” in the second term creates a semiotic and semantic link between Bloom’s burp and the burgundy he drank earlier in Davy Byrne’s. The creation of this causal link is a part of the shift from a semiotic function to the mimetic semiotic and semantic one. The opening passage of Inside Mr Enderby reverses this technique by moving from a semiotic, semantic and mimetic function to one that is semiotic or semiotic and mimetic. The intertext that is created transposes of the systems of signs by which Joyce signifies Bloom’s burps and their causes into the system by which Burgess signifies the sleeping Mr Enderby’s posterior flatulence. This transposition is “accompanied by a new articulation of the enunciative and denotative position”—if one can consider farting and belching as enunciative positions—as the winds of Bloom and Enderby expelled in different directions from their respective alimentary canals. FARTS IN ELFLAND “Pfffrrrummmp. And a very happy New Year to you too, Mr Enderby! The wish, is however, wasted on both sides, for this to your night visitors, is a very old year […] 158

Perrrrrp. A posterior riposte from Mr Enderby. Do not touch, Priscilla. Mr Enderby is not a thing to be prodded; he is a great poet sleeping […] Querpkprrmp. You see? He’s disturbed. Let him settle as one lets churned water settle […] Bopperlop. Rest, rest, perturbed spirit. That picture, please, Robin. I can see it in your blazer pocket. Thank you. Fellation, if you must know, is the technical term […] Porripipoop. The horns of Elfland. We have left him to his poet’s peace […] Above us, the January sky: Scutum […] And that man down below, whom that clatter of cheap metal has aroused from dyspeptic and flatulent sleep, he gives it all meaning.”18

The “Pfffrrrummmp” which onomatopoeically signifies Mr Enderby’s flatulence includes a semantic signifier of the posterior orifice, or “rump” from which it is expelled. Reversing the movement from the semiotic to the semantic in Joyce’s text, Mr Enderby’s second expulsion is semiotic and mimetic but not semantic. Pushing Joyce’s technique further, Burgess provides his poet with an appropriately literary fart through the sequence of consonants and vowels that phonetically reproduce the left-hand, top-row letters of a typewriter. The final note from Mr Enderby’s “horns of elfland” imitates a musical tremolo before reminding the reader of the other function for the orifice from which it originates. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. Neat certainly. Matcham often thinks of the masterstroke by which he won the laughing witch who now. Begins and ends morally. Hand in hand. Smart. (U 56)

Leopold Bloom is clearly not only a literary critic, but the sort of literary critic who harbours thoughts about his own potential for creative writing. He glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling his water flow quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and received payment of three pounds, thirteen and six. Might manage a sketch. By Mr and Mrs L. M. Bloom. Invent a story for some proverb. Which? Time I used to try jotting down on my cuff what she said dressing […] Evening hours, girls in grey gauze. Night hours then: black with daggers and eyemasks. Poetical idea. Still, true to life also. Day: then the night. (U 56-57) 159

“The character I was to call Enderby had appeared to me one day in the bathroom of our hovel outside Brunei Town, a wraith conjured by an attack of malaria. He was, for a microsecond or so, seated on the toilet and writing poetry […]. Up to the time of my writing the novel, fiction, with the exception of Ulysses, where Mr Bloom spends more than page in his outdoor jakes, preferred to ignore the bowels. Rabelais did not ignore them, and Rabelais was right. Even sweetest Shakespeare names his melancholy character in As You Like It after a water closet and seems to equate depression with constipation.”19 “JINGLING,” “JAUNTY” NOTES OF DISCORD

Joyce: she turned over and the loose brass quoits of the bedstead jingled. [U 46] She set the brasses jingling as she raised herself briskly, and elbow on the pillow. [U 51] Jingle. Bloo.” I feel so sad. P.S. So lonely blooming. [U 210] Lenehan waited for Boylan with impatience, for jinglejaunty blazes boy. [U 216] By Bachelor’s walk jogjaunty jingled Blazes Boylan, bachelor, in sun in heat [U 222] Jiggedy jingle jaunty jaunty [U 223]

Burgess: Compassion? Did that then seem the proper balm wherewith to anoint his soul’s bruises? They struck, my wife, my brother, but knew not what they did. I will feel no anger, I will resent nothing. I stand above, blessing, forgiving, with lips untwisted in bitterness.20 WS stood, pitying among the many cheering, on Cheapside towards the end of March.21 There was that lord whom he had once called friend, aloof on his chestnut, the shame of his imprisonment quite forgotten, a great captain bound for the quelling of the kerns. Steed after steed after steed, richly caparisoned, the harness jingling22 The cavalcade went by in jaunty magnificence23

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Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun restages the Viceregal cavalcade of Ulysses as the cavalcade of Essex and his troops leaving London to “quell” the “kerns.” Burgess’s fictification of Shakespeare endows him with the humanistic qualities of Joyce’s Bloom. In both texts, the public display of political and aristocratic power functions as a foil to the individual pain of emotional and sexual betrayal that Bloom and WS experience. Faced with the reality of Molly’s betrayal with Boylan, Bloom feels “sad” and “lonely,” and his social isolation contrasts sharply with the excitement that Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy share with the other Dubliners who enjoy the excitement generated by the cavalcade. Joyce’s text provides another counterpoint to Bloom’s alternating boredom and sense of loss in the rising, anticipatory lust of Boylan. Burgess’s WS experiences the double betrayal of his wife, Anne with his brother, Richard and that of Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, with WS’s dark lady, Fatimah. The writings of both Burgess and Joyce make a clear break with the structure of book as a teleological totality structured according to the tripartite pattern mapped out in Aristotle’s Poetics, but they do so in very different ways. The list of dated entries that mimic the structure of a diary on the final pages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man produce the effect of a beginning as it shifts from the past tense of the third-person narrative and the earlier entries to the present tense of “I go” which then opens onto the double infinitive of “to encounter” and “to experience.” (P 288) The separate, male- and femaleoriented discourses of the “Ithaca” and “Penelope” form a sort of double ending to Ulysses with the latter opening a female, night-time language that can be linked to the Anna Livia Plurabelle’s “languo of flows” (FW 621.22). The effects of the simultaneously, incipient and ultimate sentence of the Wake upon the form of the book as a traditional, ideological structure have of course been explored by a number of Joyce scholars. Burgess’s writings frequently sustain the traditional, ideological forms of the novel and the academic book, but both Nothing Like the Sun and The Complete Enderby strive to break with that form. The beginning of Nothing Like the Sun is framed as “Mr Burgess’s farewell lecture to his special students, but this Mr Burgess both is and is not the “A. B.” whose initials are appended to the “Foreword” which intervenes between the announcement of the “farewell lecture” and the second beginning of the novel that commences with the uncertain date immediately after the “Foreword.” Mr Burgess’s farewell lecture to his special students (Misses Alabaster, Ang Poh Gaik, Bacchus, Brochoki, Ishak, 161

Kinipple, Shackles, Spottiswoode, and Messrs Ahmad bin Harun, Anguish, Balwant Singh, Lillington, Lympe, Raja Mohktar, Prindable, Rosario, Spittal, Whitelegge etc) who complained that Shakespeare had nothing to give to the East. (Thanks for the farewell gift of three bottles of samsu. I will take a swig now. Delicious.) The text being the acrostical significance of the following lines: “… My love is as a fever— Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill, The uncertain sickly appetite to please. My reason, the physician to my love, Angry that his prescriptions are not kept, Hath left me …”24 ______________________________________________________________ A FOREWORD [TEXT OF THE FOREWORD] A. B. Monaco 1982 ______________________________________________________________ 157?-1587 IT WAS ALL A MATTER OF A GODDESS—dark, hidden, deadly, horridly desirable. When did her image first dawn?25

The narrative of Nothing Like the Sun is structured in part by Stephen Dedalus’s theory of Shakespeare’s cuckolding which is taken from Ulysses and creates an intertext with that text. The tense and narrative point of view is broken by the adaptation of the narrative that mimics Dedalus’s diary entries in A Portrait of the Artist. In Nothing Like the Sun, these entries are incorporated into the narrative at a point that is close to the centre of the linear narrative and produce a temporary suspension of the third-person, past-tense narrative they interrupt. The entries create another intertextual link with Joyce’s writings by using the date of the liturgical Epiphany to anchor the time when Shakespeare sees his dark lady and imagines giving his “dark one […] a womb rich with Titania’s young squire.”26 The text takes advantage of the coincidental birth dates of Shakespeare’s twins and Joyce and uses February 2nd as the date upon which Shakespeare learns that his dark lady’s name is “Fatimah,” or ‘fate.’ This intertextual tag triggers off a vortextual movement from the 162

biographical texts on Shakespeare’s life through those on Joyce’s to a narrative that “(con)fuses” fact and fiction and in which the voice of a drunken Mr Burgess—who both is and is not the author—merges with the voice of the bard. The publication of the four earlier novels that were published individually between 1963 and 1984 in The Complete Enderby created new relationships between those novels and produced a new four-fold structure for the Enderby narratives. The framing device of the visiting teacher and pupils that frames the trilogy Inside Mr Enderby, Enderby Outside and The Clockwork Testament is broken by the addition of Enderby’s Dark Lady. The subtitle, No End to Enderby, signifies three distinct yet related signifieds: a) Enderby is resurrected in a text that feigns to “placate kind readers of The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby’s End, who objected to [Burgess] casually killing [his] hero; b) the miss en scene taken from Ulysses in which Enderby is theatrically costumed as Shakespeare and placed mise en abyme as “Shakespeare look[s] at Enderby from the mirror and coldly nod[s]”27 and c) the “clockwork” narrative structure of the title in which the time travellers, Paley, Schleyer and the nameless American scholar bring Shakespeare copies of his own plays which he then copies into his own hand and which Enderby will late use as the basis for the play on Shakespeare’s life in which he meets his own dark lady and is transformed into Shakespeare.

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NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Anthony Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time (London: Penguin, 1991) 175. Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time, 95. Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time, 74. Louis Armand, “Books of Sand,” Technē: James Joyce, Hypertext & Technology (Prague: Charles University Press, 2003) 31. Armand, “Books of Sand,” 32. Cited in Armand, “Books of Sand,” 32. Cited in Armand, “Books of Sand,” 32-3. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez and Alice Jardine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) 88. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) 304. Kristeva, Desire in Language, 16. Kristeva, Desire in Language, 15. Anthony Burgess, Joysprick (New York: Andrea Deutsch, 1973) 15-16. The TLS on A Clockwork Orange; Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time, 59. Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time, 274. Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time, 373-4. Burgess, Joysprick, 22. Burgess, Joysprick, 22. Anthony Burgess, The Complete Enderby (New York: Vintage, 2002) 13-17. Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time, 13-15. Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like the Sun (New York: Vintage, 1992) 206. Burgess, Nothing Like the Sun, 206. Burgess, Nothing Like the Sun, 207. Burgess, Nothing Like the Sun, 207. Burgess, Nothing Like the Sun. Burgess, Nothing Like the Sun, 3. Burgess, Nothing Like the Sun, 145. Burgess, The Complete Enderby, 613.

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Darren Tofts ASSESSING THE GREEN BOX ULYSSES: PROLEGOMENA TO JOYCEAN HYPERTEXTUALITY SEVILLE, 1994

The consequences of playing with algebra and fire are not inconsiderable. I found this to be the case when researching the history of conjunctives, those indispensable vectors of locution, whose grammatical indifference to what they bring together, or the profligacy of their issue, forms the basis of poiesis. Pursuing the unpredictability of the act of connection, I had procured a complete set of the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia. In fact, it turned out to be the same edition (New York, 1917) referred to by Jorge Luis Borges in his 1941 story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius.” It was from within the pages of this mighty tome (Borges, it must be remembered, worked from an incomplete set) that the poetics of conjunction first announced itself. Wedged in between pages 601 and 602 I discovered a number of torn note-sheets which were covered in a small, spidery writing that seemed vaguely familiar. On closer inspection I realised, to my utter astonishment, that I had found a number of Joyce’s early sketches for Ulysses. Tracing echoes in subsequent transmissional documents and published editions, I found that all but one of the four sketches had been incorporated, either verbatim or in some augmented or developed form. Indeed, subsequent forensic research indicated that the outstanding six line fragment, with the word “gnomon” written on the back, was not present in any of the extant notebooks available for consultation in the holdings of the British Library and the Lockwood Memorial Library. I could only conjecture that this note sheet, clearly torn from the kind of waistcoat-sized pad described by Frank Budgen,1 must be a relic of the lost 12 kilogram bundle of unused notes which Joyce described to Myron Nutting in 1923.2 As for its content, the anomalous fragment involved Stephen’s brief recollection (its rhythm reminiscent of the initial style) of a discussion with an unnamed Parisian artist about the latter’s project for an innovative work of art in glass, which broke away from the prevailing fashions of the time. Was this mysterious figure a fictional prototype of a modern iconoclast, or did Joyce actually have someone in mind? With the aid of the genetic scenario provided by Michael Groden and Rodney Wilson Owen,3 I confidently dated the fragment as being composed around 1914, possibly from the same period as the Trieste notebook. Further historical research into the European artistic climate of the time has led me to assume that the artist in question is Marcel Duchamp, and the anticipated work is none other than his Large Glass. 165

Duchamp commenced his early, preliminary work for the Large Glass in Munich in 1912, and most of the voluminous working notes he wrote for it at this initial stage were made between 1913 and 1915.4 There is no reference made to a meeting with Duchamp in Ellmann or any other of the standard accounts of Joyce’s European peregrinations around this time, nor within the vast body of Joyce scholarship have I been able to find much in the way of a Joyce/Duchamp connection. Where and when Joyce might have met Duchamp, or how he came to be aware of the genesis of The Large Glass, are matters entirely open to speculation. From a critical point of view, the conclusion I drew from my startling find was that along with The Odyssey, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni, we need to add The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, even to the list of Ulysses intertexts. From a genetic point of view, the notes found in the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia pointed to an important, previously unknown link in the textual development of Ulysses. The compositional histories of both Ulysses and The Large Glass are uncannily synchronous; early development around 1914, consolidation during the years of the Great War, and the problematic irresolution of completion in the early 1920s (as many critics have noted, Joyce stopped writing Ulysses in 1922, rather than achieved textual closure, and in 1923 Duchamp declared The Large Glass “definitively unfinished.”)5 A “quest for quiddities”6 found resonances in Stephen’s “cracked looking glass,” and “shattering glass and toppling masonry.” As well, extra-diegetic metaphors describing Ulysses in the early 1920s elicited the connection, such as Virginia Woolf’s likening of Joyce’s achievement to a man smashing open a window to breathe7 (Duchamp frequently referred to himself as a “breather” rather than an artist). However the intertextual motivation of The Large Glass is different from the architectonic structure of The Odyssey, or the thematic texturing of Hamlet. It prompts the kind of attention that has occupied textual editors and the like for the last seventy years, which has disseminated the text into fragments, individual passages, individual words. Textual criticism of Ulysses has unwittingly enacted this dialectic in its undoing of our acquired understandings and critical habits, which, as Harry Levin has noted,8 increasingly sought interpretive teleologies and holistic maps of the Joycean compositional process. As intertext, The Large Glass acts as a heuristic device designed to foreground the complex dialectic of composition and decomposition in the writing and reading of Ulysses. Duchamp noted of The Large Glass that he “did not intend to make a picture to be looked at;” it was rather a “catalogue of ideas,” to be thought about in relation to his working notes.9 A few of these were published as early as 1914, 166

but the majority were published in a limited facsimile form in 1934, in an edition known as The Green Box—a collection of 93 notes on torn pieces of paper loose in a green suede covered box. No mere adjunct to the Glass, The Green Box was to be consulted while looking at it. The idea that “the Glass […] should be accompanied by a text of ‘literature’ as amorphous as possible, which never took form,” enabled the spectator to think of the Glass from all possible “associative angles.”10 This evidenced Duchamp’s conviction that the spectator makes the work of art through active participation, through the linking of ideas. Indeed, for Duchamp the spectator was the missing link “in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act.”11 Just as Duchamp made multiples, replicas of The Large Glass (which undermined the concept of an original, master-work), Joyce produced variants, thousands of them, which have increasingly drawn the attention of critics to their particularity. The textual aporias noted over the last ten years by genetic scholars, especially the indeterminacies generated by Joyce’s notorious correction of proof, substantiate Frank Budgen’s impression of an unknowable morphology responsible for the transformation of the thousands of notes, sketches and drafts Joyce composed in Trieste and Zürich, working drafts for each episode, and eventually the published edition: No one knew how all this material was given place in the completed pattern of his work, but from time to time in Joyce’s flat one caught glimpses of a few of those big orange-coloured envelopes that are one of the glories of Switzerland, and these I always took to be the storehouses of building material.”12

Even more suggestive, especially in the light of Duchamp’s Green Box, or his Boite-en-Valise (his portable museum), is the image of thousands of “stray bits of paper” crammed into an envelope, or, as he described to John Quinn, a “small valise.”13 An irresistible question arises here. Why had Joyce proceeded to publication in the traditional codex format of the printed book? In terms of his compositional practice, the dramatic mode of reading he envisaged for his implied reader and the overall construction of Ulysses as a complex, interconnected field of inscriptions, it is perhaps surprising that he chose to publish the text as a book. In the light of the Joyce/Duchamp connection I have identified, it is possible to speculate that Joyce, for whatever reason, abandoned an alternative, more radical medium for his text. Duchamp had clearly taken stock of the continued relevance of the book form, especially in terms of his preoccupation with a textuality that would no longer be fixed and stable, but ongoing and indeterminate. He told Anaïs Nin in 1934 that The Green Box represented a form that should hereafter replace finished books: “It’s not the time to finish anything. It’s the time of fragments.”14 In the same 167

year an early commentator noted of The Green Box that “reader and spectator must find a new manner of attachment to each other, and to the problem called culture.”15 Imagine Ulysses appearing on 2nd February, 1922 in a large, peacock-green suede box, with no guidance (other than a title), on what to do with all those notes. Early reviews would, no doubt, have oscillated between bewilderment and fascination: He calls it a book, but it is a book such as the publishing world has not seen before […] the book is not really a book but a box, and not really a box but a book. A thing to surprise to keep you guessing […] The package is like a closed door, yet somehow inviting you to open it. The inside is even more surprising […] (scraps of paper) as loose and free as air, money or sin, are irresponsibly beneath the hand to be read or scrutinised as you wish—no binding, no numbering, no indicated sequence. They exist, in fact, at liberty without traditional moorings.16

Joyce’s schema would, of course, have helped, providing you were privy to leaked information from the chosen few who, until Stuart Gilbert included them in his 1930 study, were privileged to see them (Duchamp’s notes were not published in a widely available commercial edition until 1959, though in 1935 André Breton published his “Lighthouse of the Bride,” a descriptive essay offering itself as an “Ariadne’s thread” through The Green Box). Joyce’s anxiety over the possible publication of his schema with the American edition of Ulysses evidences his desire, like Duchamp, to sustain the reader’s interactivity with his material, to suggest and stimulate acts of discovery, not to prescribe them. Duchamp’s notes in his Green Box were not designed to enable the spectator to decode the iconography of The Large Glass in the name of the father, and Joyce also took precautions against overly assisting the reader (removing Homeric episode headings being a famous instance of this.) The putative authorial guidance of the schemata has also been questioned by critics such as Phillip Herring. It is actually enticing to think of them as being part of the overall package, like Duchamp’s photographs and his explanatory accounts of sections of the Glass. This information may well be given; knowing what to do with it, how to relate it to an overall understanding of the Glass, or to construct a synthesised Ulysses from a sum of its parts, is another matter. The Green Box Ulysses is a useful guide for re-conceptualising Ulysses. In looking at it through The Large Glass we can establish a new order of relation between Joyce’s “continuous manuscript text”17 and the 1922 edition. Observations made by textual theorists such as Jerome McGann, or critical theorists such as Stephen Heath,18 suggest that we need to think of the 1922 168

Shakespeare & Company edition as one possible (that is Joyce’s) arrangement or assemblage of an indeterminate number of potential combinations (multiples) of the pre-text, or textual field that Joyce had amassed between 1914 and 1922 (just as The Large Glass is Duchamp’s construction from his own working notes). Parallactic (a suitably Joycean word) is an appropriate concept to describe this process of reading as multiplexing, of textuality as multiplicity. Parallactic readings of The Green Box assume that while the number of documents to be negotiated are finite, the conditions of negotiation are not. With Ulysses, too, parallax becomes the necessary constituent of a textuality that is relative, conjugate; my Ulysses, your Ulysses, his Ulysses, her Ulysses, their Ulysses. Discussions of the Arranger, ever since David Hayman coined the term in 1970, portray an internal, organising presence forging self-referentiality. Thus, Hugh Kenner refers to the book’s “memory-bank” to describe an organising consciousness that “lets escape from its scrutiny the fall of no sparrow.”19 But can we divorce this assertion, which is anterior to reading, from Kenner’s own collation of details produced, presumably, by many readings? As Jonathan Culler has noted, there “are no moments of authority and points of origin except those which are retrospectively designated as origins.”20 Parallax suggests that new readers, sufficiently free from critical overload, will establish their own cross-referential chains, relying, perhaps, on the Arranger as a more self-conscious form of cueing. Like a child’s memory game, collation, the assimilation of contiguity, relies on the player’s recognition that an element has in fact been repeated. To conceptualise Ulysses in this form is to defamiliarise the dramatic, rather than epic activity of reading that Joyce no doubt had in mind for his readers; a prospect apparently only available to new readers equipped with an ideal immunity to Joyce criticism. For the initiated, this is a Utopian prospect, for it offers an engagement with Ulysses that has been denied through decades of HCE (heavy critical exegesis). The Green Box Ulysses raises important questions about how we have learned to, or been taught to read Ulysses. But it also occasions a revision of our sense of the phenomenology of reading, of where we are when we engage with formless conglomerations of signs. Sifting through The Green Box Ulysses, where Joyce’s schematic and reflexive clues are just so many fragments among others, with no sign-posted hermeneutic privilege, is to enter fourth dimensional space. Fourth-dimensional pictorial space was poetic, a static simulation of the shifting, temporal mobility essential to human perception of objects in the natural world, as theorised by Adolph von Hildebrand. A fourth dimensional icon such as Jan Metzinger’s tea-cup (from the painting Tea Time) offers the illusion of a homogenous totality of numerous viewings of the object from all 169

conceivable angles. In Cubism the fourth dimension represented “the immensity of space eternalising itself in all directions at any given moment.” But it was also a form of memory, a way of capturing and holding still the succession of perceived facets of an object that can’t be seen as a totality from any single point of view. Writing is also a mnemonic technology. It holds words still and provides a spatial environment for repeated scrutiny. However The Green Box Ulysses requires the exercise of an extended or virtual memory. It lacks the spatial contiguities we normally expect writing to possess, or at least make possible. It presents, instead, a fugitive textuality, in which the connection or link between discrete items is not material or reproducible (as in a book) but rather constitutes a space-time event or singularity. This situation of reading as an intense spatio-temporal activity invokes Einsteinian hyperspace, since so much happens at any given moment. This hyperspatial act of reading involves a rapid interchange between apprehension and memory, the thing read and the thing remembered, and the placement of new formations and new links into an enveloping network that also has to be retained in memory. Without the artificial memory of the codex, the reader is forced (challenged) to develop a hypermnesia that portends a return to the prodigious memory work of the pre-literate tradition. This hyperspatial activity of reading invokes the ideal writing or écriture yearned for by Roland Barthes and other theoreticians of the nouvelle critique, in which the reader, as opposed to the author or the text, is the locus of meaning. Duchamp, who dabbled briefly with Cubist aesthetics, interpreted the fourth dimension as something more dynamic. Like Joyce, fourth dimensional space was an ongoing activity of “interplication,”21 the folding and unfolding of ideas as a sequence of anachronous moments, where remembered associations coalesce with newly formed combinations, forestalling decisive outcomes or closure. Hence his curious subtitle for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, even—“delay in glass.” Looking at The Large Glass put this concept into play, concentrating the aesthetic experience as an intransitive process of incompletion, of delay, of “indecisive reunion.”22 As with Duchamp’s Green Box, The Green Box Ulysses decentralises the reading process and foregrounds indeterminacy as the prevailing mood of that which is read: the possibilities for conjunction are open-ended, multiple and unpredictable. In this sense, Joyce and Duchamp did not produce texts, they provided systems of prompting, the primary node in an interface completed by the spectator. The nomenclature of hypermedia seems more relevant to modernist experiments in fourth dimensional space than the incunabula of contemporary 170

interactive culture,23 of which Joyce is frequently cited as an antecedent. Derrida was quick to recognise this as the first generation of personal computers were appearing in the early 1980s, likening them to a “bricolage of a prehistoric child’s toys” next to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.24 Hypermedia simulates “joyceware” as Derrida foresaw over a decade ago. This recognition returns us once again to the prodigious fourth dimensional space that was the mind of Joyce. We return armed with new descriptive terms, their relevance not appropriated but timely, of Joyce’s time, in an uncanny sort of way. Joyce’s method of composing Ulysses was virtual, revising, improving, connecting and creating “all at the one time.”25 His note-sheets reveal a form of shorthand in which a single word or phrase, underlined in coloured pencil, signified more expansive, amplified constructions in the author’s mind. We would now refer to this as hypertext. With less fuss and greater economy, Valéry Larbaud described it as “abbreviated.”26 Derrida characterised Joycean textuality as an interface, an irresistible invitation to interactivity which “a priori indebts you, and in advance inscribes you in the book you are reading.”27 Every time I activate a link when using hypertext I can’t help but feel that, in very pale form, it is quoting Joyce. Similarly, when Myron Krueger made the observation in 1993 that hypertext liberates the reader “to make decisions about order of presentation that the author was not willing to make,”28 I thought he was referring to the Green Boxes of Joyce and Duchamp. Cyberpunk novelist William Gibson recalled The Bride Stripped Bare in Neuromancer; perhaps Ulysses: The Matrix Edition will turn up in a subsequent novel. POSTSCRIPT, MELBOURNE, 1999.

After completing this paper for its presentation at the Seville symposium in 1994, I reflected on the historical dissemination of Ulysses. I surmised that the next stage of this process would be intertextual, the intrusion of a fabulatory Ulysses into the network of available editions. Prior to my departure for Seville this suspicion was confirmed when I found, in a second-hand bookshop, the missing link in the genetic chain, stuck, appropriately, in a pile of cyclopaedias.

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NOTES An earlier version of this paper was presented at the XIVth International James Joyce Symposium, Seville, 1994. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28

Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (London: Grayson, 1934) 176-177. Cited in JJII 558. Michael Groden, Ulysses in Progress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). Rodney Wilson Owen, James Joyce and the Beginnings of Ulysses (Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1983). Arturo Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp. Notes and Projects for the Large Glass (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969) 1. Marcel Duchamp, ed. Hulten (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993) 17-18. The phrase is Harry Levin’s introduction to James Joyce. Ulysses. A Facsimile of the Manuscript (London: Faber, 1975) 11. “Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown,” The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World Inc, 1950) 116. Levin, introduction to James Joyce. Ulysses, 10. Schwarz, Marcel Duchamp, 7. Marcel Duchamp, ed. Hulten, 25/12/1949 & 30/9/1948, resp. (The biographical section of this book is organised as “Ephemerides,” day to day instalments set out in terms of the astrological calendar). Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” in R. Lebel, Marcel Duchamp (New York: Grove Press, 1959) 78. Frank Budgen, 176-177. L III.30-31. Marcel Duchamp, ed. Hulten, 16/10/34. Dorothy Dudley in Marcel Duchamp, ed. Hulten, 3/11/34. Dorothy Dudley, in Marcel Duchamp, ed. Hulten, 3/11/34. Ulysses: Critical and Synoptic Edition, ed. Gabler (New York: Garland, 1982, vol. 3) 1895. See Jerome McGann, “Ulysses as a Postmodern Text: The Gabler Edition,” Criticism (Summer, 1985, xxvii, 3): 283-306, and Stephen Heath, “Ambiviolences: Notes for Reading Joyce,” Post-Structuralist Joyce. Essays From the French, eds. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 39. Ulysses (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982) 125 & 64 resp. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) 117. See Heath, “Ambiviolences,” 32. Marcel Duchamp, “Kind of Subtitle. Delay in Glass,” The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, even. A Typographic Version, by Richard Hamilton, of Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box, trans., G.H. Hamilton (Stuttgart: Edition Hansjorg Mayer, 1976) i.. The term “incunabula” is Janet H. Murray’s. In her Hamlet on the Holodeck. The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: Free Press, 1997) 28. Jacques Derrida, “Two Words For Joyce,” Post-Structuralist Joyce, 147. L I.173. “The Ulysses of James Joyce,” The Criterion 1 (1 October, 1922): 102. Derrida, “Two Words For Joyce,” 147. Myron Krueger, in Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) viii.

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CONTRIBUTORS LOUIS ARMAND is Director of InterCultural Studies at the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University, Prague. His most recent books include Technē: James Joyce, Hypertext & Technology (2003), Giacomo Joyce: Envoys of the Other (ed. with Clare Wallace, 2002), Night Joyce of a Thousand Tiers: Studies in Finnegans Wake (ed. with Ondřej Pilný, 2002) and Incendiary Devices: Discourses of the Other (2006). He is founding co-editor (1994) of Hypermedia Joyce Studies (http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz). MARLENA CORCORAN is the co-editor of Gender in Joyce (University of Florida

Presses, 1997). She creates narrative electronic art, including works exhibited as part of the New York Digital Salon, Venice Biennale, and Documenta X. In 2003, her internet play, The Birth of the Christ Child: A Divine Comedy, appeared in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (www.marlenacorcoran.com).

DANIEL FERRER was Directeur de l’Institut des Textes et Manuscrits modernes, CNRS-ENS, in Paris (1994-1998). He has published books on Joyce, Virginia Woolf, literary theory and genetic criticism and is editor of the journal Genesis. In 1984 he coedited, with Derek Attridge, Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French (Cambridge University Press). His work on Joyce and genetic criticism has appeared widely and he has co-edited numerous anthologies and critical volumes. Along with Vincent Deane and Geert Lernout he is co-editor of the Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo (Brepols, commenced 2001). He was recently a fellow of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (www.item.ens.fr/). MICHAEL GRODEN is Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. He

has published extensively on Joyce, including Ulysses in Progress (Princeton, 1977) and the James Joyce Archive (general editor; Garland, 1977-9). He currently co-ordinates the international Digital Ulysses project (http://publish.uwo.ca/~mgroden/).

DIRK VAN HULLE is an Assistant Professor in German and English Literature at the

Université d’Anvers (Belgium), a member of the Antwerp James Joyce Center (directed by Geert Lernout), and editor of the electronic journal Genetic Joyce Studies (www.antwerpjamesjoycecenter.com/GJS/).

LAURENT MILESI teaches in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University and is a member of the Joyce ITEM-CNRS Research Group in Paris. He is the editor of James Joyce and the Difference of Language (Cambridge University Press, 2003). MARK NUNES is Chair of the Department of Humanities at Georgia Perimeter

College in the United States. He has published several articles on the social and cultural dynamics of network technology. His books include Virtual Topographies: The Internet and the Spaces of Everyday Life (2005). 174

THOMAS JACKSON RICE is the author of Joyce, Chaos and Complexity (1997). He is currently Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. ALAN R. ROUGHLEY is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities at Liverpool

Hope University College. He is the author of James Joyce and Critical Theory (1992) and Reading Derrida Reading Joyce (1999). He is the Founding Director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation.

DONALD F. THEALL is University Professor Emeritus at Trent University (Canada). He is the author of The Medium is the Rear View Mirror: Understanding McLuhan (1971), Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture and Communication (1995), James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics (1997), and The Virtual Marshall McLuhan (2001). DARREN TOFTS is Chair of Media and Communications and a member of the Institute

for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. His books include Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture (with Murray McKeich; 1997), Parallax: Essays on Art, Culture and Technology (1999) and Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History (ed. with Annemarie Jonson and Alessio Cavallaro; MIT, 2002).

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