“Spatial form”: ex cathedra

Frank begins his classic essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945) with a discussion of Lessing’s Laocoön, a work which he sees as having developed “a new approach to aesthetic form”³ which is crucial to the understanding of modernist texts. In Frank’s reading, Lessing presents “aesthetic form” as “the relation between the sensuous nature of the art medium and the conditions of human perception,” thus breaking with concepts of form as “an external arrangement provided by a set of traditional rules.”⁴ Taking from the Laocoön a sense of the complex interrelationships between time and space in the plastic arts in particular, Frank turns to modernist classics from the Cantos to The Waste Land, from Nightwood to Ulysses, in an effort to define that central operation which he calls “spatial form.”

In itself a figural resolution of the problem, this phrase encapsulates the “internal conflict” in classic modernist texts “between the time-logic of language and the space-logic implicit in the modern conception of poetry.”⁵ This tension is the result, for Frank, of the introduction of nonsequential modes of order into these texts and of the consequent requirement that readers “read reflexively” in order to apprehend “units of meaning . . . reflexively in an instant of time.”⁶ Finally, grounding his argument in authorial intention, Frank maintains that Joyce “proceeded on the assumption that a unified spatial apprehension of his work would ultimately be possible.”⁷ This apprehension he associates with the process of rereading which, as we have seen, is for Frank one of the defining processual characteristics of modernist texts and, in particular, of Ulysses.

In “La Littérature et l’espace,” Gérard Genette explores this concept of space further:

l’espace du livre, comme celui de la page, n’est pas soumis passivement au temps de la lecture successive, mais qu’en tout qu’il s’y révèle et s’y accomplit pleinement, il ne cesse de l’infléchir et de le retourner, et donc en un sens de l’abolir.⁸

For Genette, the semantic field transformed by Mallarmé’s exploitation of the graphic resources of the printed page and by Proust’s attempt to overthrow “la tyrannie du point de vue diachronique introduit par le XIXe siècle” is a space of simultaneity in which we learn to recognize “les effets de convergence et de rétroaction.”⁹ Thus, Borges’ library, Foucault’s theatrum philosophicum, Joyce’s system of systems.

In “Discours du récit,” Genette extends these observations to confront a problem which has long concerned critics of Frank: the seeming obstacle which the temporality and sequentiality of language present to the theory of spatial form.

Produced in time, like everything else, written narrative exists in space and as space, and the time needed for “consuming” it is the time needed for crossing or traversing it, like a road or a field. The narrative text, like every other text, has no other temporality than what it borrows, metonymically, from its own reading.¹⁰

Moving spatial form toward post-Einsteinian concepts of the space-time continuum, Genette not only stresses the fact that sequential processing of the text is bound up with the literal spatiality of the text as object but also poses the problem of the relationship between, on the one hand, the reading process and experience and, on the other, the text’s mode of operation at the micro- and macrostructural levels.¹¹ For Genette, resolution is to be found in a theory of mimesis which is both “illusion” and “act”¹² and thus a mode of representation which is nonreferential, since, as Umberto Eco puts it, “the referential fallacy consists in assuming that the ‘meaning’ of a sign-vehicle has something to do with its corresponding object.”¹³ According to Genette,

mimesis in words can only be mimesis of words. Other than that, all we have and can have is degrees of diegesis.¹⁴

The experience of spatial form becomes, then, a particularly sustained version of the “noematic phase”¹⁵ of apprehension of a narrative, that is, the narrative as experienced, the totality of synchronic processing of the text which concludes the reading act. But Frank’s term, far narrower and more limited than his admittedly sketchy definitions of it, still poses the problem of a seeming opposition between the concept of form and that of act, particularly when act is defined in Genette’s sense. A partial resolution of this problem would seem to be found in Frank’s reading of Lessing’s concept of form: “Form issue[s] spontaneously from the organization of the art work as it present[s] itself to perception.”¹⁶ But this statement creates more complicated problems of its own as well, problems which center on the “noematic structure of action”¹⁷ (whether spontaneous or organized) and upon the locus of the experience of the art work. To use Paul Ricoeur’s Husserlian terminology again, Frank would seem to be arguing that Ulysses occasions a particular intensification and complication of the noematic phase of apprehension. Let us consider this problem further by approaching from another angle.

If we follow Kenneth Burke’s strategy of “perspective by incongruity”¹⁸ while working with spatial form, the Classical concept of ekphrasis, much adopted by Romantic poets, and the Pauline theory of recapitulation or anakephalaiösis——a term used by Paul (Ephesians 1:10) and borrowed by the early Greek fathers of the church—may prove useful.¹⁹ Ekphrasis, “the concentration of action in a single moment of energy,”²⁰ finds some of its most familiar representations in the ekphrastic moments of Keats’s Grecian urn or Eliot’s Chinese jar in “Burnt Norton”:

As in the Laocoön, the emphasis here is upon the art object rather than the perceiver’s experience of it. As the jar moves in its stillness, it balances kinesis—the process of being—against stasis—the integrity of its own form—and thus within the poem the jar becomes an icon of a mode of resolution of time which is unattainable in the world of human action. But in the next six lines of “Burnt Norton,” another approach to the problem of time is introduced:

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,

Not that only, but the co-existence,

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now.

While the ekphrastic topos continues to resonate in the last line of this passage, the explicit rejection of ekphrasis as a solution to time’s effects (“Not the stillness . . . , / Not that only . . . “) carries us to the topos of recapitulation or anakephalaiösis. It is defined by theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar as “not just flowing backward to the beginning, but movement forward in time as the integration of the beginning in the end, . . . [which] is the significance of the movement forward itself, insofar as it is at once in time and above time.”²² Or, in John Freccero’s elegant definition, the “gathering up in an epistrophic moment” which, he argues, is “the essence of thought for Augustine.”²³ Augustine’s concept of history is an extension of the same topos: “at once linear and circular, a syntax that moves toward its own beginning.”²⁴ Thus what Wendy Steiner has termed “Cubist historiography”—an understanding of history moving “not as a plotted narrative toward a resolution, but as a cubist painting whose elements maintain their heterogeneity ... in an aestheticized structure of interrelations”²⁵—may more accurately be seen as a theory of history which in the Western tradition has its origins in Augustine. As Freccero argues, Augustine marks the beginning of a turning away from the exclusive privileging of the spoken word in Christian theology and the onset of “the reverse process, where the visual and spatial perception of the word as read becomes an emblem of a simultaneity that is preferable to sound and the fall into time.”²⁶ In its rejection of pure sound as analog, Eliot’s variation on this theme approaches the Augustinian emphasis upon the association of spatiality with simultaneity, a collapsing of the categories of time and space which will eventually result, in The Four Quartets, in resolution into Christ as word, thus ending where Augustine himself did. Through the appeal to recapitulation, the pressure of the ekphrastic moment in the Quartets is relieved.

Augustine’s emblem of simultaneity, Christ the word, serves to balance a system which otherwise threatens to suffer an instability similar to that exhibited by Frank’s spatial form (or Eliot’s Quartets if we can imagine them without the god-term), but it is a balance which is sustained only as long as we accept the insertion of transcendental signified as telos. Viewed logologically, Pauline recapitulation becomes a kind of animated and centered ekphrastic moment in the dual sense of kinetic animation and of inspiriting process, an infusion of anima in its Aristotelian sense of essence. In this context, then, spatial form may be seen as a “maxim” in Grice’s sense²⁷—a maxim which attempts to stand in symbolic relation to modernist texts in their attempts to encode Verbum, and to the reading response patterns enjoined upon readers who undertake the works of, for example, Joyce. But if the noema has become the discourse system in performance, the text itself becomes more than “a game whose rules must be established in the process of play.”²⁸ So we return to logologized theophany, Barthes’ semiophany.

Spatial form appears, then, to be the kernel of a dramatistic theory which encodes the relationship between form and act at both textual and metatextual levels and which, in focusing on the dialogic structure of the interchange between text and programmed reader, seeks to articulate the ekphrastic leap beyond the restrictions of sequential time which characterizes modernist discourse. But we must now, following Freccero, include Augustine in this schema as well and, as Frank did in a later essay, also cite Erich Auerbach’s figural schema and its models in Scholastic thought and Gothic art.²⁹ In his attempt to articulate the demands placed by such works as Ulysses and Nightwood on readers, Frank began the long process of writing the semiotics of the Joyce system but he chose what Genette calls an “architextural” mode, a mode which privileges the noematic or essentialist at the expense of the noetic or processual-mimetic level of apprehension of the text.³⁰ Not “Proust palimpseste,” then, this textual space is ex cathedra, beyond “scholasticism in stone” (JJII 515) as jest or cliché to the absolute literality of it: Gothic pedagogy in text and gesture.³¹

Gothic pedagogy: processual mimesis

In The Rule of Metaphor, Paul Ricoeur is concerned with, among other things, the rereading of the concept of mimesis to its origins in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics. In contrast to the euhemerized, naively referential versions of mimesis which have long dominated and still do control a number of areas of literary criticism (including, alas, Joyce studies), Ricoeur stresses the processual foundation of Aristotle’s concept of mimêsis phuseôs.³² Usually rendered as the “imitation of nature,” this phrase—as Ricoeur, Foucault and Derrida³³ have variously argued—has been inscribed within an ideology which has taken as its central concern the formation of an antagonistic relation between “nature” and “man” concomitant with the inscription of the human as divinely ordained conqueror of all other life forms and of the earth itself. Mimesis has become a mode of ownership rather than a means of production.

Returning to an understanding of mimesis as process, which has both analog and origin in the Thomist concept of the act, Ricoeur maintains that mimesis

does not signify only that all discourse is of the world; it does not embody just the referential function of poetic discourse. Being mimesis phuseôs, it connects this referential function to the revelation of the Real as Act. [ . . . ] To present men “as acting” and all things “as an act”—such could well be the ontological function of metaphorical discourse. . . .³⁴

Reading the “Real as Act” logologically, we can discern both the Augustinian concept of the text as “nascent speech act”³⁵ and the Thomist concept of form as act,³⁶ both rooted in the Aristotelian understanding of mimesis as techne which Ricoeur glosses from the Ethics as

something more refined than a routine or an empirical practice and [which] in spite of its focus on production, . . . contains a speculative element, namely a theoretical enquiry into the means applied to production. It is a method; and this feature brings it closer to theoretical knowledge than to routine.³⁷

A mode of articulation as both utterance and motion, mimesis as techne is a method of enactment “which composes and constructs the very thing it imitates” and is the “structure of plot.”³⁸ Or, in Augustinian terms, the human response to the originary speech act of creation.³⁹

Like Roman Jakobson’s definition of the “poetic function” as an accentuation of the message at the expense of the referential function, human utterance within the Augustinian speech paradigm is referential in a purely semiotic sense.⁴⁰ “The medium is the message,”⁴¹ as Marshall McLuhan’s instant decompression says, but in the Christological tradition, human message as sign vehicle can never fully capture the divine signans which activates it, nor can it re-present that originary act except in its own embodiment of the gesture of creation. The essence of that mime—verbal and kinesthetic—is, in the Christian tradition, the ritual drama of the liturgy.

A trope founded on a pun, the liturgy is, like all tropes, an event since “the figures of signification ‘occur through a new signification of the word.’ ”⁴² As an “act-event,”⁴³ the central drama of the Catholic liturgy, the Mass, may be classified as both an act of rememoration (memoria passionis)⁴⁴ and one of performative utterance in the sense in which Émile Benveniste uses J. L. Austin’s term. Thus, “an utterance is performative insofar as it names the act performed. . . . The utterance is the act; the utterer performs the act by naming it.”⁴⁵ In the Thomist sense of the word, “form” is an utterance: an act which is performative in time and, if encoded in the spatiotemporal continuum of liturgy, in space as well. Thus Joseph Frank’s concept of “spatial form” becomes liturgical enactment if liturgy is defined as a fixed, processual system encoding prescribed gestures and words, enacted and concelebrated by priest and people, and centered on the enunciation of the Word in time, the conversion of utterance into flesh. Noesis and noema are here bound into enactment.

Grounding his observations in the medieval theologian Amalarius’s expositions of the Mass as highly allegorized sacred drama, O. B. Hardison writes that there were “two concurrently developing patterns” in that celebration:

The first is the ritual, which, in spite of its highly stylized form, is a true and visible sequence of actions and texts. The ritual is timeless. It always occurs in the present and its central features are unchanging. It is not a representation but a re-creation. It is linked indissolubly with a second order of events which occurred in chronological time and which must therefore be re-created in the present by meditation—by an effort of the memory heightened through contact with the ritual. The two elements cannot be separated.⁴⁶

Until the period of reform which commenced with the efforts of Pope Pius X in the 1890s, the Roman Mass was essentially a processual system having both an ekphrastic center (the consecration or ritual transformation of immanent product into transcendent process) and a recapitulative movement guided by a set program both printed (the Roman Ritual, the missals in common use by lay participants until the 1960s) and mnemonic (the trained memories of lay participants who—perhaps without any comprehension of the semantic field of the Latin Mass—nevertheless knew the responses and recognized all the familiar verbal and kinesthetic gestures of the celebrant).

The experience of the Tridentine Mass for many lay people in fact bore a striking resemblance to that of the members of the audience at the performance of an oral narrative. Harold Scheub writes of the “process of patterning”⁴⁷—or what we will refer to here as programming—which is experienced by the audience at the performance of an oral narrative in which both verbal and kinesthetic expression by the performer serves to unite the group in a sort of performative communion. Against the “grid” of highly formalized gestures the performer sets the verbal narrative. When fully used, the gestural grid creates its own patterning which “is not reflected in the words of the narrative, a patterning evoked by the words.”⁴⁸ It is a literal “embodiment” of the semantic grid of the narrative. Contemporary Catholic theologians refer to this form of processual mimesis in the context of the sacrament of the Eucharist at the center of the Mass as “transsignification. “⁴⁹

An amplification of the Augustinian concept of transsubstantiation, transsignification refers to the association of “the substance of bread and the substance of the body of Christ” as operant within the context of a “sign-act” which is the Eucharistic transformation.⁵⁰ Logologically speaking, the process is one of transcoding which is motivated (in Kenneth Burke’s sense: moved to act/ion) by the enactment of performative utterance. Which is to say that through the synesthetic performance of strictly encoded gestures, the discourse system enacts itself insofar as the components of that system are operant (that is: celebrant, lay participants, the various texts of encoded verbal and kinesthetic gesture; logologically speaking: text characterized by that form of processual mimesis and logothetic programming which has been encapsulated as “spatial form,” and competent readers willing not to “suspend disbelief”—since belief is never in question here—but first to submit to textual programming and then, achieving familiarity with the maneuvers of the system, to enact the text as performative discourse insofar as these components share fully in the enactment or “exercising” of it).

In this sense of “liturgy,” then, the demands of those texts characterized by “spatial form” are demands of liturgical enactment. Logothesis, in other words, is no longer sufficient in itself to meet the text-directives of the Joyce system by the time of Ulysses. The reader/exercitant must now function not only as logo-technician (as s/he did of Portrait) but also as performer of a very particular kind. As Scheub notes, “Decoding occurs not [only] through analysis but [also] through participation.”⁵¹ Our emendation needs to be taken a stage further, however, since in performative discourse of the sort we are concerned with, analysis and participation are utterly entwined. Like the Romantic version of the ekphrastic moment, the noetic moment for these texts is a synesthetic one.

We have come a long way toward the description of both Roman Catholic liturgy and its logological analog, the act-event of transsignification which is both process and product in a text like Ulysses, as formulations of what Walter Ong has called “oral noetics.” In Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Ong has synthesized three decades of his research into oral and mnemonic paradigms and presented a description of the main features of primary oral culture and its expression in oral performance. Going beyond the generic restrictions imposed by Albert B. Lord and his school, Ong—like Jeff Opland, the fine scholar of Anglo-Saxon and African oral traditions—has extended the concept of “formulaic expression” to include all forms of language activity within a primary oral culture. As Ong puts it, “primary orality is radically formulary.”⁵² Further,

Oral noetics, as manifested in poetry and narration of primary oral cultures, organizes thought largely around a controlled set of themes, more or less central to the human lifeworld: birth, marriage, death, celebration, struggle (ceremonial or ludic, and polemic or martial), initiation rites, dance and other ceremonies, arrivals and departures, descriptions or manipulations of implements [...], and so on.⁵³

Both the thought and the poetic expression of such cultures have a “mnemonic base”⁵⁴ which has its major expression in “formulary devices” (a term which Ong uses with reference to a variety of forms, including proverbs, adages, “programmatically mnemonic verses” including Homeric phrases of the “rosy-fingered dawn” sort, “cumulative commonplaces” or “prefabricated purple patches” on a standard topos, and “standardized verbal expressions”). The “mnemonic base,” however, extends beyond these devices to include a number of rhetorical characteristics of “orally based thought and expression.”⁵⁵ Among these features are additive style, aggregative structures featuring epithet clusters and heavily adjectival phrases, and what medieval rhetoricians referred to as copia or redundancy, including such forms as amplificatio and elaboratio.⁵⁶ In this linguistic conservereconomy, not novelty but integration into existing styles and structures is valued. So is what Ong refers to as “agonistic tone” or the privileging of flyting, vituperation and praise ritualized in performance.

Oral noetic economies are characterized in oral performance and in everyday activities as what Ong calls “homeostatic” in the sense that they “live very much in a present which keeps itself in equilibrium or homeostasis by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance,”⁵⁷ a process which requires a constant reintegration of a renewed, reshaped past into the present time of performance. The past is rewoven into the language of the present. Formulary devices serve in oral enactment as regulators of a system which contains within itself the linguistic and cultural checks and balances necessary to the stabilization of the whole. This process of balancing is facilitated, perhaps in part caused, by the prevalence of “situational” rather than “abstract” thinking in primary oral societies.⁵⁸ Thus—in examples which Ong cites from the fieldwork of A. R. Luria among predominantly oral people—geometrical figures, logical puzzles, syllogisms and the like, and requests for definitions are quickly discounted. “Try to explain to me what a tree is,” Luria said to one young man. “Why should I? Everyone knows what a tree is”⁵⁹ was the reply, an exchange which is not as far from Gothic pedagogy as it may at first seem.

Luria’s attempt at a sequentially structured dialogue is foiled from the beginning by his subject’s recognition of and suspicion toward his own “kerygmatic assumption”⁶⁰ about “reality” and trees, not to mention his condescending tone. Refusing to play his part, the young man blocks the attempted exchange without revealing to his questioner the bias of the latter’s expectations. In Luria’s world, “tree” can be defined; in the young man’s more literal and situation-bound world, the essence of tree (“what a tree is”) cannot be “defined” but only performed. As for Aquinas, for Luria’s informant “form is act.” In refusing a travesty of diegesis, Luria’s subject asserts with Gérard Genette that “mimesis in words can only be mimesis of words,”⁶¹ and with Emile Benveniste that “the utterer performs the act by naming it.”⁶² By refusing to “name” the tree, the young man refuses to enter his questioner’s world of logical categories in which words can be made to represent things. He rejects, in other words, what Genette calls mimologie⁶³ and opts instead for the processual, nonreferential bias of his oral noetic culture. It is this ontological model which is at the heart of the preecumenical Roman liturgy and of what Kenneth Burke calls “scholastic realism.”⁶⁴

“La Liturgie est fondamentalement une pédagogie,” writes Marcel Jousse.⁶⁵ Those who come to this school to learn must apprentice themselves to the text and, in the act of memorizing it, begin to apprehend the teacher’s message encoded in the text. Breaking through the shell of referential expectations and desire for instant and soon forgotten bits of information which is characteristic of cultures of “secondary orality” like our own, the student learns—as Jousse puts it—to eat the bread of the Eucharist, the book of the Gospels and the Teacher, Christ.⁶⁶ This is Jousse’s paradigm of knowledge or total apprehension which is emblematized and realized in the Eucharistic Cum-unio or at/one/ment of teacher with pupil.⁶⁷ For Jousse this is an interactive and completely balanced paradigm, a stable system, despite the seeming disparity, theologically speaking, between levels of divine and human knowledge. Like Aquinas’s universe, Jousse’s is an utterly knowable one in which human beings are, so to speak, synchronized with their world and capable of articulating even the far reaches of mystery since words exist to enact that which they name. It is the mode of enactment which is central to Jousse’s inquiry into psychobiology and oral noetics, a study which begins with investigation of the gestural semiotics of the Gospels.

For Jousse a holistic concept, gesture has its roots in the “rhythmo-catechistic” milieu⁶⁸ of Palestine at the time of Christ. The narratives of this oral noetic economy are characterized, according to Jousse, by a heightened stress upon balanced formulaic utterance performed in such a way that verbal and kinesthetic gestures are and were in complete harmony. The products of gestures of the laryngo-buccal muscles of the mouth and throat, words were used in the Palestinian milieu of Christ and his disciples within the living context of holistic gestural interaction as body communicated with body. Utterance was a synesthetic act-event. Within this milieu, verbal knowledge could not be separated from other modes of corporeal apprehension. Activities involving the same sets of muscles—eating, speaking, reading aloud—became, as it were, thematized under the same heading and so the teacher’s task was the transmission of gestural sets and paradigms, the kinesthetic “handing down” of embodied knowledge. As Jousse notes, every memory, every act of rememoration, is in itself a system of individual gestures which replays the encoded gestures of the past, handling them with full mastery in the process of re/call.⁶⁹

So for Jousse the Gospels came to be “played” in particular ways known to Christ and crafted by him in such a way that the synesthetic gestural resources of his culture would be permanently “embodied” within the language later to be set down in writing. Precisely in order that the chirographic stage might in time be reached by the Gospels, the language had to have both a strong mnemonic base and an equally tenacious gestural encoding, thus employing human capacities which would be sustained across time, particularly as “anthropos acquires everything he knows in this way.”⁷⁰ Mime, Jousse’s term for this mode of synesthetic gestural enactment, is the means of apprehension and experience which is congruent with the operative mode of the Gospels and also with what Jousse viewed in orthodox terms as the inscription and enactment of the Gospels in the liturgy and particularly in its central celebration, the Mass. An “aide-mémoire,”⁷¹ the Mass for Jousse is a mime which enacts not the referential but the processual paradigm which it co(m)[cum]-memorates. It is a gestural enactment of community rememoration at each level of synesthetic experience, its goal the performative discourse of transsignification. “De la page écrite [of the Ritual and the Gospels] va surgir le mimodrame.”⁷²

An exploded Lectio divina, the Joussean semiotic of gestural enactment takes gesture as techne in the production of Gospels, liturgy and catechism, the pedagogical modes of oral noetics. Like the Ignatian logothetic system, the Joussean proceeds on the basis of what Patrice Pavis refers to in the context of theater as the “performance-text,”⁷³ the enacted, enunciated text. However, where the Ignatian performance-text (the allegorical or “acted” text of the Spiritual Exercises) is given by the retreat director to the exercitant and is thus already a transsignification of the Ignatian printed text into the oral noetic text of meditations, gestures and spiritual practices assigned to the exercitant, the Joussean analog is, in a sense, the point of intersection of the printed text of Gospels or Ritual and the reader/receiver/ participant. Similarly, the Ignatian “anagogic text” (the linguistic response generated by but transcending the system of its production) finds its Joussean analog in the formulaic gestural response encoded in the Gospels and in the celebration of the Mass. A significant difference is apparent here, however, since the Joussean response component of the gestural paradigm exceeds neither the paradigm nor the performance-text as a whole. As Ong comments, even syntax is mnemonic: every element of the performance-text is both congruent with and in metonymic relationship to the whole of which it is a part.⁷⁴ Once again, the knowable world. To construe this world is to enact its synesthetic gestures.

But Ulysses is not, in any strict sense, the product of primary oral transmission in either the Parry/Lord or the Jousse modes. Eminently the product of a technologized culture, in neither its corrupt nor its now virtually immaculate typographic incarnations does it body forth sage or spirit in holy fire or otherwise. Ulysses is a book but a book which, as Walton Litz has written, “lives in our minds as both process and product.” It is a narrative whose “intrinsic genre,” Litz continues, “is our total image of the work, which is recreated and modified each time we reread it.”⁷⁵ Or, as Hugh Kenner puts it, Ulysses is “a kind of hologram of language, creating a three-dimensional illusion out of the controlled interference between our experience of language and its arrangements of language.”⁷⁶ Holographic performative, then; gestural enactment. “Form is act.”

“Beyond Z”: da capo

Like Portrait and Finnegans Wake, Ulysses repeatedly defines itself, instructs us in its semiotic operations, specifies its genre, provides models of the relationship between its micro- and macrostructures, gives us practice sessions in decoding. It is like them as well in its elaboration of the strategies of oral noetics within the modality of print, its usurping of the referential bias of print ontology and adaptation of that skew as a Burkean “terministic screen.” The noetic Ulysses, then—the product of performative discourse in its semiotically fixed and experientially transient enactment—is a “place,” a locus on a memory chain, where no one speaks or thinks,⁷⁷ where the “postulate of depth”⁷⁸ (or the “kerygmatic assumption”) reveals precisely nothing, where everything is given, specified—even M’lntosh, our token mystery. And it is a system in which supplements are unnecessary if we come to the reading with that level of competence which the text demands, a not unreasonable requirement in a work which seeks in an expanded ekphrastic moment—better: hour or day—to be an “act” in the sense which we have been pursuing in this chapter.

Not only unnecessary, supplements are in fact excluded from this “form” which is an act, for Ulysses—taking what Michel Beaujour calls its “topo-logie”⁷⁹ (topology, topos/logic) from oral noetics rather than print ontology—may be classified as a speculum mundi rather than as an encyclopedia. As Beaujour writes, medieval specula or mirrors

sont des groupements de lieux ordonnés selon une métaphore topique ... qui (que) fournit une taxonomie; et chacun des lieux contient virtuellement le développement dialectique d’un discours descriptif ou conceptuel, qui peut accessoirement s’illustrer de micro-récits exemplaires. Le miroir ne vise donc pas à narrer, mais plutôt à deployer intelligiblement une représentation des choses, or du sujet qui les connaît, tout en ménageant la possibilité de la possibilité de renvois d’un lieu en un autre, et celle d’ajouts dans les lieux déjà parcourus.⁸⁰

We have already encountered a version of this form in the Ignatian “arborescence” of paradigms in Portrait. Contrast the encyclopedia, which strives to attain a sequentially structured perfection—from A to Z—and, in so doing, to enclose the world and thus achieve “comprehensive coverage” of the “sum” of knowledge.⁸¹

What is centrally involved here is an epistemic shift from the Scholastic premise of comprehensibility of the world and its mirror, “man,” to the post-Enlightenment “scientific” paradigm of mystery enacted in the epistemological battle between darkness/ignorance and light/scientific knowledge.⁸² The encyclopedia, disseminator of higher knowledge to the laity, may thus be seen paradoxically as the battleground of the foes of “irrationality” typically equated with medieval modes of knowing and, in particular, with Scholastic realism. Involved in a constant struggle to “keep abreast” of the latest knowledge, as the cliché has it, the encyclopedia as form was and is caught in the drive toward the fullness of sequentiality since only through the full saying of “knowledge” can mystery be vanquished. This is the fruitless struggle to push back the boundaries of ever-encroaching darkness conceived as that which the light of science has not yet demystified. As Vincent Descombes puts it:

On the one hand, the name of Encyclopedia excludes the supplement, for this title announces that the book is meant to have a comprehensive coverage of its subject from A to Z. On the other hand, in order to be what it claims and means to be, the Encyclopedia must allow the possibility of a supplement, an exposition beyond Z: if the book lacks such a supplement ... it will be unworthy of its name.⁸³

But “it belongs to the eidos of an ‘encyclopedic’ Summation not to be ‘encyclopedic,’ not to be able to close itself in the circle A-Z, not even supposing that the book is in fact perfect, i.e., encyclopaedic.”⁸⁴ Defining itself in terms of the closed system, the encyclopedia is thus condemned to openness and therefore to the courting of mystery. In contrast, the speculum, by displacing the goal of achieved perfection to the god-term, is free to catalogue according to the convention of elaboratio enacted upon the topoi of the age. Thus, among others, “les neuf sphères du ciel, les neuf ordres angélique, les quatre éléments, les quatres humeurs du corps et de l’âme, les quatre âges du monde, les sept âges de l’homme, les sept vertus et les sept péchés capitaux.”⁸⁵ Or, following the taxonomy of the Speculum Maius of Vincent of Beauvais: Speculum naturale, Speculum historiale, Speculum doctrinale, and Speculum morale.

Grounded in the assumption of an interactive, mirroring relationship between the world and humankind, and specifically between the world and the word as performative utterance, the Scholastic ontology which structures the speculum asserts the existence of an always and already comprehensible universe. These are the roots of Gothic pedagogy—as Beaujour points out, a mode of knowing which has its “architectural isotope”⁸⁶ in the Gothic cathedral with its system of “lieux concrétisés” in stone and iconography, “système qui programme une multitude de renvois entre les images et les fonds qui s’évoquent et se désignent les uns les autres dans leur contexte symbolique.”⁸⁷ In its Joycean variation, this system begins with the theory of the epiphany in Stephen Hero and is elaborated in Ulysses by way of the extratextual programming device of allusion, the intratextual programming devices of the motiv system and overdetermination, and the hybrid devices of the pun and the riddle, both of which we will classify under the heading of catachresis. In turn these devices give rise to particular textual operations or sequences of programmed implicature which are activated during the processing of the text or that stage which we have already referred to as the assemblage of the “performance-text.” At this point the data called up by the reader’s enacting of and, in a sense, being enacted by the textual programming devices begin to become memory events.

In both the Linati and the Gilbert schemas of Ulysses, these events are governed by the specific “technic” or techne of each chapter, a mode of enactment which orchestrates the various phases of programmed implicature across the chapter as well as across the whole system. Repeated gestural enactment of the performancetext leads finally to apprehension of Ulysses as what we have called performative discourse—like Ignatian “semiophany” in that this dialogic process can be produced in no other way. But let us begin again in an eminently traditional place, with the Joycean concept of the epiphany.

As has often been pointed out, the concept of the epiphany has its origin in the Biblical story of the Magi who “journied from afar” to worship the Christ-child and celebrate the coming of the Messiah into the world.⁸⁸ What has not been stressed about this sequence in its Joycean application is, however, an aspect of it which the seventeenth-century homilist Lancelot Andrewes delighted in emphasizing: that the Magi “saw before they came, came before they asked; asked before they found, and found before they worshipped.”⁸⁹ Following the star which they interpreted as signifier of the long-awaited event, they moved toward the expected signified, whose incidental details remained to be experienced but whose meaning they had already apprehended in the context of the prophetic tradition within which the child would later situate himself. Using the language of that tradition, their greeting commenced the process of inscription of the Word within the words already given and thereby the extension and modification of that language. Accordingly, this act-event was a teleological rather than a supplementary one. Alpha and omega, the Messiah came in a moment both ekphrastic and recapitulative, expressing the essence of language and in every sense being its meaning. Epiphany is thus an occasion of inscription rather than of transsignification: meaning is situated within the world system which occasions and mirrors it (the god-term author/izing his/her own text) rather than being the resolution of a conjunction of disparate systems the fusion of which is the act-event (the Eucharistic moment at the center of the Roman Mass).

—an important distinction and one central to Joyce’s dealings with the concept of epiphany, for in Stephen Hero it is the object of the perceptual process which “is epiphanised” (SH 216) and not the subject who is thereby transformed. “Imagine my glimpses at that clock,” SD tells Cranly, “as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised” (SH 216). Like his earlier rejection of referential mimesis in favor of a neo-Thomist concept of the “artistic process . . . [as] a natural process” (SH 175), SD’s concern here is to stress that subject and object achieve not fusion or symbiosis but, rather, exchange between compatible systems, each comprehensible to the other.

The epiphanic moment is the product of a reading process producing an experience of simple cognition rather than of kerygmatic revelation. At first “only an item in the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture,” the catalogued clock—inscribed within a written system whose purpose is that of the speculum rather than the encyclopedia—“is epiphanised” when “all at once I see it and I know at once what it is” (SH 211). But SD’s knowledge remains specula/tive (rather than speculary, the moment being one of cognition rather than of Narcissistic introjection; the perceiving subject does not experience transformation as a result of or in the course of the exchange). Not an ekphrastic moment, the epiphany involves neither the “still moment” of insight called up in Eliot’s image of the “Chinese jar” nor the transsignifying capacity of liturgical ekphrasis. What transpires is the conversion of one term (catalogued clock as signifier) to another (the subject’s discourse), a performative utterance which enunciates the quiddity, the “whatness,” of the object through the temporary vehicle of the subject. Or, as SD has it in Ulysses 1.2, “It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible” (U 2.67). SD is situating the catalogued Ballast Office clock as potential performative the utterance of which will fulfill the “demands” of the clock just as, in its Biblical form, epiphany refers to the utterance of the Magi witnessing the Christ-child as divine performative. The act-event was the utterance or enunciation, the witness which in itself was neither—in terms of the Biblical epiphany—the coming of the god-term (which was already in evidence) nor the informing of the Magi (who already knew). This is the beginning of the Joyce system’s adaptation of epiphany, by way of the locus parallax, to the more complex requirements of the performative discourse which is Ulysses.

One goal of that discourse is monist synthesis, the early stages of which we can also recognize in Stephen Hero’s stress upon the integritas of the Ballast Office clock and the decorum of respect involved in the epiphanizing of its icon. One of the forms which that decorum takes in Ulysses is a mode of processual mimesis which has usually been seen as characteristic only of the later, “experimental” chapters. In fact, the world enunciates itself repeatedly throughout the system. “Silt” says the printing press at the Freeman’s Journal in II.4:

The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forward its flyboard with slit the first batch of quirefolded papers. Sllt. Almost human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak. That door too silt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its own way. Sllt. (U 7.174)

As with Portrait’s induction of the reader into Lectio divina, we are here programmed in the comprehension of this form. Both terms of the equation are given in repeating sequence (the movements of a specific kind of machine, the icon of the sound made by such a machine in action) and the emblematic resolution of these terms is clearly stated as a maxim of the type characteristic of LB (“Everything speaks in its own way”) followed by a recapitulative statement of the code phrase “Slit.”

The famous example of the cat’s meow at the beginning of II. 1 provides another instance of this mode of processual mimesis as well as a term necessary to the assemblage of LB as perceptual paradigm. Here we move from the cat’s initial “Mkgnao” to “Mrkgnao,” “Mrkrgnao” (U 4.16, 4.25, 4.32) and, immediately preceding the transcoding move to MB’s first statement, “Mn,” we have the cat’s happy response to a saucer of milk, “Gurrhr,” a delighted switching of codes (U 4.57, 4.38). It is interesting to see MB’s code phrase associated with the hungry, unsatisfied cat’s utterance rather than with its later, more contented one as well as to observe that within the LB paradigm, Gothic pedagogy dictates that both animals and inanimate beings “speak.” Later, in II.8, the door in the newspaper office will “speak” again, enabling LB to make a distinction which the whole discourse system calls into question (“There’s music everywhere. Ruttledge’s door. ee creaking. No, that’s noise” [U 11.964]) and which is contradicted later on the same page when MB’s “Tinkling” is punningly classified as “Chamber music.”

Performative utterance grounded in processual mimesis takes on the properties of heightened iconicity across the text as well, begging the question of who speaks. For example, in II.6 the discussion of the father-son relationship in Hamlet mutates into a rhythmic specula/tion on Shakespeare’s will:

(U 9.701)

And in II.8 the techne of fuga per canonem arranges numerous examples of iconically stressed processual mimesis. Simon Dedalus’s tenor voice “soared, a bird, it belled its flight ... the endlessnessnessness . . . “(U 11.745); MB’s “wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevy hair [is] un comb:’d” (U 11.809); and LB’s flatulent “last words” go through as many mutations as the cat’s earlier in the day, from “Prrprr” to “Fff! Oo. Rrpr” to a triumphant crescendo, “Pprrpffrrppffff” (U 11.1293). In 11.12 the Gong says “Bang Bang Bla Bak Blud Blugg Bloo” (U 15.189); and in this processual chiasmus, Plumtree becomes “Peatmot. Trumplee. Moutpat. Plamtroo” (U 17.604), a transformation no more dramatic than that undergone by LB’s name, subject in his youth to the anagrammatic variations

But the text’s insistence that no one “speaks” any of these words except the reader is perhaps even more pointedly evident in its denomination of referential mimesis in absentia. MB, for example, holds her teacup “by nothandle” (U 4.333), while in II.8 “Bloom sang dumb” (U 11.776) and the blind stripling “unseeing .. . stood in the door. He saw not bronze. He saw not gold” (U 11.1281). In the same chapter is a list of phenomena associated with sound: “snakes hisss” but “hens don’t crow” (U 11.964), and a lull in conversation is encoded as “None nought said nothing. Yes” (U 11.224). Here we begin to see a shift which goes beyond manipulation of double negatives and into the problem of the enunciation of the negative as a category meaningful in itself.

Unlike SD’s composition of his name as place in the universe of Portrait (an act of “topo-logie”), LB’s inscription is fragmentary: “I [ . . . ] AM A” (U 13.1258). The sentence is open, its syntax incomplete as the course of the “everchanging tracks” which MB and LB follow as they sleep, journeying westward (like Gabriel Conroy, toward death) along earth’s orbit in “neverchanging space” (U 17.2310). Infinity is a place in the system, space a neverchanging element in its topology. “Nought is nulled” (FW 613.14) in the gestural enactment of the performancetext. The inscription of absence, the specification of what was but is no more, the denomination alike of incapacity and category shift: these are the materials of the speculum mundi which requires performative iteration whose tracks are the synoptic paths of memory events.

No more solid than SD’s words in II.3, memories in a dialogic economy demand full gestural enactment lest their syntax be broken forever. So, like the young SD of Portrait, LB is also given to an Ignatian weaving of categories:

Mouth, south. Is the mouth south someway? Or the south a mouth? Must be some. South, pout, out, shout, drouth. Rhymes: two men dressed the same, looking the same, two by two. (U 7.714)

—a process which introduces both the locus parallax and the ancient topos coincidentia oppositorum,⁹⁰ the co/incidence of opposites. Cusa’s formula is used in its strictest sense here: terms denominated as opposites which have their incidence in a shared or joint manner. They co/operate, in other words. In order to move from the condition of “rhymes” to the state which 11.12 classifies as “Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes unite” (U 15.2097), the epiphanic relation of enacted rhyme must be displaced within the system, supplanted by parallax and then, through a neo-Hegelian reduction of opposites, the transient state of co/incidence achieved briefly through the techne of III.2, the catechetical form of the processual mimetic mode.

“Timeball on the ballastoffice down” is our first indication of this shift within the syntax as are the terms introduced within the LB paradigm immediately after this statement:

Fascinating little book that is of sir Robert Ball’s. Parallax. I never exactly understood. There’s a priest. Could ask him. Par it’s Greek: parallel, parallax. Met him pike hoses she called it till I told her about the transmigration. O rocks! (U 8.110)

Between II.5 and 11.12, LB enacts parallax without expressing it, thinks again of getting someone to define it for him, but does not solve the problem which it poses until Chris Callinan asks him “What is the parallax of the subsolar ecliptic of Aldebaran?” (U 15.1656) “Pleased to hear from you, Chris. K. 11” LB answers, thereby bringing into co/incidence the topos parallax and two of its loci, the number eleven and Kino’s advertisement for trousers. Kino’s ad, which LB sees just before his meditation on Sir Robert Ball’s astronomical text (in which he hoped to find a definition of parallax as an astronomical term), is the immediate occasion of his association of parallax with MB, whose assignation with Boylan has placed her and LB in a more than usually parallactic relationship that day. Able to define metempsychosis for her as transmigration of souls, LB is later unable to satisfy his own curiosity or to switch codes to deflect parallax away from associations with male genitalia (“O rocks” [U 4.343]). Which brings us back to Kino’s trousers, the legs of which obviously do not exist in a parallactic relationship to each other (as the ones of the number eleven do) any more than do train tracks (“Rose of Castille” / “Rows of cast steel” [U 7.591])—yet another locus on this memory chain—which inevitably meet at infinity, a transmigration of lines otherwise known as “Amiens St. Station” or, in the Wake, the geomater’s “quincecunct” (FW 206.35).

Infinity is both part of the problem and an essential component of the system, for the repeating elevens of Kino’s trousers bring us both to the system’s formulation of motiv as synchronic process—the inscription of infinity within the text—and to LB’s mnemonic act-event, the vision of Rudy which, at the end of 11.12, emblematizes the “hallucinatory” techne of the whole. As one of II.8’s polysemous maxims puts it, “Symmetry under a cemetery wall” (U 11.833), the performative inscription of death within the symmetry of the body as both erotic and mnemonic locus. For an oral noetic specula/tive economy, looking back “in a retrospective arrangement” (U 14.1044) is the beginning of an epiphanic co/operation of remembered past gathered into remembering present inscribed in performative time which, through gestural enactment of the performance-text, becomes the synchronic moment of performative discourse. The full textual sequence is a transformative one, beginning as we have already seen in the conversion process of the epiphany and ending, by way of liturgical transsignification grounded in a recapitulative mode of processing, in an ekphrastic experience of gestural enactment—“spatial form” in all its erotic and textual dimensions.

Thus the noetic Ulysses, a synchronic act-event which II. 11 approaches by way of anastomosis (enacted anakephalaiösis or recapitulative reweaving) as a vehicle of “postcreation” (U 14.294). As language speaks its own changes in that chapter—passing from Anglo-Saxon to evangelical rhetoric, catching up the threads of literary as well as “vulgar” dialects in the production of the system’s Vulgate—memory is woven into present creation. If “form is act,” gynecological formation and sexual act are necessary initial processes in the after-birth of the text, processes which must be iconically operative before the act-object, language, “is epiphanised.” Language’s epiphany, then, is II. 11 in itself (the enactment of conversion) just as its necessary consequence and co/incident is II.12, the reweaving of the text. As one instance of the “looking back in a retrospective arrangement” motiv has it, “all seemed a kind of dream” (U 16.1401).

But dream is simply another techne in the system, though perhaps a more than usually sacramental one. As LB says, “You call it a festivity. I call it a sacrament,” to which Alexander Keyes responds, “When will we have our own house of keys?” (U 15.1681) We are reminded that in III.2, LB “as a competent keyless citizen . . . had proceeded energetically from the unknown to the known through the incertitude of the void” (U 17.1019), the known in this case being the kitchen door to which he had gained access, having forgotten his housekey in his other trousers’ pocket, by climbing over the area railing and briefly experiencing the “incertitude of the void” before landing unscathed on the pavement below. Like the circle described around crossed keys in LB’s variation on the papal emblem, the House of Keyes ad, the void is a closed system having a definite beginning and end and, in this case, even extending in a straight line. In parallel specification of absence, the failed parallax of trousers unworn meets the progress of astronomical time not yet experienced since the creation of the universe: “nought nowhere was never reached” (U 17.1068).

Not only inscribed within the system, however, the “void,” the end-term of parallax, is the operative force of the sacramental syllogism. Two catechetical exchanges from III.2 will help us here:

What visible luminous sign attracted Bloom’s, who attracted Stephen’s, gaze?

In the second storey (rere) of his (Bloom’s) house the light of a paraffin oil lamp with oblique shade projected on a screen of roller blind supplied by Frank O’Hara, window blind, curtain pole and revolving shutter manufacturer, 16 Aungier Street.

How did he elucidate the mystery of an invisible attractive person, his wife Marion (Molly) Bloom, denoted by a visible splendid sign, a lamp?

With indirect and direct verbal allusions or affirmations: with subdued affection and admiration: with description: with impediment: with suggestion. (U 17.1171)

This elaboration of the penny-Catechism definition of a sacrament as “an outward sign of inward grace”⁹¹ moves carefully through the classic weaving of the memory loci of light and darkness associated with this topos: from “luminous sign” to source of light, from visible to invisible and back, from seemingly superfluous detail (“oblique shade,” “blind supplied by Frank O’Hara, ” and so on) to the assimilation of specula/tive data to the source of illumination, MB mystified. And although the sacramental process of transformation here is not “violent and instantaneous, upon the utterance of the word” as it is in II. 11 after the cloudburst (U 14.1389), it is nevertheless the fulfillment of “performed possibility” like Mina Purefoy’s child (U 14.1413), performed (logologically speaking) by the system’s drive toward performative enunciation of its own techne.

Nowhere more evident in Ulysses than in II.12, techne structures a text whose performance is the weaving of the certitude of the void into the incertitude of the present, the certitude of the diachronic into the incertitude of the synchronic. It is an epic elaboration of the text’s speaking in absentia, culminating in one version of the trope toward which all of Ulysses moves, the resolution of epiphany into sacrament, the factoring of past by encoded present which is the motiv system here resolved for an instant in the figure of Rudy.

Troping the separation of dream-time from wake-time, Rudy foregrounds II. 12’s use of hyperbole in the service of processual mimesis. A “fairyboy . . . dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet,” Rudy reads “from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page” (U 15.4959), an icon of gestural enactment. As Barbara Johnson says of all readers of performative discourse, Rudy is one of the “effects”⁹² of the text which he reads—a text perhaps Hebrew, perhaps speculary—reminding us of the difficulties of all “secondary modelling systems.”⁹³ Closed within the text, he is lodged in a kind of textual hypogram⁹⁴ from which LB is forever excluded. Like the object which “is epiphanised,” Rudy exists only within the continuum of the reading act, a parallax which cannot be resolved into infinity except by the end of the text, the final turn of LB as perceptual paradigm. To use Johnson’s terms again, Rudy’s “ ‘truth’ puts the status of the reader in question”—both LB’s status as reader of the vision and our status as readers of the book—and “ ‘performs’ . . . [the reader] as its ‘address.’ “⁹⁵

Earlier in II.12, Shakespeare seems to be performed in a similar way but the moment in which he “is epiphanised,” the product of co/incident gazes, is radically different from Rudy’s. Briefly accessible to his producers SD and LB, Shakespeare is also easily dispensable as Rudy is not. “The mirror up to nature” (U 15.3820), the vision of the bard’s face rigid in paralysis, emblematizes the relation between aesthetic and natural process presented in Stephen Hero. Gazing into the hall mirror, LB and SD are figures of nature, bound together not only by rhyme but by a co/ incident search for meaning in performative utterance. “Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men” (U 15.4192), SD begs his mother in II.12. In II.6 he has already received his answer (“Love” [U 9.429]), but only after the game of naming the world, begun in Portrait, expands by way of LB to include the naming of variations on love, hate, and death, and ends with MB’s “yes.”

No more SD’s answer than SD is his, LB is a co/incident term, not a solution. In this textual “topo-logie,” perceptual paradigms must achieve a dialogic relation (seen in extended form in III.2) but that relation is bound into the interattractive force field of “neverchanging space” (U 17.2310) rather than into self-centered romantic attachment. Thus although Nicholas of Cusa’s neoplatonic label for this attraction is “love,”⁹⁶ his reference is to the attraction of substance for substance, “love” driven by energy of enactment or Kenneth Burke’s concept of “motivation” in the sense of the textual encapsulation of the activity of motiv systems. But before considering motiv/ation as a form of parallax (its elements co/inciding at points of semantic “infinity” across the text, its intratextual programmatic activity serving as a metonymic guide to the recovery of performative discourse), let us return to SD and LB as “reagent” and “reactor,” respectively, and take another look at “substance.”

In the midst of a catechetically structured recital of the ills to which life is subject, III.2’s catechist asks,

Did Stephen participate in his dejection?

He affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational reagent between a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably construed upon the incertitude of the void. (U 17.1012)

The unknown macrocosm, the void, is a place, a locus on a memory chain, a destination attainable through the exercise of the syllogism. Like the motiv “parallax” with its locus “metempsychosis” and subset “transmigration of souls,” SD’s syllogism is a vehicle of parallax (through the end-terms of SD’s “Ineluctable modality of the visible” [U 3.01]) and of parallactic enactment whose root paradigm is that of the act of reading. “Signatures of all things I am here to read” says SD (U 3.02), like Bloom eroding any distinction between animate and inanimate in his quest for understanding of the substance, the mode of operation and being of all creation. “Seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs . . . “: like the Ballast Office clock, already catalogued, signifiant, waiting to “be epiphanised,” followed by a “dog’s bark” (U 3.310) and a dead dog, by SD’s lips which “lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her moomb. Oomb, allwombing tomb” (U 3.401).

Because the syllogistic move—like the pun to which the in absentia code approaches via catachresis—is fundamentally a sacramental one, the point of intersection is the point of semantic infinity on this ever-triangulating grid. Logologically viewed, the transsignification process which is the defining characteristic of the Eucharist (considered in orthodox terms to be the sacrament defining all others, given its central position in the Roman liturgy) involves the transformation of material elements (here, bread and wine) into spiritual ones (body and blood of Christ), the latter so integrated into and transformative of the former that the reception of even a fragment of the consecrated bread or a sip of the consecrated wine is said to constitute the reception of Christ. In this sacramental sense logologized, then, SD is the reagent in the transsignifying, syllogistic process, LB the field of enactment, and MB the occasion of transformation. At the processual mimetic level, what is being enacted throughout 16 June 1904 is the void, the point of parallactic infinity, Rudy bound in speculary reading, the god-term, the raison d’être of Gothic pedagogy, the performative discourse of the sign in the world through the naming of all of its parts, “world without end.” Joyce’s Commedia.

To which LB’s response in III.2 is equally significant for the system as a whole:

Was this affirmation apprehended by Bloom?

Not verbally. Substantially. (U 17.1016)

Not understanding, not cognition but apprehension, and apprehension which moves a stage beyond LB’s inaudible speaking of Rudy’s name. Here there are no words: apprehension has reached its ultimate form as substance. The very stuff of being, the wholeness and particularity of SD’s statement, is consumed in sacramental fashion. So LB models the reception of the performance-text in his role as “conscious reactor against the void of incertitude” (U 17.2210). But in contrast to SD’s emphasis on the void, LB’s on incertitude characterizes the reader’s primary analytic task in the Joyce system: to submit to textual programming, thereby reducing the incertitude occasioned by our acculturated bias toward referential mimesis and thus toward mystery and kerygmatic reading. Beginning to move beyond plot- and character-functions (to the extent that these devices are used in Ulysses as a means of orienting the novice reader), we approach competence in the procedures of the system’s processual mimetic ontology. The diegetic microstructure, in other words, serves the primary purpose of situating the competent reader within the textual syllogism which requires the response demanded by all performative utterance: enactment in the weaving of the discourse system which is the textual macrostructure. When our sense of balance falters and the “terministic screen” of the microstructure dominates our reading, the system contains us within a complexity of semiosis for which the referential cannot begin to account. Like the equally facile rejection of medieval systems of thought, the rejection of Ulysses by critics whose ideological adherence is to unreflective “realism” has to do neither with the Gothic pedagogy of medieval and modern systems nor with their products.⁹⁷

Motivation, then, or the intratextual factoring of the text by such elements as parallax (in the fundamental sense of motiv: a recurrent unit acquiring meaning beyond its basic semantic value as a result of repetition across the text or any portion of it)—or “looking back in a retrospective arrangement”—mimes the semiotic operations of the text as a whole. Through the co/incidence of units constituting the motiv, the text finds one vehicle of synchrony or the achievement of, as it were, the strengthening of its paradigmatic axis. This operation is what II. 11 refers to as “retrogressive metamorphosis” (U 14.390) since such readerly cognitive processing must always be the consequence of rereading, reflection, analysis. “Da capo,” as II.8’s instruction says (U 11.1245). In this mnemonic exercise, III.2 provides rhythmo-catechetic training, the response paradigms generated by its techne hypostatizing not character and plot but “topo-logie,” troping the performative utterance of the text and modeling its most basic operation.

From catechism to catachresis

In the course of his study of the Gospels as “sémiotique narrative,” Louis Marin reflects on the meaning of locus, lieu, in the context of the discovery of Christ’s empty tomb:

Que ce lieu soit un tombeau et que le fait de l’absence soit celui du cadavre disparu, cela introduit la transformation de la topographie en topique, de lieu de l’espace en lieu de parole, dans la dimension sémantique de l’histoire.⁹⁸

Jousse’s concept of the “rhythmo-catechizing” process inscribed across the Gospels intersects with Marin’s theory at the point where catechism takes over from event and the “cadavre disparu,” the corpse of authenticity, has its absence inscribed at semantic infinity. Thus the necessarily parallactic enactment of the catechetical techne mimes not the recovery of the author but the recovery of the topoi in the process of enactment of the performance-text. Like the holistic gestural enactment of the Gospels in the liturgy, the processing of Joycean performative discourse requires a training process in the recognition of what “is epiphanised” at the motivic level as well as at other levels of patterning across the system. The initial and most basic demand is for the skills nurtured in an oral noetic milieu, one in which texts (oral or written) carry the systemic requirement of synesthetic mnemonic processing as described by such scholars as Opland, Scheub and Ong.

Marin’s conversion of “lieu de l’espace en lieu du parole” is, however, not that of the Joyce system for the Joycean accommodation of typography to topography (which is the figure of topographia, in Irish the more restricted form being dinndsenchús or the “lore of places”) effects the system’s attempt to erode the boundaries of spatial and temporal modalities. Topographia, then, is correlative of the spacetime continuum in modern physics or, as we have seen, the logothetic dissolution of such boundaries in synesthetic enactment through Gothic pedagogy. Caught up in the recapitulative movement which is particularly strong in this chapter, the parallactic “topologie” of III.2 with its catechetical response paradigms becomes a massive review exercise, and we are put through our dramatistic paces.

What we learn is, however, not scientific, not encyclopedic but once again specula/tive. If III.2 is the great repository of responses required throughout Ulysses, it is also the text’s best example of the speculum in action and of the thoroughly comprehensible world to which that form bears witness. Comprehensible not in the scientific sense but in the specula/tive one as evinced in the Catechism, where, as in this mode’s great exemplar, Aquinas, responses exfoliate, repeatedly intersecting others within a wholly predetermined order, a Gothic architecture of congruent word and world. Never totally and seldom even partially “answers,” these responses are co/incidents together with their questions, both question and response having the status of memory event, or what we have been referring to as response paradigms. Thus the emphasis in this techne is equally on question and response and on the dialogic structure of their joint enactment, a structure in which neither changes as a result of or is affected by the other even in the sense that responses are occasioned or generated by questions. In this the response paradigms of III.2 are typical of the progress of perceptual paradigms SD and LB across 16 June 1904.

Response paradigms are memory events in part because neither component is predictable within the paradigm or the sequence of which it is a part. The catechetical act is grounded in paradigmatic order and syntagmatic processing more particularly than is the act of reading in general precisely because so much of what we learn through this mode will strike us as being non/sense outside the system. Its sense, in other words, is defined by and within the system as is the case with all processual mimesis. Not referential function but mnemonic placing within the topography of the whole is the criterion for inscription of data. Consider LB’s catechized conclusion about the nature of the heavens:

That it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not a heavenman.

That it was a Utopia, there being no known method from the known to the unknown. ...(U 17.1139)

But, as we have seen, SD’s syllogistic procedure used later by LB in the sacramental elucidation of MB, “invisible attractive person . . . denoted by a visible splendid sign” (U 17.1177), does accomplish the movement from known to unknown, from world to designated void. So the parallactic motiv of void and incertitude takes precedence as signaled in III.2’s earlier response that “the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit” (U 17.1039) was the “spectacle” which confronted SD and LB as they emerged into the garden. Tree, grot, beast and man may, however, not a heaven make or a utopia; they are among the materials of a speculum mundi, a knowable, cataloguable system of which “heaven” or semantic infinity is one component.

So is its co/incident term, necessarily enacted with it, for if love is the will to form in this system, then hate, or “aosch” as the Wake has it (FW 286.02), must be inscribed as well. This is one function of II.9 summed up in parallactic fashion by LB: “Hate. Love. Those are names. Rudy. Soon I am old” (U 11.1069): a present-tense naming which, fulfilling Benveniste’s principle, performs the act it utters. What act? Only by spinning the dramatistic wheel of motiv/ation can we respond (not “answer”: author/ity resides within the system) to that question; only by calling up the vision of Rudy and synthesizing it with the loci on the topos of age for LB. Only by remembering the signifiance of names in Portrait and noting the shift from Stephen Dedalus in the Universe to LB’s and SD’s association of language with gesture: “the structural rhythm” of enactment (U 15.107) in II.12, the gestural language of seduction in II. 10 (“Still it was a kind of language between us,” says LB thinking of Gerty MacDowell [U 13.944]). In its weaving of the loci and topoi of the system, the catechetical techne precipitates its own unweaving as well, a process co/incident with aggregative performance and necessary to it, for however ekphrastic the moment as continuum, however recapitulative the motiv/ ation, the performance must end. And that end, ever insuperable, must be inscribed within the system as well, inscribed so fully that the moment of semantic infinity—the moment when parallax at last accepts the intersection of its lines—will also be part of the gestural repertoire.

This is the function of the pun, a form of catachresis or “misuse” which epitomizes the defiance of the ontological primacy of sequentiality in the act of reading. Where catechism is dialogic, catachresis in its punning form is syllogistic, its middle term dispersed from the immediate occasion into the system. A device of segregation and dissociation in the Joyce system,”⁹⁹ catachresis mimes the Babel of all language, temporarily hazarding a creative aphasia. But used within a system characterized by a high degree of redundancy and motivic patterning, and itself inscribed within the text’s motiv/ation, catachresis has the effect of ictus, a term whose neurological meaning is as useful here as its poetic one. In prosody ictus refers to the strong beat in a metric foot while in neurology it designates that brief pause which comes before the beginning of certain kinds of epileptic seizures, a pause which stands in double relation to the ensuing event for it is both a warning of a time of disruption to be suffered within the neurological system and a last brief space of clear, sometimes heightened, awareness before interruption of consciousness occurs. Ictus serves, then, both to stress its own inscription and to presage its own undoing.

Within a system characterized by processual mimesis, ictus mimes the moment of death. Like epiphany, catachresis serves to clear an opening in language, to interrupt the relentlessness of inscription and enact the absence of name. An extension of what we have called parallax in absentia, catachresis as a single event attempts to subvert the memory system built up through enactment of performative discourse while retaining that system’s place within the semiosis of the system. Attempting to sustain the instant of transsignification by intensifying the polyvalence of that process, catachresis refuses to accede to the syntactic demands of conversion and remains grounded in the iterability of the word and in its status within the logothetic economy of performative utterance. Analogous to Freudian dreamwork, as we shall see in the next chapter, catachresis synthesizes question and response, past and future, manifest and latent, catalyzing dichotomies into polyvalent units within the memory system. But the analogy is a partial one at best for catachresis in the Joyce system works in triumphant defiance and rejection of mystery—or, in terms of Freud’s ontotheology, of the “unconscious” with its claims to encyclopedic rather than specula/tive operation. Like parody, catachresis operates in this context as a vehicle of full saying, sometimes of homage, rather than of revelation or kerygma. And, like epiphany, catachresis epitomizes the system’s defiance of the ontological primacy of sequentiality in the act of reading, attempting through the dissemination and re/collection of its terms to test the memory system built up in the course of its own enactment in performance. In all this the Gothic pedagogy of III.2 provides an extended initiation, a rigorous exercising of procedures in place in elementary form since the beginning of the Portrait. To see how the Joycean “double gesture”¹⁰⁰ of catachresis as founding trope and deconstructive pedagogy functions at its most complex level, however, we must turn to Finnegans Wake and the principle of Vichian morphogenesis.