“A tree story”: The New Science

Among the meanings ascribed to morphogenesis by René Thom in his book Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, the one we need here is “decomposition of natural process,”⁶ a phrase whose coincidence with SD’s assertion in Stephen Hero of the “artistic process . . . [as] a natural process” (SH 175) helps to focus one of the major shifts in the system between Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a shift which anticipates the mutation from chapter III.2 of Ulysses to chapter II.2 of Finnegans Wake. In many ways the midpoint of this transformation, the stories of Dubliners are the product of a translatio or code-heightening by which the referential mimesis and author/itative discourse of Stephen Hero become the processual mimesis and performative discourse of Portrait. In other words, the “natural process” of nineteenth-century modes of rendering Presence as “consciousness” firmly in control of God the father-narrator mutates under the pressure of the morphogenetic principle within the system into the decomposition of that process through a deconstructive analysis of “composition,” “nature,” “process,” and their supposed interaction. The recombinant semes⁷ of the father-narrative undergo an Ignatian weaving of categories, a massive exercise of anakephalaiösis or recapitulative reweaving which, in the sense of the term which Bach preserves, invents Joycean discourse as memory wheel. Control is transferred from the “father,” the patriarchally authoritative narrator of/in the text, to the programmed interaction of text and reader, in itself a no less absolute structure of power than the first but a differently constituted one, determining a different mode of reception.

Morphogenesis is thus a mode of invention, a techne, a principle of code-generation, whose motiv/ation is recursive or, in Vichian terms, ricorsive. “Ordovico or viricordo,” as the Wake has it. “Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be” (FW 215.23). Defined by Vico in terms of the “virile heart,” the motivs of strife, insurrection and siege on both personal and political levels delineate an order of male succession and design. But the way of order in Vico is also that of peace and inner balance, and the new science itself is a memory theater, a hall of topoi which mirror, often anamorphically, the condition of the human world. Vi ricordo (Ital.: “I remember you”) as much as viri cordo (Lat.: “the heart of man”). As Donald Phillip Verene puts it:

When we enter Vico’s [memory] theater, we enter the sensus communis of the human race. The objects of Vico’s frontispiece and his explanation of the significance of each place us immediately in the center, in the clearing he makes for us around which the oppositions of humanity can be arranged. Each of Vico’s axioms is a recollective universal, a production of the bonding of the philological with the philosophical which can concretely affect the memory. His 114 axioms circulate before us, leading our memory to the “inner writing” of the human world, to its inner form.⁸

Ignatian Lectio divina has become Vichian Lectio humana, both systems of “topologie” characterized by translatio or intrasystemic transcoding, but proceeding in seemingly opposite directions: the Ignatian away from man toward God, the Vichian away from God toward man. In both cases, opposites coincide on the memory wheel.

Like Ignatian calisthenics, Vichian mnemonics serve a primarily pedagogical purpose. They are an “applied grammatology” grounded in the principle that human history is the product of human action rather than of divine intervention: “That which did all this was mind, for men did it with intelligence; it was not fate, for they did it by choice; not chance, for the results of their always so acting are perpetually the same” (NS 383). Flux and reflux, peace and war, exist in an ongoing condition of vital interrelationship, of “corso” and “ricorso” bound together in the “setdown secular phoenish” (FW 4.17) of human life. Lacking the elegant simplicity of Phoenix cycles, history is a muddled and muddied inscription of recursively recirculating ups and downs, middles and beginnings and endings deconstructing each other “down all the ages” like Anna Livia’s “mamafesta” alias the letter scratched up in the midden by Biddy Doran, whose mixed identity (both hen and old woman) reflects another version of ricorsivity, the motiv of ecosystemic balance which we saw at work in Ulysses as well.

One of the Joyce system’s major transformations of The New Science, this ecosystemic motiv filters what is known as the “verum factum principle” in Vico through Ignatian Lectio divina to produce a manifold troping of “natural process,” an ars combinatoria of mnemonic inventions. For Vico,

Human knowledge arises . . . from a defect of our mind, i.e., from its extremely limited character as a result of which, being external to everything and not containing what it strives to know, it does not produce the truths which are its aim. The most certain things are those which, redressing the defects of their origin, resemble divine knowledge in their operation, inasmuch as in them the true is convertible with what is made.⁹

Because the human mind is, for Vico, “external to everything” and does not contain the objects of its desire to know, it must attempt in its human intellectual operation to imitate divine knowledge. In modern terms this is a kind of synaptic mime, a processual mimesis at the highest level of abstraction and one which by definition cannot of itself “produce the truths which are its aim.”¹⁰ Since for Vico the production of truth is a theologically restricted activity, the human production of imitative process comes to have value in and of itself in his system. This is epitomized in the “dipintura” which was designed under Vico’s direction and engraved to serve as frontispiece to the second edition of The New Science.¹¹

Exhibiting the familiar Gothic pedagogical goals of synchrony and space-time resolution, Vico’s “dipintura” is an iconic speculum mundi which compresses human history into an emblem and human knowledge into a scienza (scientia), a mode of knowing.¹² Further, the “dipintura” serves as a rhetorical caution in graphic form, a warning to readers who would interpret the necessarily diachronic form of the text as an indication that its four books are to be taken, equally simplistically, as being representative of three separate ages followed by a ricorso. As Verene indicates, Vico’s emblem functions as a mnemonic device, a recapitulation of the major topoi of the memory system and an indication of the basic nature of their relation to each other.¹³

Metaphysic occupies the central, mediating position in the emblem, with a ray of light emanating from the divine eye and touching her breast while another, lesser light moves in turn from her to a statue of Homer. At Homer’s feet are what Vico’s “explanation” of the “dipintura” refers to as “hieroglyphs” (NS 3) which “denote the world of nations” (NS 26). Above are hieroglyphs which “signify the world of minds and of God” while in the middle, under Metaphysic’s feet, is a globe representing “the world of nature which the physicists later observed” (NS 26). Standing in metonymic relation to the specula/tive allegory of which it is a part, the “dipintura” affords the reader an opportunity for the exercising of categories as s/he trains to achieve the noetic experience of Vichian “semiophany” toward which The New Science moves. If not a Lectio divina because of the fundamental defectiveness of the human intellect in Vico, the Vichian memory system offers at least the opportunity for a Lectio humana on a grand scale.

Figure 4. Vico’s “dipintura.” (Frontispiece to Giambattista Vico, The New Science, 1730/1744)

Because human knowledge is, for Vico, bounded by divine knowledge, human inquiry into history and geography through analysis of the language which constitutes both these disciplines (or mythologies, in Vico’s terms) as well as all human knowledge, can lead ultimately to an understanding only of what man himself has created. In Verene’s words, “the human remembers back to the origin of the human world, but not to the origin or ground of the world itself.”¹⁴ In the Joyce system, however, no such limitation is in evidence. In its place is an almost Augustinian confidence in the power of the word to generate a world, a confidence which—as we have already seen—shapes Joycean performative discourse according to the contours of liturgical enactment as memory system or, in terms of Ignatian reader response theory, according to the requisites of Lectio divina.

Essential to this process in Finnegans Wake is Vico’s concept of the “Mental Dictionary” with its apparatus of Vichian theory of the origins of speech and writing in primordial time and of memory as a mode of Vico’s complex concept of the imagination. Within this new science, what Vico calls “poetic history” and “poetic geography” take their place along with geometry as founding pedagogies, strategies for the recapturing in imagination of humankind’s “ideal eternal history” (NS 62). If the uttering of this “IDEAREAL HISTORY” (FW 262.121) in itself constitutes the condition for entry into the “allaphbed” (FW 18.18) of language, the midden of all history, performance—mnemonic enactment—of the system is a means of repealing the law of cause and effect analogous to Vico’s long struggle against the ascendancy of Cartesian logic. Taking a strongly anti-Scholastic turn, however, Vico’s argument in the De Sapientia veterum is very different from the Joycean one, a difference which has radical consequences for the Joyce system. “Thinking,” Vico argues,

is not, indeed, the cause of my being a mind, but a sign of it, and a sign is not a cause. Thus the wise skeptic will not deny the certainty of signs, but he will deny that of causes.¹⁵

Because of its postlapsarian limitations, human intelligence can apprehend neither God the ultimate cause nor every link in the causal chains of daily life. Thus by virtue of its displacement of the divine final cause to a realm by Vichian definition beyond speculation, Vico’s essentially logological system binds itself to ontotheology. Although this precautionary maneuver had the advantage of safeguarding Vico’s life during the Neapolitan Inquisition, it does have the disadvantage of pulling the Vichian system against its own semiotic bias and inhibiting the systematic translation of theological to logological codes. By rejecting this suppression of the god-term, the Joyce system makes possible a logological rereading of “providential divining” (FW 599.13) through the vehicle of “this new book of Morses” (FW 123.35), Finnegans Wake. Following a “commodius vicus of recirculation” (FW 3.02) from the “strandentwining cable of all flesh” (U 3.37) extended in Ulysses, Finnegans Wake reads Vichian new science back through its originary maneuvers and through its own terms to the “Verb umprincipiant” (FW 594.02), first recombinant seme of the Joyce system.

“Through the trancitive spaces”: speculum and allegory

Referring to that stage in the history of the encyclopedia which we have identified with the medieval speculum, Umberto Eco writes that “a maze does not need a Minotaur: it is its own Minotaur: in other words the Minotaur is the visitor’s trial-and-error process.”¹⁶ The same could be said of Vichian autotelic “science.” As we enter the maze, an array of memory tasks surrounds us. Before we can proceed, we must complete these tasks; we must exercise memory. Without such interpretive guides at hand, we will not be able to make our way with understanding through the maze although our information will change as, at each turn, the structure repeatedly defines itself and instructs us in the principles of maze navigation. We begin to perceive that we have entered a vast series of overlapping hermeneutic circles. However, there is no “horizon” or anything so fixed as a “perspective” or even an “oscillating perspective.” As in the Vichian “dipintura,” we are given the keys (FW 628.15) though we can’t always find the locks. Following the familiar, we may find ourselves seeking out what seems to be the referential and beginning to collate allusions and stabilize what seem to be plot- and character-functions. Thereby we create our own Minotaur to drive out fear and bewilderment as the text—a maze sufficient unto itself—reiterates its instructions for its own processing. As Vico says, whenever humans “can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand” (NS 122).

Both Vichian and Joycean systems are variations on an ancient mode, that of the specula/tive allegory which, in taking the form of an enormously complicated memory theater, demands of the reader-exercitant skills which the post-Enlightenment encyclopedia—with its literary heritage in the ascendancy of referential mimesis—rendered almost obsolete. The rhizome-text is, then (to shift Eco’s point), “incomprehensible”¹⁷ in terms of the capitalist ontotheology of the encyclopedia, of “science” in its post-Vichian sense, but not in terms of the maze which manifests it—in other words, not in terms of the Porphyrian forest to which it is native. If, as Maureen Quilligan has argued, allegories are always performance-texts, then we might say that rhizomes exist for the processing, a mode of readerly experience which Quilligan refers to, in terms of the tradition, as pilgrimage.¹⁸ Seeking a form of enlightenment which would become problematic, the medieval notion of “pilgrimage” is paradigmatically autotelic and processual for the goal was achieved in the daily enactment of transient exile, self-imposed hardship, and ritual performance of prescribed penances. As in the Zen tradition, meaning emerged (or did not) of itself; semiophany was not conceived of as being a planned event.

Logologically speaking, the experience of textual nembutsu (as Barthes classified it) in both The New Science and Finnegans Wake begins with the gesture of acceptance, of “willing suspension of disbelief,”¹⁹ which allows the speculum, which acknowledges textual dissemination of topoi and loci across the Joyce system, and which submits to textual programming. Like the Wake’ s “Eins within a space” (FW 152.18), Vico’s “Explanation” of the “dipintura” is the specula/tive version of “Once upon a time.” And, as we have already seen in the case of Ulysses, the spacetime dictates of performative discourse condition the noetic experience of synchrony toward which the Joyce system moves. This experience is what Verene sees in Vico as the moment of total apprehension of the system, a moment made possible by the training of “re-collective fantasia” through the Vichian memory system. Thus, in Vico, Gothic pedagogy is

a process of healing. The notion of wisdom as a whole for Vico is not the notion of unity. It is instead the notion of a language for the preservation of fundamental opposition. Thus philosophical speech comes from the branch of the [mnemonic] image, the branch of the arts of humanity, but speaks of them only in relation to their opposite, the branch of the sciences, the life of the concept. This speech heals the soul by stirring its memory. It heals us from the madness of the concept, the thick night of rationality, with its language of the single sense of meaning, its inability to speak without a specifiable principle of order.²⁰

In the Joyce system, that “thick night of rationality” becomes the battlefield of civil strife in which the seeming antinomies of war and peace (as denoted by Michelet and Quinet) are mediated by ricorso. But strife here extends also to the struggle between memory and anamnesis mediated by aboulia, and to that between language and silence mediated by the Vichian “Mental Dictionary” (NS 478) and resolved through the agency of catachresis. In this vast dictionary of all language which encompasses the field of enactment, of language as performative, the speculum serves as “map of the souls’ groupography” (FW 476.33), but it is a Porphyrian mapping or arborescent cartography which differs from the Enlightenment encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert with their attempt, in Eco’s words, to “transform the [Porphyrian] tree into a map”²¹ pure and simple. Closer to Blake’s “God us keep / From Single vision & Newton’s sleep” and his specula/tive allegory of Albion,²² the Joyce system’s radical rethinking of the modern heritage of Cartesian ontotheology brings it into line with the work of such contemporary scientists as René Thom and David Bohm.

If, as d’Alembert maintains, there is a cartographic projection for every system of human knowledge, then the projection of choice for both Joycean and Vichian systems is “Cosmos” or what Phineas Fletcher refers to as The Purple Island.²³ Fletcher’s allegory of the human body as geographical place is motivated precisely by the surrender of referential mimesis, for “a broad mimetic act must move nearly parallel to God’s creation,” a movement which Leonard Barkan argues is crucial to allegory as genre.²⁴ When, in Spenser’s Faerie Queen, this mime of Genesis develops a chiasmic structure of body as “multiple world” and world anatomized into body,²⁵ allegory itself takes on the broad characteristics of catachresis as operative strategy. Thus the fundamentally synecdochic relationship of body and world is textually problematized by the bounded implicature of catachresis. Eco’s “Model Reader,”²⁶ programmed in the application of Vichian “poetic geography” (NS 741) or Joycean Phoenix Park, is bound into the “implicate order”²⁷ of the system.

Consider David Bohm’s example of this form of order. In the laboratory a transparent container is filled with a viscous fluid and is “equipped with a mechanical rotator that can ‘stir’ the fluid very slowly but very thoroughly.”²⁸ A droplet of insoluble ink is added, the rotator is set in motion, and “the ink drop is gradually transformed into a thread that extends over the whole fluid.” The viscous fluid will take on a grey cast but if the rotator is reactivated so that it turns in the opposite direction, the droplet of ink is reconstituted. Bohm’s point here is that what appears to be random nevertheless has its own order, an order different from that of, say, another ink droplet placed in a different position within the same container. Bohm calls this kind of order an “enfolded” or “implicate” order and refers to the order created when the rotator is reversed as “explicate” order.²⁹ Using Bohm’s terms, we can see Vichian “new science” as an explicate order insofar as we can recreate for ourselves “ideal eternal history” (NS 349) as a whole through our meditation on loci in the memory system.³⁰ Thus “he who meditates this science narrates to himself this ideal eternal history so far as he himself makes it for himself” (NS 349). For Vico, we can gain access to history through systems of implicate order such as the “Mental Dictionary” (NS 473), the product of the “mental language common to all nations, which uniformly grasps the substance of things feasible in human social life and expresses it with as many diverse modifications as these same things may have diverse aspects” (NS 161). By reversing the rotating blade of history, we can reconstitute the implicate order of language and, through that study, of the dawn of language acquisition in primordial time.³¹

Characteristic of allegory, this “literalization of etymology”³² which is the central strategy of the “Mental Dictionary” leads Vico to the study of the ways in which familiar phrases contain impacted within them the traces of “ancient wisdom.” For example,

The French say bleu for blue, and since blue is a term of sense perception, they must have meant by bleu the sky; and just as the gentile nations used “sky” for Jove, the French must have used bleu for God in that impious oath of theirs, moure bleu! [or morbleu! ], “God’s death!”; and they still say parbleu! “by God!” (NS 473)

Or as the Wake has it, in II. 1—a chapter rich in Vichiana courtesy of the fact that the “producer” of this “Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies” is “Mr John Baptister Vickar” (FW 255.27) himself—“how accountibus for him, morebleu?” (FW 253.36) ULI is the one being accounted for here in his guise as hero of “gigantesquesque appearance” (FW 253.29) interred in the landscape, an incarnation of poetic geography and incorporation of the Vichian requirement that “allegories must be the etymologies of the [first or] poetic languages” (NS 403). Since “the first nations thought in poetic characters, spoke in fables, and wrote in hieroglyphs” (NS 429), it is not surprising that ’s crucial first fable, by Vichian definition a “true narration” (NS 808), should be the much disputed and highly ambiguous tale of his activities with the Cad in Phoenix Park. An allegorical account of the dangers inherent in all linguistic communication, ’s story enacts the Vichian axiom that “song arose naturally under the impulse of violent passions” (NS 108), passions recorded in the Ballad of Persse O’Reilly with its scurrilous insinuations about the father’s conduct.

The fact that it is , rather than any other member of his family, who is subjected to this invective is also an inevitable consequence of the monosyllable which is his linguistic origin. From the thunderwords or names for Jove in the “ancient languages” are descended the primal interjections such as pa, from which come pape and patrare, meaning “to do, make,” an activity which is the “prerogative of God” (NS 107). Not only is patriarchal power visited upon by language alone but the activity which succeeds his first fable is also patriarchally imprinted, for interpretation initially the interpretation of divine laws, is “as if for interpatratio” (NS 107), the Vichian variation on the father’s no. In the Wake that task of interpretation in the patriarchal mode falls, in the absence of convincing speech by , to the even less convincing foursome, Mamalujo (X), the disciples in old age and anamnesis, their oral heritage reduced to a peep show.

This comedown is a Vichian one as well, analogous to ’s fate as a stutterer, a sign of his originary status, for just as the language of the gods was almost entirely mute and that of heroes an equal mixture of mute and articulate (NS 106), so as a partial mute “must have uttered vowel sounds by singing, as mutes do; and later, like stammerers, . . . [he] must have uttered articulate consonantal sounds, still by singing” (NS 112-13). The four, however, represent a different stage in this Vichian allegory though one, like all of these “stages” and “phases,” coterminous with the others just as the Vichian stages of the post-Flood evolution of landscape into mountains, then plains and finally to the shores of the sea (NS 44) are collapsed in the Wake into “Howth Castle and Environs” (FW 3.03) and “Dreamoneire” (FW 280.01). So the four are assigned double duty as bedposts overseeing the activities of the founding parents and as grave markers whose function as guardians is preserved etymologically since, in the “Mental Dictionary,” phylax, the Greek word for “grave marker,” comes from phyle, Gr. “tribe,” denoting loyalty according to Vico. Echoing the Scienza Nuova’s three fundamental principles, the “eternal and universal customs” (NS 333) of religion, marriage and burial, the Mamalujo (X) etymological tree also includes such branches as cippus, “the Latin name for . . . post [which] came to mean sepulcher, and ceppo [which] in Italian means the trunk of a genealogical tree” (NS 529). From figurative trunks and literal posts Vico moves to extensions of the family tree: Lat. stemmata, referring to the long rows of statues of their ancestors which the ancient Romans placed along the halls of their houses, a custom perpetuated in the usage of stemmata to signify “family arms.” Thus in the Wake, “Arms appeal with larms, appalling” (FW 4.07), “huroldry” (FW 5.06) and “scutschum” (FW 5.08) are always associated with strife and bloodshed in various forms, and all in turn are associated also with patrilineal claims upon the bodies of earth and people.³³ However, it is the conflict of eye and ear to which the four give most urgent witness, a conflict of linguistic stemmata, of speech and writing, of memory and its inescapable other term, anamnesis, death.

Like poetic etymologies, hieroglyphs in the Vichian system are traces of the thought of the first humans in primordial time. The earliest records of the “mental language common to all nations,” the “lingua mentale commune” (NS 161), hieroglyphs make the “Mental Dictionary” possible for the following generations of humankind. Preceding speech, this early mute language operated by associating “signs, whether gestures or physical objects” (NS 401), with the “ideas” to be expressed. By using “poetic logic,” Vico concludes from this sequence that a transfer of power took place between these abstract “signs” and the words which, like hieroglyphs, represented them. Thus, since “logos, or word, meant also deed to the Hebrews and thing to the Greeks” (NS 401), the breaking of the semiotic chain linking concept, gesture or representative object with semantic expression became the occasion of physical violence. Accordingly, “wars are waged for the most part between nations differing in speech and hence mute in relation to each other” (NS 487).

In the Wake, the embattled relationship of Mutt and Jute, Stone Age men who have nevertheless mastered Vico’s five stages of language acquisition (interjections, pronouns, particles, nouns and verbs [NS 109]), enacts the most rudimentary difficulties of the “sound seemetery” (FW 17.36). The Vichian giants are not long gone but hieroglyphs in the form of runes have emerged and the thunder which sent the giants in terror to their mountain caves (NS 122) has also made it possible for Mutt and Jute to do business with each other. As Jute says,

Bisons is bisons. Let me fore all your hasitancy cross your qualm with trink gilt.

Here have sylvan coyne, a piece of oak. (FW 16.29)

As “mental” signs mutate into pecuniary ones, private property also becomes possible and with it writing, the “as time went on as it will variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable script-signs” (FW 118.26). With “scriptsigns” comes print and “what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints” (FW 20.10). An author is an authority, an owner of fields as are the giants who, struck down with fear by Jove’s thunderbolts, had first hidden in their caves, then learned to cease wandering and to settle in one place and begin families. As Vico puts it with fine patriarchal spirit:

So it came about that each of them would drag one woman into his cave and would keep her there in perpetual company for the duration of their lives. Thus the act of human love was performed under cover, in hiding, that is to say, in shame; and they began to feel that shame which Socrates described as the color of virtue. And this, after religion, is the second bond that keeps nations united, even as shamelessness and impiety destroy them. (NS 504)

Shame, inevitable consequence of sexual passion after the first age of “bestial lust” (NS 504), is thus also a consequence of writing in the Vichian system. An auctor or landowner is also a fundus, founder and—in Swift’s term—“fundament” (NS 491). Like ’s, his products are excremental, his own body his text, a “continuous present tense integument” which slowly unfolds all history (FW 186.01). The writer in himself writes process and product and is a “self-consuming artifact”³⁴ whose cycle begins in family (resident at the house “O’Shea or O’Shame” [FW 182.30]), is subsumed by religion and, falling victim to strife within his “dividual chaos” (FW 186.04) or without in the “pura et pia bella” (FW 178.17) of his age, finally succumbs to death and Vico’s last mark of civilization, burial. In the Wake this is the passage from “stripture” (marriage, human sexual experience) to “scripture” (religion, writing) and to “sepulchre” (burial), a passage also known as “cycloannalism” (FW 254.26-28) in honor of the regularity of its occurrence.

The problem of causality is, however, a more difficult one, returning us to Vico’s conviction that, limited by a fallen intellect, humankind cannot return by way of poetic logic or imagination to the divine first cause but only to the beginning of human thought. The Wake ironizes the same problem: “Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects” (FW 482.36). Which is the root paradigm of another familiar Wake predicament: “how one should come on morrow here but it is never here that one today. Well but remind to think you where yesterday Ys Morganas war and that it is always tomorrow in toth’s tother’s place” (FW 570.10). Thoth’s place, the place of writing, is both The (Egyptian) Book of the Dead and the “book of that which is ‘’ (FW 570.08), the “book of the opening of the mind to light” (FW 258.31) and the “chapter of the going forth by black” (FW 62.27), a “wolk in process” (FW 609.31) and a forged “palimpsest” (FW 182.02) inscribed with ’s “stolentelling” (FW 424.35). In all this, final answers are unavailable: “Mere man’s mime: God has jest. The old order changeth and lasts like the first” (FW 486.09), the reason being not only that explicate and implicate orders are involved with each other but also that “The mar of murmury mermers to the mind’s ear, uncharted rock, evasive weed. Only the caul knows his thousandfirst name. Hocus Crocus, Esquilocus, Finnfinn the Faineant ...” (FW 254.18).

As the little death of memory lapse breaks the cycle of memory, so name reveals fraud for, as Vico says, “ ‘Name’ and ‘definition’ have also the same meaning” (NS 433) and is but a pale imitation of Jove, whose interjections, the first thunderbolts, gave birth by onomatopoeia “to one produced by the human voice: ‘pa!’” which was soon doubled: “pape!” (NS 448). Papa ’s “pregross” (FW 284.22) in this respect is commemorated in the eighth of the Wake’s thunderwords—“Pappappapparrassannuaragheallachnatullaghmonganmacmacmaconacmacwhackfallthedebblenonthedubblandaddydoodled” (FW 332.05)—in which the ballads of “Finnegan’s Wake” (“Whack fall the doodle-o”) and “Yankee Doodle” (“daddy-doodled”) combine to celebrate the fall of “pappa the gun” (FW 331.01). Thunder-words are “last word[s] of perfect language” (FW 424.23) because of the descent which they signal from the mute state of the gods to the articulate one of humankind. With words comes the strife of “this babbel men dub gulch of tears” (FW 254.17), and, since “letters and languages were born twins and proceeded apace through all their three stages” (NS 5), with letters comes the disappearance of “false religions” (NS 25) and the subsequently embattled state of the remaining “true religion” (NS 365).

This is the conflict of poet and cleric, church and state, arts and sciences which the Wake encodes in terms of Patrick and Balkelly, Kells and Irish kills (church), “prout” and “poeta.” Referring to “Father Prout,” the pen name of Irish Jesuit F. S. Mahoney, whose poem “The Bells of Shandon” is regularly satirized in the Wake, the following passage summarizes grammatological history in Ireland, mentioning along the way the coastal raids of the Vikings against the Irish, and the burial of the Book of Kells:

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 so and so many counterpoint words. What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. (FW 482.31)

In the working out of its polyglot “Mental Dictionary,” the Wake reinvents Vichian “ideal eternal history,” encountering war (Gr. polemos) as it anatomizes the city (polis, in Vichian poetic etymology [NS 588]) and encountering religion (Lat. ara, “altar”) as it inscribes another aspect of the collective dungheap of “thanacestross mound” (FW 18.03), this time plows (aratrum) whose moldboard (urbs) resolves the Vichian poetic relationship of ara, aratrum and urbs and thus of the interface of urban and rural worlds (NS 778). Vichian “true religion” is shown up as a con job (a Prout) with lethal capabilities which must be met by a fit opponent, the Wake itself as a “proteiform graph [which] itself is a polyhedron of scripture” (FW 107.08). The eschaton toward which the new scripture points thus employs “strangewrote anaglyptics” (FW 419.19) as well as maps and “letters” (FW 478.02) in accordance with the Vichian schema for the evolution of language (NS 98). The problems of coding for eye and ear in the Wake, however, exceed even Vichian bounds.

A “general theory of the universal unfolding”:
Quinet and Michelet

“A man,” says The New Science, “is properly only mind, body and speech, and speech starts as it were midway between mind and body” (NS 347). Speech the mediator, however, performs more than simple linguistic acts for in Vico the oral is written, the achievement of linguistic fluency is the achievement of writing. “All nations began to speak by writing,” we are told, “since all were originally mute” (NS 97). As to that Enlightenment obsession, the question of the “origin of languages and letters,” Vico asserts that the problem is an invention of scholars,

all of whom regarded the origin of letters as a separate question from that of the origin of languages, whereas the two were by nature conjoined. And they should have made out as much from the words “grammar” and “characters.” From the former, because grammar is defined as the art of speaking, yet grammata are letters, so that grammar should have been defined as the art of writing. So, indeed, it was defined by Aristotle, and so in fact it originally was; for all nations began to speak by writing, since all were originally mute. (NS 429)

Thus the Vichian evolution from the divine, mute language of hieroglyphs to the heroic, symbolic one of signs and “heroic devices” such as coats of arms and, finally, to the human, epistolary language of letters (NS 98, 106, 290) in fact reflects a series of coterminous transformations in understanding of the “semiosic web.”³⁵ This shift in the semiotic weighting of icon/hieroglyph, index/heroic device, and symbol/epistle is most obvious during the ricorso or time of reflux, when warfare erupts as a result of nations or peoples having become “mute in relation to each other” (NS 119) and reverting to earlier stages of linguistic competence. Thus the resurgence of military insignia and coats of arms in battle is a return to “hieroglyphic writing” with its symbiotic relationship to “duels, raids, reprisals, slavery, and asylums” (NS 353). This collapsing of index into icon represents also a temporary suspension of the symbolic/epistolary mode with its grammatological stress upon the balancing and synthesizing of oral/aural and visual systems—in other words, upon the identity of speech and writing.

For Vico, then, the temporary privileging of one sensory modality over others ruptures the balance of a complex communication network grounded in the co/incidence of opposites. Just as speech mediates between “mind” and “body,” so grammatology or, more specifically, “arche-writing”³⁶ as the central morphogenetic function in The New Science is the de facto agent of the Vichian monist ontology. Violence thus represents the incursion of Cartesian dualist hegemony of one sensory modality over another, producing a reflux and dissemination both of earlier unitary linguistic modes and of their tautological extensions in Vico, that is, of dualist concepts of body, mind, consciousness, sensory experience, human hegemony within the ecosystem: the structures of “dividual chaos” (FW 186.04) resulting from the shattering of the world community. But chaos in Vico is not absolute; it is “order othered” (FW 613.14), “aosch” (FW 286.02). It is implicate in world order and thus in morphogenesis. In Bohm’s terms, “aosch” can be “explicated” and enfolded again within the macrosystem just as “order” can be “othered,” implicated into “aosch.”

The Vichian variation on René Thorn’s “general theory of the universal unfolding”³⁷ is thus fully grounded in a complex process of anakephalaiösis, leading not to the moment of salvation (as Karl Löwith has shown, Vichian history is not Heilsgeschichte)³⁸ but to the endless reenfolding into the ecosystem of insoluble materials being endlessly unfolded from or, more properly, “implicated” out of it. To attempt to break the holistic balancing, the homothetic movement, of living beings is, in Vico, to attempt the destruction of language “itself,” to attempt anesthesis of a homologous macrosystem. “Who gave you that numb?” Mark asks Mamalujo (FW 546.26) not because name is identity but because the act of naming, the originary languaging act pertinent to any being, marks the full enfolding of that life into community in a profound symbiosis which it denies not only at its own expense but, because it is bound into the semiosic web of the universe, at the expense of all other life forms. Vichian history thus works a dramatistic variation on allegory as “cosmos” and situates allegorical text-processing and text-generation within the matrix of universal morphogenesis. Allegory becomes macrotext; the Gothic pedagogical structures of allegorical performative discourse become the basic structures and processual modes of world-understanding.

“Mundus,” says The New Science, first denoted a “slight slope” and then, when the “theological poets” and geographers came to imagine their situation,

they came to understand that the earth and the sky were spherical in form, and that from every point of the circumference there is a slope toward every other, and that the ocean bathes the land on every shore, and that the whole of things is adorned with countless varied and diverse sensible forms, the poets called this universe mundus as being that with which, by a beautifully sublime metaphor, nature adorns herself. (NS 725)

Since “among the Greeks and Latins ‘name’ and ‘nature’ meant the same thing” (NS 494), mundus may be seen to incorporate natura, and natura to enfold logos! language just as, according to “poetic geography,” “Within Greece itself ... lay the original East called Asia or India, the West called Europe or Hesperia, the North called Thrace or Scythia, and the South called Libya or Mauretania” (NS 742). Thus, “in virtue of the correspondence which the Greeks observed between the two,” microcosm was applied to macrocosm, Greece to the world (NS 742).

Throughout this sequence, the new science of metonymy is set repeatedly within the larger allegorical exchange process of metaphor. Greece is not less Greece (or Greek) for being the world and the world is no less polysystematic, no less otherly ordered, for being set against Greece in juxtaposition or subsumed within Greece in enfoldment. Like Bohm’s container of viscous fluid, mundus implicates all matter within its bounds and thereby renders possible the “explication” of any of its parts even if those parts should be orderly structures within a disordered or ricorsive system.³⁹ An instance of disorder becomes, then, one possible configuration within the “universal [explicate] unfolding.” Conversely, any instance of “order” also becomes one possible configuration within universal implicate enfolding, and so on through the permutations and combinations of the Vichian system. We can see one bounded instance of this Vichian paradigm in Finnegans Wake’s use of Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet in relation to the mediating figure of Vico allegorized.

In his Introduction à la Philosophie de l’Histoire de l’Humanité, Edgar Quinet presents a benign and optimistic variation on the topos of humankind’s place in nature, emphasizing the intrinsic harmony of their interrelationship and the transience of any rupture in the scheme of things. History has its roots “dans les entrailles mêmes de l’univers”⁴⁰ and humankind’s place is a mediating one between the vast harmonies of the cosmos and the individual rhythms of other animate beings who live alongside us in the world. Thus, although human action has its own distinctive “harmonies and contrasts,” it is nevertheless analogous in its order and stability to the physical world as a whole. So close is this morphogenetic bond that “les accidents de la vie des fleurs” may serve “à expliquer des phénomènes correspondants dans l’existence des corps politiques.”⁴¹ Humankind, however, has been reluctant to accept its place in the processes of the universe, claiming instead the right of hegemony, of absolute power over other life forms.⁴² In Quinet’s system, the universe is the companion of humans, its laws are our laws, its destiny is our history.⁴³ The past lives in us, its order animating our lives. As he writes of his own sense of being bound into the evolving order of time:

je me berce de cet espoir, que la puissance qui a su peser et balancer les siècles et les empires, qui a compté les jours de la vieille Chaldée, de l’Egypte, de la Phénicie, de Thèbes aux cent portes, de l’héroïque Sagonle, de l’implacable Rome, saura bien aussi coordonner ce peu d’instants qui m’ont été réservés, et ces mouvements éphémères qui en remplissent la durée.⁴⁴

In Quinet death is only a moment within the cycle of time, only “une transformation ascendante, la vie des peuples [n’est] qu’un court moment dans la vie universelle, une feuille d’un arbre, une page d’un livre, où nous nous efforçons de déchiffrer l’instant présent à travers les révélations du passé.”⁴⁵ Cities appear and disappear as their times come and go.⁴⁶ “Si promptement les traces de l’homme sont effacées par le souffle des âges!”⁴⁷ Even the epic battles of the past are erased by the power of time, of the order of the universe as epitomized by the tenacity of wildflowers growing amid the ruins of ancient empires.⁴⁸ This is the context of the “beautiful sentence from Edgar Quinet”⁴⁹ which recurs across Finnegans Wake.

Le moindre grain de sable battu des vents a en lui plus d’éléments de durée que la fortune de Rome ou de Sparte. Dans tel réduit solitaire je connais tel ruisseau, dont le doux murmure, le cours sinueux et les vivantes harmonies surpassent en antiquité les souvenirs de Nestor et les annales de Babylone. Aujourd’hui, comme aux jours de Pline et de Columelle, la jacinthe se plait dans les Gaules, la pervenche en Illyrie, la marguerite sur les ruines de Numance; et pendent qu’autour d’elles les villes ont changé de maîtres et de nom, que plusieurs sont rentrées dans le néant, que les civilisations se sont choquées et brisées, leurs paisibles générations ont tranversé les âges, et se sont succédé l’une à l’autre jusqu’à nous, fraîches et riantes commes aux jours des batailles.⁵⁰

For Quinet, Vico is the philosopher of “les lois universelles de l’humanité,” the creator of “ideal eternal history.” The rise and fall of civilizations is only “l’expression du rapport du monde avec cette indestructible cité” of Vichian universals⁵¹ and, according to their position in the order of time, nations

entrent en rapport avec cette cité idéale, et s’établissent dans son enceinte; ils la parent de leurs couleurs, et, pendant qu’ils existent par elle et en elle, ils lui communiquent en retour un mouvement apparent; ils la revêtent de tous les emblèmes que des époques diverses leur ont apportés: ils promenent quelque temps leur gloire ou leur misère, dans ses immuables labyrinthes; ils font entendre en passant leurs voix sous ses voûtes silencieuses; quand ils périssent, elle ne périt point: elle se dégage de leurs ruines, et reparaît toute radieuse dans la région des idées.⁵²

Although Quinet’s new science is closer to being a purely Platonic one than is either Vico’s or Joyce’s, his sense of the symbiosis of all life forms in the world and, in particular, of flowers as emblems of that profound interrelationship is crucial to Finnegans Wake. The children’s game of colors in II. 1, the heliotrope motiv with its complex of associations with Dublin/Heliopolis, as Pharoah, in his Joussean role of seducer of and the “hedge daughters” (FW 430.01), and the recurrent associations of with flowers, leaves and water: these are some of Quinet’s iconic flowers of morphogenesis though their Wake lives are more complexly implicate than Quinet’s cosmological botany would in itself allow for. Emblems of the “dear prehistoric scenes” (FW 385.18), the Wake’s “botanical calligrams” bind Ireland to Quinet’s Egypt, Chaldea and Phoenicia, and Irish antiquity to the classical past:

Since the bouts of Hebear and Hairyman the cornflowers have been staying at Ballymun, the duskrose has choosed out Goatstown’s hedges, twolips have pressed togatherthem by Sweet Rush, townland of twinedlights, the whitethorn and the red-thorn have fairygeyed the mayvalleys of Knockmaroon, and, though for rings round them, during a chiliad of perihelygangs, the Formoreans have brittled the tooath of the Danes and the Oxman has been pestered by the Firebugs and the Joynts have thrown up jerrybuilding to the Kevanses and Little on the Green is childsfather to the City (Year! Year! And laughtears!), these paxsealing buttonholes have quadrilled across the centuries and whiff now whafft to us, fresh and made-of-all-smiles as, on the eve of Killallwho. (FW 14.35)

With a nod to Lewis Carroll’s Lobster Quadrille, the Wake’s wildflowers two-step across Ireland from a couple of Dublin’s less fashionable suburbs (Ballymun and Goatstown) to Rush in County Wicklow, Knockmaroon in the Moy Valley and back by “whiff” to the Wake’s own “indestructible city,” the “sound seemetery” (FW 17.35) of Chapelizod, Phoenix Park, Dublin Bay, the Liffey, the Wicklow Hills: a Vichian “poetic geography” compound of “Dyoublong” (FW 13.04).

Quinet’s flowers are also caught up in the battles of and for pride of place. At the end of III. 1, ‘s chapter on the Post, carrier of ’s letter (an inscription in “shemletters” of ’s “anaglyptics” [FW 419.20]), consigns his twin brother to the flowers of death: “may the tussocks grow quickly under your trampthickets and the daisies trip lightly over your battercrops” (FW 428.26). However, if being battered by buttercups seems an innocent fate, II.2 has worse in store for both of the twins as Quinet’s flowers are assigned “THE PART PLAYED BY BELLE-TRISTICKS IN THE BELLUM-PAX-BELLUM MUTUOMORPHOMUTATION” (FW 281 .RI). Here the Quinet sentence is set in the context of the twins’ battles in metonymic relation to all of the world’s “Enten eller, either or” squabbles with their equally possible “Nay, rather!” conclusions (FW 281.29). Flowers become emblematic of these power struggles (“Margaritomancy! Hyacinthous perivinciveness! Flowers. A cloud” [FW 281.14]) as the hieroglyphic stage of language takes ascendancy in conflict situations but, lacking the power of homeopathic magic, the cloud of flowers becomes a background to strife: “Bruto and Cassio are ware only of trifid tongues the whispered wilfulness, (‘tis demonal!) and shadows multiplicating . . . , totients quotients, they tackle their quarrel” (FW 281.15). Later, in II.3, Quinet’s flowers are more directly affected by the battles of the “samuraised twimbs” who “had their mutthering ivies and their murdhering idies and their mouldhering iries in that muskat grove but there’ll be bright plinnyflowers in Calomella’s cool bowers when the magpyre’s babble towers scorching and screeching from the ravenindove” (FW 354.24). Signaling the end of an explicate time of Babel, the magpie-Phoenix is the pyre from which emerge both the raven of black foreboding and the dove of peace, both murderous ivy and “bright plinnyflowers.” Before babble, scorching and screeching are enfolded into “sound, light and heat, memory, will and understanding” (FW 266.18) which must e/merge “in gyrogyrorondo” (FW 239.27).

Brutus and Cassius, Browne and Nolan, Bruno of Nola and Nicholas of Cusa, Edgar Quinet and Jules Michelet: opposites bound, since “felixed is who culpas does” (FW 246.31), in order constantly othered, per omnia saecula saeculorum (“Poor omniboose, singalow singlearum” [FW 488.11]). And without “ricocoursing” (FW 609.14), “Solitude” (FW 246.35) and beginning again in caves of rock or spirit, mind and body are set apart before the coming of reflection (NS 236). Hence the Vichian “universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to signify the institutions of the mind and spirit” (NS 237). Before that fluent deconstruction of body and mind which denotes the coming of grammatology, human institutions remain undeveloped, mute. For Michelet, however, that Vichian state of muteness is the founding condition of all life in the universe:

Avec le monde a commencé une guerre qui doit finir avec le monde, et pas avant: celle de l’homme contre la nature, de l’esprit contre la matière, de la liberté contre la fatalité. L’histoire n’est pas autre chose que le récit de cette interminable lutte.⁵³

Michelet’s Introduction à l’Histoire Universelle, written, as he said, “on the burning pavements of Paris” during the uprising of July 1830, takes as its purpose the understanding of history “comme l’éternelle protestation, comme le triomphe progressif de la liberté”⁵⁴ which he conceived to be a Vichian undertaking. Michelet’s Vico is a hero fighting on the side of the masses against the tyranny of the few, a French revolutionary figure whose great proclamation is the claim that the force which directs the “course the nations run” is “mind, for men did it [history] with intelligence; it was not fate, for they did it by choice; not chance, for the results of their always so acting are perpetually the same” (NS 1108). Thus Michelet’s “strong reading”⁵⁵ of the Vichian text effectively destroys the holistic, morphogenetic power of the system, putting in its place a patriarchal and paternalistic claim to ownership of the world and its life forms. Adapting the metonymy of France in relation to the world, Michelet repeats the Vichian transformation of metonymic into metaphoric relation but this time the result is the proclamation of a French colonialist hegemony, a redemptive mission undertaken by France, “le pilote du vaisseau de l’humanité.” But, says Michelet,

ce vaisseau vole aujourd’hui dans l’ouragan; il va si vite, si vite, que le vertige prend aux plus fermes, et que toute poitrine en est oppressée. Que puis-je dans ce beau et terrible mouvement? Une seule chose: le comprendre; je l’essayerai du moins.⁵⁶

—a like goal, the inscription of a “letter selfpenned to one’s other” (FW 489.33), grounded in sometime claims about “the ouragan of spaces” (FW 504.14), alas in this century no longer hyperbolic ones.

Michelet’s privileging of culture over nature, of France over the world, of the material over the nonmaterial, of “Liberté” over “fatalité,” represents a rupturing not only of Quinet’s vision of benign order but also of the Vichian morphogenetic universe itself. Quinet’s Joussean understanding of world-order in terms of an exchange of gestures, a “rhythmo-catechizing” interface of human and other life forms in a responsive universe, is thus balanced against a system which pushes that understanding to the limit and which Vichian new science cannot sustain in tension. The forces of violence everywhere threaten the balance of memory (for Quinet’s wildflowers are botanical memory systems) and the balance of “body” and “mind” grammatologically mediated. That balance, so easily broken, requires that the warring twins—whether Quinet and Michelet or and —be subsumed within a larger system, that their explicate disorder be resolved, at least temporarily, into text. That text must then invoke all the rivers of the world and all the words for peace which it can muster, for those “MUTUOMORPHOMUTATION[S]” (FW 281.Rl)—like the “lingua commune mentale” which the Wake seeks—are components of a memory system which, in its drive toward all-inclusiveness, takes as goal the Vichian recognition of words as deeds, of reading acts which draw on “memory, will and understanding” (FW 266.19).

“The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin” says rolling down the Liffey in his barrel (FW 452.21). The snag in that watery progress is, however, not only the postman’s “sunsickness” (FW452.35) but also his threatened experience of aboulia (loss or impairment of willpower) and consequent failure at his task, the delivery of ’s letter. “Well, to the figends of Annanmeses with the wholeabuelish business!” (FW 452.34) he exclaims, threatening anamnesis into the bargain. Again in the play produced by “Mr John Baptister Vickar” in II.1, “a deep abuliousness” (FW 255.27) not only is threatened but does “descend upon the Father of Truants,” , and on in their pantomime guise.

Like the association of anamnesis with , the marking of aboulia with Vico’s stamp draws upon theory of memory in The New Science, Vico’s Autobiography, and his On the ancient wisdom of the Italians. Indeed, memory is one of Vico’s great themes and, as Donald Phillip Verene has shown, the central morphogenetic principle of the Vichian system. “Memory is the same as imagination” (NS 699)⁵⁷ and both powers are therefore located “in the head.” The “mother of the Muses; that is, of the arts of humanity” (NS 699), memory is divided by Vico into three branches or aspects: memoria “when it remembers things, “fantasia or imagination “when it alters or imitates them,” and ingegno or invention “when it gives them a new turn or puts them into proper arrangement and relationship” (NS 819).⁵⁸ In the De sapientia Vico speculates further on the conjunction of imagination and memory, “which stores within itself the perception of the senses”:

Was this [conjunction] because we can neither imagine something unless we have remembered it, nor remember anything unless we perceive it through the senses? Certainly, painters have never depicted any kind of plant nor any living thing which nature has not produced, for their hippogriffs and centaurs are truths of nature mingled with what is false. [ . . . ] Through their fables, therefore, the Greeks handed down their belief that the Muses, which are virtues depicted by the imagination, were the daughters of Memory.⁵⁹

The product of Greek oral tradition, “Homer left none of his poems in writing” (NS 850) but was a “stitcher-together of songs,” one of many rhapsodes who sang the songs which came to be referred to as Homeric (NS 851). Thus,

the blindness and the poverty of Homer were characteristics of the rhapsodes, who, being blind, when each of them was called homéros, had exceptionally retentive memories, and, being poor, sustained life by singing the poems of Homer throughout the cities of Greece; and they were the authors of these poems inasmuch as they were a part of these peoples who had composed their histories in the poems.⁶⁰

In this sense, then, “Homer was an idea or a heroic character of Grecian men insofar as they told their histories in song” (NS 873).

If Homer, writing during the “childhood of the world” (NS 1032), represents the apogee of mnemonic power, early childhood itself represents memory’s first period of strength and “vividness of imagination” but a strength which can turn to “corpulence of the imaginative faculty.”⁶¹ Care must be taken to ensure that young people study “physics, which leads to the contemplation of the corporeal universe and [which] has need of mathematics for the science of the cosmic system.”⁶² Plane geometry should also be included in the regimen since it “is in a certain sense a graphic art which at once invigorates memory by the great number of its elements, refines imagination with its delicate figures . . . , and quickens perception. . . . “⁶³ It should be taught “not by numbers or genera but by forms,” that is, by using the “synthetic” method which teaches that “we should make truths rather than discover them.”⁶⁴ Rhetoric or “Topics,” “the art of finding in anything all that is in it,” will help young people to make discoveries since Topics furnishes their minds with “matter” which will later help them to form sound judgments. In all these studies, “they should first apprehend, then judge, and finally reason . . . ,” a sequence which the Wake faithfully follows in II.2 as and practice Euclid’s Proposition Two and apply it to the universe. In the course of this lesson, the twins also exhibit the Vichian notion that “the first faculty to manifest itself is that of seeing likenesses,” though perhaps not the Vichian corollary, that the nature of children “is purer and less corrupted by persuasion or prejudice” than that of their elders.

Like the Vichian “dipintura,” ’s “geomater” (FW 297.01) diagram is the graphic presentation of an allegory of cosmos,⁶⁵ the visual image of a complex memory theater from which the discourse system of the whole may be generated in performance, whether ’s lifting of the “maidsapron” to reveal Anna Livia’s “quincecunct” (FW 206.35)—in Euclidean terms, simply an articulation of what was always there—or the reader’s programmed enactment of the Wake’s performative discourse. Bringing the aboulia of ricorso, the Vico of both The New Science and Finnegans Wake must also be the vehicle of memory in its triple role of rememoration, mimesis and invention. So the knowable universe of plane geometry becomes also a field of discovery and invention, a topos from which the exercising of the principles of generativity and anamnesis, memory and forgetting, can be undertaken. Thus the “dipintura’s” patterns of transmission of understanding—from God to Metaphysic, from Metaphysic to Homer and to the world—inscribe an implied triangulation of interests such as we see in the “geomater” diagram in terms of a “poetic geography” whose founding principle is mundus, the allegorical catachresis of body and place. At the macrostructural level, “Oh Kosmos! Ah Ireland!” (FW 456.07) replicating the Vichian understanding of Homeric Greece; at the microstructural, “A is for Anna like L is for liv” (FW 293.18).

That poetic geography in the Wake is epitomized in the geomater diagram’s “Vieus Von DVbLIn” (FW 293.12), where the “doubling bicirculars” meet (FW 295.31) and where the memory wheel is turned (FW 69.05). Like Vico’s “dipintura” a sign of community and agent of communal exchange, the geomater diagram is also the locus of identity-shifting and -questioning within “Dyoublong” (FW 13.04). Summed up in one of the Wake’s great descriptions of its own morphogenetic operations, that processual drive becomes an ovine production line, pouring chicken-and-egg questions along its course:

Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational gazebocroticon (the “Mamma Lujah” known to every schoolboy scandaller, be he Matty, Marky, Lukey or John-a-Donk), autokinatonetically preprovided with a clappercoupling smelting-works exprogressive process, (for the farmer, his son and their homely codes, known as eggburst, eggblend, eggburial and hatch-as-hatch can) receives through a portal vein the dialytically separated elements of precedent decomposition for the very-petpurpose of subsequent recombination so that 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, since the days of Plooney and Columcellas when Giacinta, Pervenche and Margaret swayed over the all-too-ghoul-ish and illyrical and innumantic in our mutter nation, all, anastomosically assimilated and preteridentified paraidiotically, in fact, the sameold gamebold adomic structure of our Finnius the old One, ... as sure as herself pits hen to paper and there’s scribings scrawled on eggs.

Of cause, so! And in effect, as?(FW 614.27)

The Vichian three ages of gods, heroes, and humans and the ricorso; the four old men as guardian bedposts-cum-grave markers, watching over creation and death; the major characteristics of each of the Vichian cycles, ever (re-)generative in ovine analogy, less viscous than Bohm’s fluid medium but equally prone to ex- and implication; the Vichian stages of language from mute signs to hieroglyphs to letters; Quinet’s flowers of ecosystemic and temporal balance presiding over the endless cycles of anastomosis and recombinant semes: all leading to Finn, avatar of alias Finnegan, in other words to the inscription of writing on the fluid medium of eggs soon rendered viscous and eventually solid when subjected to heat alias energy. But then, following Vico, we must return through all of these “associational clusters”⁶⁶ (and many more), questioning all assumptions of causal connection, scrutinizing every apparent “effect,” reconsidering our acculturated assumptions which lead us so relentlessly to “first causes.” “Of cause, so!—And in effect, as?” (FW 615.11)

What we have in both The New Science and the Wake is not causal sequence but the endless cycle of “precedent decomposition” and “subsequent recombination,” of forgetting and remembering, of performative discourse within a knowable world. If the new science is akin to geometry insofar as the latter, “when it constructs the world of quality out of its elements, or contemplates that world, is creating it for itself” (NS 349), then Vichian geometry is a mode of processual mimesis, a performative discourse like The New Science itself (NS 349). The same could be said of Wake geometry in its role as icon of the reading act inscribed in and prescribed by the text—“eggtentical” (FW 16.36) in other words. Thus anamnesis is bound into the cycle of memory, “IDEAREAL HISTORY” into Joussean gesture,⁶⁷ text production into text consumption (“His producers are they not his consumers?” [FW 497.01]), into Dublin Bay and the “roturn” of the tide (FW 18.05).

What has gone? How it ends?

Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Today’s truth, tomorrow’s trend.

Forget, remember! (FW 614.19)

“Traumscrapt”: Somnium and Visio

“In the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity,” Vico writes, “there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modification of our own mind” (NS 331). To the exploration and articulation of those principles The New Science is dedicated, its task the formulation of an “ideal eternal history” which, as we have seen, is classified by Vico as a performance-system which becomes itself in enactment as the performer “makes it for himself” (NS 349). In this, Vichian science is like geometry. As the former

constructs the world of quantity out of its elements, or contemplates that world, [it] is creating it for itself, just so does our Science . . . [create for itself the world of nations], but with a reality greater by just so much as the institutions having to do with human affairs are more real than points, lines, surfaces, & figures are. (NS 349)

Incorporating Vichian geometry into the dark night of civil strife, Finnegans Wake inscribes ricorsive language across the field of dream, assigning to the hieroglyphs (“The Doodles family” [FW 299.F4]) focal roles in this “mar of murmury” (FW 254.18). Geometric insignia, these glyphic indicators serve as directional markers, pointing the way through this new-scientific speculum, a Phoenix Park which opens to us the “childhood of the world” (NS 1032) and its regenerative cycles operated by “mind, for men did it with intelligence; it was not fate, for they did it by choice; not chance, for the results of their always so acting are perpetually the same” (NS 1108).

Vico’s hieroglyphs mediating scienza and geometry are William Warburton’s mediating writing and dream. In ancient Egypt, as Warburton wrote in his The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, priests “believed that their Gods had given them hieroglyphic writing” and dreams, and that “the same mode of expression [was employed] in both revelations.”⁶⁸ Both hieroglyphs and dreams were subject to “onirocritic,” a mode of “interpretation” grounded in an understanding of dreams as allegorized texts. Like writing, dream encodes a knowable world, and in this system writing is to world as dream is to writing. Within the convention of the specula/tive allegory, then, scienza (whether Vico’s science or Warburton’s hermeneutics of revelatory writing) gives access to the human world composed, as it is in these systems, of language: the semiotics of congruent word and world. If, then, both dream and scienza serve as vehicles for the regeneration of past impacted within present, of forgetting within memory, the art of onirocritic is in itself a ricorsive tactic, enabling the interpreter to articulate dream as history, history as dream. Dream becomes the sound of memory turning in the dark, and memory a glyphic condensation of gesture known and susceptible to enactment within the liturgy or performative code of the dream narrative. So in its manifold inventions of scienza, the Joyce system reinvents the ancient onirocritic of Gothic pedagogy.

Interlacing of patterns across the text or development of discrete sequences, dissemination of one glyph or of a glyphic cluster across one or several texts, fragmentation of established textual paradigms:⁶⁹ these are all common strategies in specula/tive allegory, whether of the onirocritical kind or not. Equally, they are strategies of that form of medieval “glyphic” narrative known as the dream vision in which the single most important mimetic gesture is the adoption of the dream convention itself. As Constance Hieatt has argued, the dream vision “is a device to lend credence to the marvellous.”⁷⁰ In other words, dream functions as legitimizing strategy, as semantic sanction of invention in nonreferential modes. Thus J. B. Stearns writes of this genre in classical times that

In general, the dream fills the role of a messenger between the divinities or the spirits of the dead and living mortals. Consequently, the poet, who often regards himself as a priest of the gods, sometimes receives inspiration by means of dreams, or, at least, assigns a dream as his reason for composing.⁷¹

Accordingly, the dreamer in many dream poems “both is and is not the same as the writer who names him as ‘I’ in the poem.”⁷² Or, the writer both is and is not a dreamer, a singer of fabulous tales, a Homer in Vico’s sense, a disseminator of information across codes, a codemaker by invention, a network of loci and topoi in a memory theater, a text awaiting an exercitant, an autotelic pedagogy teaching only itself. Or the dreamer/narrator is the text bound in self-consuming processual diegesis—a dream which is “a scene of writing,”⁷³ manifesting its own telos, a glyph of its own substance endlessly performative of its own process/ing, endlessly instructive and instructing, a rhizome-epiphany, a performative gnomon motiv/ated across the manifold catachresis of a plurivocal text. Not a “monolook interyerear’’ (FW 182.20) but a “drama parapolylogic” (FW 474.05), a techne for the production of process, for morphogenesis, for retrieving the “Mental Dictionary” which is Mundus, the world (NS 725).

But the dream narrative as genre may also be more restrictively categorized in terms of, for example, the five subdivisions presented by the fourth-century writer Macrobius in his speculum, the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, one of the most influential of medieval onirocritical texts. Macrobius supplies five categories of dream narrative: the somnium (Gr., oneiros) or “enigmatic dream”; the visio (Gr., horama) or “prophetic vision”; the oraculum (Gr., chrematismos) or “oracular dream”; the insomnium (Gr., erypnion) or “nightmare”; and, finally, the visum (Gr., phantasma) or “apparition.”⁷⁴ A single dream may be classified under several of these headings, perhaps synthesizing visio and visum if a dream is both prophetic and concerned with the apparition of a figure of wisdom such as a deceased parent who had lived an exemplary life. A visio does not require interpretation since “future events are depicted in the dream exactly as they will occur”⁷⁵ while, in contrast, a somnium is an “allegorical dream”⁷⁶ which requires exegesis and possesses “the global character of dream revelation at its highest. . . . “⁷⁷ Insomnium refers to interrupted dreams “produced by mental or physical distress”⁷⁸ and, like the visum, is of little interest to Macrobius, whose focus is on the analysis of the somnium presented in Cicero’s text Somnium Scipione. In the course of that analysis, Macrobius ranges from geometry to cosmology and from Pythagorean number theory to neoplatonic metaphysics, working inventions on the recombinant semes of his speculum and modeling a specula/tive paradigm to which authority would be attributed for a millennium.

In his dissertation on the somnium, F. X. Newman has catalogued a number of other major features of this genre as it developed in the wake of Macrobius as well as of the equally influential Boethius, and the ongoing modeling of the form through particular exemplars. Among the standard features of the dream narrative catalogued by Newman is the employment of circular structure, bringing the dreamer back to where he (seldom she) started but in better harmony with the world around him after suffering a period of confusion or dislocation. Typically, the dreamer returns to a world of springtime with May being the favored month, and benefits from his dream revelation in proportion to his moral and spiritual qualities. “Evil men,” in fact, “see only vain and delusive fantasies”⁷⁹ in their dreams, while the dreamer who wakes at the outset of his dream and then falls asleep again is thought to be experiencing “the opening of the spiritual eye of the heart.”⁸⁰ Through the agency of his imagination, “the mediating instrument between truth and the dreamer’s ignorance,”⁸¹ he transcends corporeal vision and acquires spiritual insight, a process often imaged in terms of the crossing of a river or lying down to sleep beside it or of encountering a many-branched river which occasions a choice on the part of the dreamer.⁸² These choices form part of the pedagogical structure of the dream narrative and are frequently presented in terms of debates between dreamer and guide or of the whole narrative structured as a debate.⁸³ Thus specula/tive knowledge on a grand scale might be inculcated or presented in such a way that the ingenuity of the onirocritic was challenged and the narrative might take on the characteristics of a puzzle to which the keys were given and the intermediate steps left to the exegete’s skill.

Such is the case with the Wake’s dream narrative, principally employing the somnium and the visio along with traditional details of landscape both human and ecological. Thus we have the river not only as emblem of generation and dissolution but as generator of text, and not only the muddled voices of half-awake dreamers marking the passing of the night—

Hark!

Tolv two elf kater ten (it can’t be) sax.

Hork!

Pedwar pemp foify tray (it must be) twelve.

And low stole o’er the stillness the heartbeats of sleep. (FW 403.01)

—but also the confusion of dreamers emerging from sleep near dawn and rehearsing the terms of revelations experienced at that traditionally crucial dream moment. Hearing the stirrings of their children, the parents begin the narrative of their own death as a movement into anamnesis:

A cry off.

Where are we at all? and whereabouts in the name of space?

I don’t understand. I fail to say. I dearsay you too. (FW 558.32)

Meanwhile rests on the hillside in his pilgrim’s attire (“brief wallet to his side, and arm loose, by his staff of citron briar, tradition stick-pass-on” [FW 474.03]), tired after his experiments in rhythmo-catechizing with . and the “hedge daughters” and after his denunciation of with its ultimate consignment of him to the region toward which their parents are also moving: “Walk while ye have the light for morn, lightbreakfastbringer, morroweth whereon every past shall fall fost sleep. Amain” (FW 473.23). Attempting to fill the role of prophetic figure in ’s dream, utters the traditional injunction to repent and be saved before the coming of the end, the mutation of mo(u)rning. Classified as “drama” rather than “dream monologue” (FW 474.04) given the performative nature of his narrative, ’s own early morning dream enacts the pilgrim’s vivid experience of guilt occasioned by recognition of sin:

—Dream. Ona noonday I sleep. I dreamt of a somday. Of a wonday I shall wake.

Ah! May he have now of here fearfilled me! Sinflowed, O sinflowed! Fia! Fia!

Befurcht Christ! (FW 481.07)

’s fear, expressive of the revelation he experiences as part of his visum, contrasts sharply with the peaceful world of the Ass, modeled on Langland’s Piers Plowman, as he drifts with a clear conscience into sleep (“Methought as I was dropping asleep somepart in nonland” [FW 403.18]) and, “as I was jogging along in a dream as dozing as I was dawdling, arrah, methought broadtone was heard” (FW 404.03).⁸⁴ This is the prologue to ‘s appearance as false prophet in the visio dreamt by the Ass: “When lo (whish, O whish) mesaw mestreamed, as the green to the gred was flew, was flown, through deafths of durkness greengrown deeper I heard a voice, the voce of Shaun ...” (FW 407.11). Thus the violent world of Michelet again intersects with the gentle, ecological view of Quinet with its heritage of medieval pastoral.

Michelet’s dark world is further invoked in the Wake’ s “dreambookpage[s]” (FW 428.16) through the somnium in which drifts, “somnolulutent” (FW 76.30), and which calls down upon as he points the “deathbone” at him: “Insomnia, somnia somniorum. Awmawm” (FW 193.29). Wandering in this vast “semitary of somnionia” (FW 594.08), which persists after the invocation to dawn commencing Book IV, we are bound still in the “somnione sciupiones” (FW 293.07) which serves as a label for the geomater diagram with its neo-Macrobian “aletheometry” (FW 370.13). An episode of insomnia resulting from the erotic unrest of the children, II.2 resolves itself into their bitter “Nightletter” wishing “best youlldied greedings to Pep and Memmy” (FW 308.21), a moment of respite in the long series of catechetical paradigms in the form of debates which stretches across the Wake from the first encounter of Mutt and Jute (FW 16-18) to its metonymic sequel, the debate of Patrick and Balkelly in Book IV.

In that “triptych vision” (FW 486.32) or visio, the Wake finally rejects the “opposition of dream to wakefulness . . . [which] is a representation of metaphysics”⁸⁵ and thematizes the processual course set out in Portrait and Ulysses. In the opposition of memory and forgetting, the triptych generates its own third term and resolves in its own processing the binarism which structures the debate. It is a techne which Albrecht Dürer identified as “dreamwork” (Traumwerk), writing that “Whoever wants to do dreamwork, must mix all things together. “⁸⁶ Dürer’s immediate reference is to his use of the ancient practice of surrounding a “central” image of a saint or deity with a border or frame of interlaced figures, a semiosic web of nonreferential data. Like the Tunc page of the Book of Kells which is woven into the geomater diagram of the Wake as well as into the voyeurism of Mamalujo and the motiv of “invagination”⁸⁷ across the narrative, Dürer’s dreamwork pages have Gothic pedagogical ends in view. The erosion of boundaries and categories, the ambiguation of binary structures, the induction of allegory and medieval dream narrative into the performative discourse of the text: these are among the lessons of “dreaming” in the Wake and of Traumwerk in Dürer.

Motiv/ated by Vichian morphogenesis, the Wake’s “traumscrapt” (FW 623.36) maps a Porphyrian forest of tree stories as it fulfills the ancient injunction to “hand on the matter worthily,”⁸⁸ preface to the reader’s bond, the “earning”⁸⁹ of the work through induction into the text’s programmatic strategies of invention. As we enter the system by way of its geometric mnemonics, we come to discover that—like The New Science—Finnegans Wake offers us the possibility of a radical restructuring of our still-Cartesian world. Privileging the geomater diagram over its ancient type, the melothesia or emblem of “Vitruvian man,”⁹⁰ the Wake opts for “order othered” (FW 613.14), for Dürer’s concept of dreamwork rather than for Freud’s ontotheological one, and for a central morphogenetic principle which is closer to that of medieval dream narrative than to either the psychological novel or “Realist” fiction. This is the apogee of the Joyce system’s antihumanist rejection of ideological structures complicit in hegemony. And it marks the final stage of the initial induction into Gothic pedagogy with its quadrivial components troped through the agency of Vichian morphogenesis. Deconstructive geometry, mathematics and cosmologically oriented astronomy have occupied us thus far. What remains is music.