Joyce

Joyce? Surely not James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (1882-1941), now of “Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one” (U 3.39), a number “out of order” as we say. No fingernail parings in sight.

Trademark, then. Sign denoting system, “the Joyce system.” Sign? A light which, lovingly subjected to prolonged exegesis and the production of perfect texts, will finally reveal . . . what? whom? If light, in darkness? Where? Only “written words? Signs on a white field” (U 3.15) after all?

“Yes” and also “the”: end-words leaving us without endings, happy or otherwise (will Molly make Poldy’s breakfast or not? some readers ask themselves; does Anna Livia’s last word run the salmon leap and, “riverrun,” begin the narrative again?). “Here, weir, reach, island, bridge,” the Wake counsels (FW 626.07). Well then, I will.

System

Meeting that performative injunction demands competence in the working of “Once upon a time” and “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan” and “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s,” components of a system which is their aggregate and which, as linguists and cognitive scientists use the term, “generates” those components in their networks of interbranching subsystems. To write the system is both to invent and to perform it: “invent” in the medieval rhetorical sense of inventio, to come upon or discover what is already given and, working with the text, to “draw out” or foreground its modes of operation. In the process of acquiring competence in the working of the system, to write Joyce is to be written by the system which is “Joyce,” to submit to that “order othered” (FW 613.14) which is bracketed in Finnegans Wake by recursive markers of present and past, “Fiatfuit” (FW 17.32) “Fuitfiat” (FW 613.14): performative injunctions once again.

“Fiat”: “Let it be done unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38): the doubly performative contract known as the Annunciation or response by Mary to the angel Gabriel, the announcing of her willingness to conceive Christ the word. Her strategy becomes a techne¹: giving birth to the Word, she inaugurates both gestation and extratextuality as signs of writing or, to put it differently, she becomes what Umberto Eco calls a “Model Reader” or “textually established set of felicity conditions . . . to be met in order to have a macro-speech act (such as a text is) fully actualized.”² But the referent comes eventually to dominate discourse, claiming “truth-conditionality” and “sincerity” (those Austinian signs of “Presence”) as requisites necessary to the enactment of the performative. And by the time of Luther, the sacred text’s revelatory capacity, its kerygma or proclamation of the divine referent, becomes a sign of the referentiality of the world. This is the proclamation of a truth made manifest to all believers, the beginning of a hermeneutic which—like its contemporary successors in the tradition of Austin and Searle, on the one hand, and Gadamer and Iser, on the other—would exact the democratic norm of felicity conditions from utterance and/as text, proclaim a truth manifest to all believers, and eventually become complicit in the proclamation of the humanist hegemony of Enlightenment. The encyclopedia is but a step away.³

“Fuit.” Existing in other times, modernity closes the gap opened by the Enlightenment’s Cartesian rupture of word and world and by its privileging of referential mimesis as both aesthetic and ontological techne. So the speculary “Realism” of nineteenth-century fiction, that literary reflection of the mercantile codes of emergent high capitalism, gives way to the specula/tive forms characteristic of modernity, whether medieval or twentieth-century, spanning the gap of humanism. With its encyclopedic claims and speculary ontology,⁴ the book gives way once again to writing and to “processual mimesis,”⁵ thus performative discourse.

To write Joyce is to trace these ontotheological transformations; to account for the many technai of the system in terms of its own codes, directives and operations; to explore the conditions of competence designated by the system, this vast “event created by language.”⁶ In writing Joyce, we encounter the system as a teaching machine whose purpose is to teach us itself, leading us through the five-finger exercises of Portrait to the sequence of learning programs, ever increasing in complexity and mnemonic challenge, which is Ulysses, and into the dream narrative of Finnegans Wake, where dream sanction operates not a counter-narrative folded inside a referential-mimetic one but an elaboratio, an inventio, on the theme of the problematic of post-Cartesian narrative. And so back to Portrait with its Ignatian mnemonics and the “roturn” (FW 18.05) of the memory wheel.

In writing Joyce, we configure modernity as suture across the gap of the Enlightenment and, in following this vast performance system’s⁷ text directives, its instructions for processing and operating itself, we (re-)invent that “applied grammatology”⁸ which stands in metonymic relation to modernity in all its forms, whether architectural or theoretical, whether musical or mathematical. Using the lexicon and some of the logical operations of Derridean deconstruction and Ecoian semiotics, we enter a system which generates them as it continues with every turn of the wheel to generate Vico and Ignatius Loyola, Quinet, Michelet and Zukofsky. In this vast ricorsive memory theater, “Nought is nulled” (FW 613.14) and the othering of order is an exercise in recombinant semes structuring, in Eco’s phrase, a “semiosic web”⁹ which is productive of its own noesis, thereby attempting—like Vico’s Scienza Nuova—to heal the wound which is humanism.

Writing

“To control,” writes Susan Oyama, “is not to stand outside the causal world; it is to rearrange oneself in it.”¹⁰ The condition of its integritas—that form of control demanded by a performance system—requires not passive submission on our part but, rather, engagement in its processing. Thus not a conversion, a permanent transcoding operation, but the demand placed on the listener by complex music, the willingness to be programmed, to enter into processually governed expectation, anticipation, and resolution. Our task, to rearrange ourselves “in” the system, is initially a theological one. But where is “inside”? If to process the system is not to stand “outside” its semantic claims, then how do we approach the task of standing “inside” it?

The challenge posed by this task seems to be a hermeneutic one; Writing Joyce responds using semiotics within a Derridean-deconstructive paradigm. Consider an ancient analogy: we are rebuilding a ship at sea, replacing one plank at a time. The structure, the system, is already given. Wiping our glosses with what we know, as the Wake instructs (FW 304.F3), our invention will succeed only to the extent that—to mix metaphors—our planks are a good fit and, perhaps, that we prefer teak to balsa wood. Further, we must operate in accordance with the design of the whole structure, and not simply of the particular instance. This analogy obviously has its limits, however, and we may still easily sink, not only because our materials may be inadequate to the task but also because we have missed connections in the system and our invention loses its theme.

It is a chance every textual analyst must take. In apprenticing ourselves to a cognitive architecture governed by performative injunction, we are “always already” bound by systemic codes. And since our boat is of the sort beloved of logicians, we are dealing with a nonreferential structure, a vast Gedankenexperiment or Borgesian aleph which, as fiction, lays no claims to truth-conditionality.¹¹ “Felicity,” then—if such there be sans Marian “fiat”—consists only in our readerly willingness to learn the system or, refusing the task, to leave it to its own devices. The Joyce system, in other words, exists in a state of bounded implicature, knowing only itself, a feedback loop possessed of the materials necessary to its own invention. Fortunately, our analytic effort is also a community one, and we learn from each others’ cognitive gaps and from our own “hides and hints and misses in prints” (FW 20.11) as well as our failures at appropriate operation of, for example, culinary codes which enjoin against the use of forks as weapons (FW 124.09).

Writing Joyce is, then, a semiotics of the Joyce system, and it assumes that the system stands in spite of the imperfections and idiosyncracies of any analysis, and thus that the analysis is, in logical terms, a second-order activity since systemic data are taken to preexist each particular writing of the system. However, in order to write the system, a metasystem must be created such that the demands of the system can be thought within the expanded frame of a deconstructive inventio. One of the results of this operation for the writing of the system is the production of a series of embedded texts which are slowly brought into alignment with systemic text-directives. This way of writing the system in itself produces a memory theater or teaching machine with its lexicon assembled in two ways: first, according to systemic text-directive, and second, according to systemic logic determining the outcome of linking operations. Thus in chapter 2, Portrait directs us to Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, within which is embedded the catechetical “technic” foregrounded in Ulysses along with numerous extensions of mnemonic procedures operant in Portrait and expanded under the heading of mnemotechnic to meet the epic demands of mnemonic processing later in the system.

Those demands are epitomized in the development of a “technic” which synthesizes pun, riddle, allegorical trope, mirror language of the Jabberwocky sort, and epiphany as defined in Stephen Hero. At the metasystemic level, then, catechism bridges into catachresis which encompasses the semantic demands made by all of the terms in the preceding list. At this point, the introduction of Derrida on catachresis in Glas not only enables us to think the transformation from catechism to catachresis but also in a sense is already determined by the system insofar as Derrida’s project is, in part, a Joycean deconstruction of modernity. Similarly, the transcoding of Joycean “technic” to techne and the embedding of Paul Ricoeur’s reading of techne and of processual mimesis within the system enable us to begin the project of thinking the meaning of the Joyce system’s performative operations. The same is the case with the introduction of Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic theory of enactment with its embedding of the Thomist concept of form as act, an operation which brings a neo-Thomist theory of the performative into alignment with semiotic theories of gesture and of theatrical performance.¹²

In order to enable the reader to orient him- or herself quickly to this at times necessarily convoluted argument, I have preferred throughout Writing Joyce to choose textual examples from among a range of frequently cited and, for the most part, familiar Joyce passages. And, as we have already seen, terms as fundamental to Joycean critical practice as epiphany, catechism and techne/technic are reconsidered here although my quest is for neither of the typical contexts in which these concepts have traditionally been discussed, that is, in terms of the historical Joyce and of the Realist mode. That rejection of referential mimesis as operant strategy is a crucial determinant not only of the development of the Joyce system itself but, inevitably, of the writing of the system as well. One of the results of that challenge is the rejection of the custom, dating back to Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” of referring to the chapters of Ulysses by their Homeric titles. This does not, of course, foreclose on Homeric transcodings of Ulysses since, as many commentators have shown, the requisite materials are embedded within the Joyce system. But it does help to break the habit of Realist domestication of the text, a habit which is surprisingly hard to break for anyone who has worked with the system as usually construed and has developed a form of nostalgia presently much encouraged by the fetishization of Joyce in propria persona.¹³

Perhaps, however, it is more difficult to become nostalgic about Finnegans Wake, and the shift from character names to sigla here may be the occasion of fewer problems for some readers, particularly as Roland McHugh has already paved the way for such a transition.¹⁴ Finally, it should be noted that in its rejection of an implicit theology of the hermeneutic sort in favor of an explicit one which may be logologized, Writing Joyce is, despite its emphasis on performative discourse, concerned neither with the so-called oscillating perspectives of the subject nor with the apparently ever-receding horizons of Iserian theories of performance.¹⁵

Logology

If it is not the Protestant-humanist theology of phenomenological hermeneutics which motivates this writing, then, as Eco says, what theology does “legitimize” it?¹⁶ In The Rhetoric of Religion, Kenneth Burke provides a response:

If we defined “theology” as “words about God,” then by “logology” we should mean “words about words.” Whereupon, thoughts on the necessarily verbal nature of religious doctrines suggest a further possibility: that there might be fruitful analogies between the two realms. Thus statements that great theologians have made about the nature of “God” might be adapted mutatis mutandis for use as purely secular observations on the nature of words.

[ . . . ]

Hence, it should be possible to analyze remarks about the “nature of ‘God,’ ” like remarks about the “nature of ‘Reason,’ ” in their sheer formality as observations about the nature of language. And such a correspondence between the theological and the “logological” realms should be there, whether or not “God” actually exists. For regardless of whether the entity named “God” exists outside his nature sheerly as key term in a system of terms, words “about him” must reveal their nature as words.¹⁷

That key term or “summarizing word,” Burke concludes, “is functionally a ‘god-term,’ ”¹⁸ and its language-making operations are, to use Roland Barthes’ term in Sade/Fourier/Loyola, “logothesis” (B 5), which is synonymous with the process of inventio.

Burke’s trope opens the possibility of working with the grain of an explicitly theological system without falling back into the humanist substitution and corn-modification of psyche (old style) or subject (new style) as telos, and without writing theology. It is a version of a practice which Burke himself refers to as “joycing.”¹⁹ The construction of a materialist semiotics within a deconstructive paradigm thus requires a willingness to accept the Joyce system’s explicit rejection of that mode of referential mimesis which may in part be summarized under the heading of psychologism in its various forms, and a willingness to jettison that teleological drive toward “aboutness” which the “Realist” tradition took as its speculary focus and which Western capitalist ontotheologies perpetuate through the dualist fetishi-zation of “subjectivity.” The drive to produce character and plot out of the materials of the Joyce system is, then, on this view, a reading against the system, a reading involved in the inevitable replaying of the narrative of the dominant ideology which is overlayered upon the system by, and becomes invisible to, those who choose this cognitive frame.

Taking a variety of forms, the drive toward reification of the components of the Joyce system includes the perpetuation of Realist readings of the texts, the recent search for the Holy Grail in the form of the pure text as fetish—a stage in Joycean critical practice which threatens to impose the entropy of a hermeneutic/exegetical method for decades to come—and, of course, the possibilities for reification associated with Greimassian semiotics with its emphasis upon geometric fixity of grids and paradigms. Which is not to argue against the use of the second and third of these textual strategies (though certainly against the first) but, rather, to indicate caution precisely with respect to the framing of the resultant data and the selection of semiotic modality required by the focal system.

Toward what Jurij Lotman classifies as a “dynamic model of a semiotic system,” then²⁰; toward a materialist semiotics which can accommodate processual mimesis and which can work with a textual system as a network of semiosis—a “semiosic web.” In processing the system, in following its encoded programs according to text-directives, we acquire competence in its operation/s. This process is what I call “working the system,” a cognitive activity impossible without the prior acquisition of a considerable degree of fluency in working its components. To the extent that we acquire such competence, we are “inside” the system and free to “rearrange” ourselves in its cognitive architecture (in the sense in which computer designers speak of the machine’s architecture or modes of configuration of data), in terms of which we learn to configure the system by achieving facility in its maneuvers. We are, to use another computer cliché, “formatted” by the system as we process it, and we therefore become capable of knowing or experiencing it.

Like any pedagogical system grounded in sequential processing of increasingly complex data and logical operations, the Joyce system initiates us (as chapter 2 argues) in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into the practice of what Barthes refers to as the “exercising of the Exercises” (B 42), an operation basic to the processing of the system as a whole, that is, to Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake considered as one vast system.²¹ At the same time, Portrait inducts us into the elementary use of catechetical paradigms and of epiphany as processual strategy, both operations which will become much more complex in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Later, as catechism branches into catachresis in Ulysses and the requirements of “postcreation” (U 14.294) incline the system toward an increasingly complex memory theater, the system’s performative injunctions become more and more frequent and its encoding of logological modes of transsubstantiation and anastomosis more evident.

In part, this sacramental trope is the process which Joseph Frank identified as “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” in his classic essay,²² but Frank’s attempt to use what Kenneth Burke would call the dominantly visual “terministic screen”²³ of Lessing’s Laocoön in order to resolve the telos of Ulysses into a static moment of all-comprehending noesis results in a reification of Frank’s logological point. Deconstructing Frank’s concept of “spatial form” in chapter 3 becomes a sustained exercise in memory work with the help of the “high semiotics”²⁴ of Augustine, Aquinas, and the inheritors of this tradition in contemporary sacramental theology. As both Zukofsky’s “A” and Finnegans Wake teach, before we can forget, we must remember, and remembering back through some fundamental principles of sacramental theology, we encounter a rhetoric which is already well accommodated to its subject and which, if approached logologically, may enable us to formulate a theory of performative enactment of the Joyce system.

In his list of the “Ten Little Middle Ages” in Travels in Hyperreality, Eco has characterized this practice in terms of the persistence of the philosophia perennis in many contemporary kinds of “formal and logical thinking.”²⁵ As he remarks, “the perennial vigor of the Middle Ages is not derived necessarily from religious assumptions, and there is a lot of hidden medievalism in some speculative and systematic approaches of our time, such as structuralism.”²⁶ By foregrounding some of these materials in Writing Joyce we do, however, run the risk of slipping into that form of neo-Thomism which Eco sees looming behind “the pastoral and dogmatic views of Pius XII or John Paul II . . . ,”²⁷ the negative side of the philosophia perennis.

We can, of course, avoid the risk by refusing to deal with the theological aspect of the Joyce system, or we can adopt Burke’s strategy of logologizing while retaining awareness of the drive of the Joyce system toward all-inclusiveness (though certainly not toward the doctrinal stances of Eco’s looming figures). For many readers, this will still seem to be an enormous risk but it is one which the Joyce system requires us to take if we wish to work (with) it. Until we have undergone this Classical exercise in discipline in the guise of mnemotechnic, we are not free to re-member the system for we must already know the function of each of its members within the semiosic web from which it derives its meaning. Having deduced form, we define function.

It is essential to note again, however, that where the visualist analogies characteristic of Iserian-phenomenological approaches to performative discourse (as well as of Frank’s concept of “spatial form”) would logically lead us to individualist interpretations based on shifting horizons or Riquelmian “oscillating perspectives” experienced uniquely by each perceiver, semiotic analysis of this sort is not concerned with focalizing the viewer’s position (whether horizon or perspective) and determining how that stance affects individual apprehension of the text. Such a subjectivist approach inevitably produces, as Georges Poulet has argued, a description of the interpreter who contains the text and without whom the text has no meaning.²⁸ Materialist semiotics by definition can have little or nothing to do with such Platonizing moves.

Modernity

“The word ‘modern,’ ” writes Ernst Curtius in his great compendium, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, “is one of the last legacies of late Latin to the modern world.”²⁹ First appearing in the sixth century, modernus, derived from modo (“now”), rendered possible for the first time the comparison of ancients and moderns, antiqui and moderni, an antithesis perpetuated in battles of books ever since. One twelfth-century variation on this theme, the skirmish between artes and auctores, forced the moderni of 1170 onto the defensive, as Curtius notes. Roger Bacon (d. 1294) summarizes the main issues as follows:

For the past forty years certain men have risen up in the disciplines and have made themselves masters and doctors of theology and philosophy, although they had learned nothing worth knowing. . . . They are boys who know nothing of themselves or of the world or of the learned tongues—Greek and Hebrew. . . . These are the boys of the two university orders, such as Albert [Albertus Magnus] and Thomas [Aquinas] and others, who in many cases enter [holy] orders at twenty or even younger. .. . Thousands enter who can read neither the Psalms or Donatus, yet who as soon as they have taken their vows are set to study theology. . . . Hence endless error rules amongst them.³⁰

Similarly, the insistence upon brevity and the castigation of the ancients for their superfluity of expression, charges made by the first rhetorician to identify himself as a modern, Matthew of Vendôme, could only have resulted in the further alienation of anyone aligned, like Bacon, with the ancients. Consider, for example, Matthew’s typically modern way of condemning the ancients for their erring ways. “Hoc autem modernis non licet,” he declares;³¹ such habits are not permitted by modern practice.

Not only is the term modern not a recent invention but modes of text production typical of modernism have much in common with their medieval antecedents, as such medievalists as Eugène Vinaver, Paul Zumthor, and Eugene Vance have been pointing out for many years.³² Mikhail Bakhtin’s concern with the polyglossia and “interinanimation of languages” characteristic of the “prehistory of novelistic discourse” is an aspect of the same study, as is his analysis of the relation between epic and novel.³³ My point is, however, not that medieval and twentieth-century versions of the modern are identical in theory and/or practice but, rather, that in following the Joyce system’s text-directives which draw the two together, we undertake a Joycean version of thinking an expanded concept of modernity. More than an importation of “modernité,” then, modernity in Writing Joyce designates a complex heritage, which is summed up in chapter 3 under the heading of “Gothic pedagogy.”³⁴

One of the agents in this process is Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality,³⁵ a concept thoroughly familiar to medieval writers engaged in the grafting of one text onto another and producing layered intradiegetic as well as marginal commentaries. Characteristic of a period of roughly fifteen hundred years during which history consisted of the palimpsesting through constant “retranslation and reuse”³⁶ of past and present “auctoritees,” this medieval version of postmodernist “historiography” was grounded in an apprehension of history as a continuous, present-tense process, a performative enactment of contrafacted³⁷ time as text. In the Joyce system’s version of this process, the systems of Aquinas, Ignatius Loyola, and Giambattista Vico, among others, function as intertexts, components not of the encyclopedic mode, as is often maintained, but of the tradition of the speculum and of what I refer to as specula/tive allegory. As is paradigmatically the case with Finnegans Wake’s privileging of the “Tunc” page of the Book of Kells (FW 122.23), the Joyce system rhymes then and now, tunc and nunc, in a grammatology which inscribes Vico’s Derridean theory of writing into a Gothic pedagogy of the speculum.

Logologically considered, contrafacted history, with its vast systems of rhetoric governing all of the arts, is the continuous revolutionary now of modernity across Western culture. In terms of Gothic architecture, it is the geometric manifestatio of world-order, a visual performative.³⁸ So conceived, modernity has dominated Western thought for many more centuries than post-Cartesian reconstructions of world-order which we continue to think of as characteristically modern in spite of all evidence to the contrary in the arts, as well as in philosophy and the physical sciences. However, it cannot be denied that there are severe ideological constraints upon this reading of modernity, for to accept the bracketing of humanism as a transient phenomenon is an event fraught with consequences unacceptable to many of us. Nonetheless, this is the direction which the Joyce system as an “archeology of our thought” takes, a direction precisely described in Foucault’s conclusion to his great study of this historical othering process, The Order of Things. “Man,” Foucault writes,

is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

If those arrangements [of thought] were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility [ . . . ] were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought once did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.³⁹

In tracing the disappearance of that face, modernity in the twentieth century has sought, through the disruption of the cognitive architecture of humanism, to set in place a network of logical conduits which may mend the gap opened by the Enlightenment.

Taking modernity as historical paradigm, Writing Joyce considers an array of relations between medieval and twentieth-century semiotics relevant to the Joyce system. Our purpose is not a comparison between medieval and twentieth-century sign theories, however, but a writing of the Joyce system—that “immense work of bricolage, balanced among nostalgia, hope, and despair,” as Eco describes medieval modes of preservation of the past⁴⁰—within the “continuous present tense integument” (FW 186.01) which it designates as its own field of enactment.

To be distinguished from postmodernism’s dream of a limited modernism—a dream which forgets, for example, that Pound’s making it new required study of Arnaut Daniel and Eliot’s of Dante—this Joycean discursive network rejects the notion that modernity may be confined to, say, Paris in the twenties or inscribed within a referential-subjectivist paradigm. And where, as Andreas Huyssen has argued, American poststructuralism has allied itself with the “ ‘anything goes’ variety”⁴¹ of postmodernism in its commodity fetishization of the subject, Writing Joyce works the Joyce system within the paradigm of modernity which it shares with Derridean deconstruction.

This attempt to avoid the flicker or “moiré”⁴² effect caused by theorizing the Joyce system within postmodernism’s paradigm of a limited modernism seeks also to align the Joyce system with a theoretical practice grounded in the system’s own operations. An othering operation performed upon “order,” the Joyce system is an “applied grammatology,” a carefully programmed deconstruction of precisely those concepts which postmodernism associates with modernism and which—as is paradigmatically the case with the Gothic pedagogy of modernity—cannot be experienced in any other way than through textual production leading to performative enactment.

Envoi

My “auctoritees” are many, and I am happy not to claim neo-Romantic “originality” for Writing Joyce. Where Burke’s logology makes it possible to work with sacramental theology without theologizing, Derrida’s grammatology makes it possible to think the results of the first operation into the second, of logology into the writing of the system itself. These are two of the core moves or macro-operations of this enterprise. In turn, a series of “terministic screens” has been used in the analysis of various aspects of the system, in each case designated by it. Thus Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, Vico’s Scienza Nuova, and various theories of musica speculativa, filtered through aspects of another analysis: Barthes’ Loyola, Donald Phillip Verene’s Vico’s Science of the Imagination, Louis Zukofsky’s “A.”

Other core materials for Writing Joyce have come from Vincent Descombes on the encyclopedia, John Freccero on Augustinian speech act theory, Emile Benveniste’s and Barbara Johnson’s recastings of Austin’s theory of the performative, and Paul Ricoeur on the theory of mimesis in The Rule of Metaphor. Among Joyce scholars, Umberto Eco has been the pioneer in medieval/modern studies with his Aesthetics of Chaosmos. That Writing Joyce would have been impossible without Eco’s development of materialist semiotics will be obvious, and although I sometimes disagree with his conclusions (for example, in my reworking in chapter 4 of Eco on the encyclopedia and on Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the rhizome), I am happy to acknowledge my particular indebtedness to Eco’s masterpiece, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Gregory Ulmer’s study of Derrida, Applied Grammatology, has also been crucial to my understanding of the Joyce system as a pedagogy.

It is a pleasure to see that the works of two of the finest readers of the Joyce system, Jacques Derrida and Umberto Eco, can be brought together in the analysis of the system and that, contrary to the dogma of some theory-commentators, materialist semiotics and Derridean deconstruction need not be seen as fundamentally opposed. Although this is not the place to develop this argument, I hope it will also be clear that, again pace some commentators, it is not because both modes are, to use that singularly vague and unhelpful term, “poststructuralist” that they can be harmonized. Despite the fact that both semiotics and deconstruction are characteristic of modernity, neither has its roots exclusively or even primarily in the twentieth century. The impact of medieval sign theory, of Scholastic methodology, and of C. S. Peirce’s neo-Scholastic semiotics on Eco, and of Rabbinical traditions of exegesis of Torah and Talmud on Derrida,⁴³ are further indications of modernity’s specula/tive development across the gap of the Enlightenment.

Like all memory theaters, Writing Joyce is a product of a community of mind/ brains,⁴⁴ and I hope that it will prove useful to those interested in semiotics and theory in general as well as to those primarily concerned with Joyce. The Joyce system teaches a mode of semiotic configuration which, if it is meaningful to say that this system is paradigmatic of modernity, ought to be widely applicable as a model (though certainly not in all of its specifics) to other modern texts, whether pre- or post-Enlightenment. Although I do not claim that all modern texts work as the Joyce system does, it would be interesting to see to what extent, for example, Gertrude Stein’s production does. The model should also be applicable to the tradition of what I have called specula/tive allegory, a genre which persists as a strategy of resistance across the rupture of the Enlightenment, as is evident in such examples as Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Melville’s Moby Dick and William Blake’s Jerusalem and The Four Zoas,⁴⁵

As for the predictive capacity of descriptive semiotics, it must also be said that there are those who regard this analytic mode as being in itself so powerful that any text, once fed into the hopper of semiotics, will emerge not only dis- (rather than re-) membered but uniformly sausage-shaped as well. However, given both the complexity of the Joyce system and the processual nature of the “dynamic model of semiotics” employed in this book, I hope I have been unsuccessful in producing such results. Our aim is the exploration and description of the workings of a system governed by performative injunction. Mourning the departure of plot and character, however, there will likely still be some readers who will perceive the antihumanist force of the Joyce system as in some way personally dehumanizing (so fragile is our sense of our own hegemony, after all) or who will believe semiotics in itself to be a mode destructive of the “life” of texts. Those for whom their own existence is an insufficient sign of “life” will likely never be happy with either semiotics or the Joyce system.

Of course, a descriptive semiotics is only as “good”—logical, thorough, detailed, conceptually rigorous—as the system it takes as focus. In the case of the Joyce system, no single example of a descriptive-semiotic analysis can ever be inclusive enough, but not, I would argue, because of limitations inherent in the methodology (though different methods logically produce different results, the specifics of the data base, so to speak, should not be significantly altered from one analysis of the same factors to another). Rather, it is because of the limitations of time, patience, knowledge, and inventive capacity of the analyst. It is a truism of Joyce criticism that no one ever knows enough to know the whole system thoroughly, and this is no less the case where the analysis is a semiotic one.

Finally, it should be noted that, in spite of the claims of many commentators to the contrary, neither Derridean deconstruction nor Ecoian semiotics is “neutral” or “value-free” or claims ideological “purity.” Neither does the Joyce system. All are involved in thinking/configuring/inventing—and resisting—an array of the constituents of Western culture. That this process in Writing Joyce is also, as is the case with Luciano Berio’s analysis of tone and register in Ulysses, an Omaggio a Joyce is a crucial aspect of its inscription.