o_194c354f0fne14b05mcimi6ppa.pdf

exploits it, parasites it and deciphers it, is no doubt the minute parcel detached from the
other, the metonymic dwarf, the jester of the great anterior text [...] and yet it is also another
set, quite other, bigger, and more powerful than the all-powerful which it drags off and
reinscribes elsewhere in order to defy its ascendancy. Each writing is at once the detached
fragment of a software more powerful than the other, a part larger than the whole of which it
is a part./32/
According to Louis Armand, this topological structure of the relationship between two
textual programmes, describes a species of mise en abyme, wherein a "totality" "is
represented on the model of one of its parts which thus becomes greater than the whole of
which it forms a part, which it makes into a part"; a metonymic "chain of substitutions," of
the supplement [Nachtrag], or operation of "decentring," which suggests analogies to what
the mathematician Henri Poincare termed the "Vicious Circle Principle" and which Bertram
Russell in 1908 defined as an exclusion of metonymic totality./33/ This metaphor describes a
two-fold relation contiguous to Georg Cantor’s set continuum problem, which also came to
pre-occupy Gottlob Frege and Bertram Russell. The first is the ambivalent set between two
writing/translation softwares, in which one is a "minute" and "metonymic dwarf" which is
nonetheless "detached from" and able to "exploit" the other. The second is the equivalent set
of relations between two softwares in which both are a "detached fragment of a software"
and, simultaneously, a "software more powerful than the other" and a "part larger than the
whole of which it is a part." For Russell, "whatever involves all of a collection must not
[itself] be one of the collection." /34/
The idea of Joyce's text as a kind of machine has also been treated by Jean-Michel Rabate. In
his essay titled 'Lapsus ex machina,'/35/ Rabate examines “Finnegans Wake” as a "system
which can be described as a word machine, or a complex machination of meanings," a
"perverse semic machine" which "has the ability to distort the classical semiological relation
between "production" and "information," by disarticulating the sequence of encoding and
decoding". Joyce's paronomasian and polyphonic writing, we might say, demonstrates that
"[w]hat can't be coded can be decorded, if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for" (FW
482.34). By dis-articulating the received phonic-graphic binary, Joyce's writing also
destabilises classical notions of meaning and comprehension, forcing the reader to (re-
)assemble the semantic horizons of a text with whatever is near at hand.
According to Armand:
“In the "Mamafesta" section of Finnegans Wake (I.5), this set theoretical principle of
metonymic exclusion is posed against the function of A.L.P.’s letter ("Anna’s gramme")–a
"metonymic dwarf" of Joyce’s "nightbook" as a whole, in which the letters A.L.P. (nominally
"Anna Livia Plurabelle") simultaneously describe the recurrent "vicious circle" of a Freudian
repetition compulsion in which the form Alp is also, for example, the German word for
nightmare. As this "epistolear" becomes more and more a part of the textual apparatus that
surrounds it, and less distinguishable from its own analysis or exegesis, it begins to take on a
mythological aura as the site of endless co-ordinates for an impossible rendez-vous with
itself. Like the letters A.L.P. and H.C.E., this "nightletter" serves as a kind of topological, or
tropological site of what Jean-Michel Rabate terms a lapsus–a point of "continuity" which at
the same time marks out a chain of "dis-continuities," or the symptomatic "disarticulation" of
a sequence of encoding and decoding.
Borislav G. Dimitrov 147