From Lucretian Atomic Theory to Joycean Etymic Theory

Sean Braune
University of Toronto

Much has been written on Joyces use of portmanteau and pun in Finnegans Wake. Building on Joyces reference to the etym in the Wake and relating it to the Lucretian linguistics adopted by such avant-garde conceits as Alfred Jarrys Pataphysics and Steve McCafferys writing, I analogically regard Pataphysics as the literary equivalent of physics. Jarry considers Lucretiuss clinamen (which is the swerve created during atomic collisions) as a fundamental aspect of poetical creativity; this combined with Joyces etym can yield an etymic theory that can approach texts such as Finnegans Wake which so epitomize postmodern concerns of grammatology. Keywords: James Joyce / Lucretius / Alfred Jarry / avant-garde / clinamen

Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and LEcturEs, 242

The concept atom, the distinction between the seat of a driving force and the force itself, is a sign language derived from our logical-physical world.

Friedrich Nietzsche, t hE WiLL to PoWEr, 334

first became interested in the Lucretian clinamen while working on an essay that analyzed the compositional constraints employed by Christian Bk in Eunoia.1 Since then I have been considering the possible applications of a Lucretian poetics or linguistics in relation to broader implications of the avantgarde and contemporary approaches to semiotics and philosophies of language after Saussure and Chomsky. The tradition of a Hellenic atomic theory and its possible applications to poetics finds its earliest exemplum in Lucretiuss De rerum natura (c. 1 bce). Even though Lucretius, as a poet and philosopher, has been embraced by various

168

Journal of Modern Literature Volume 33, Number 4

avant-garde schools (especially the pataphysicians and Oulipians) and by myriad analytical movements (Bloom and Serres),2 I feel that an approach currently lacking is one that regards potential intersections between the avant-gardes usage of Lucretius (in both theory and practice) and the writings of Joyce, specifically the Joyce of Finnegans Wake. Leonard Orr points out the reticence Joyce scholars have voiced about the direction Finnegans Wake scholarship has been heading,3 and recently Peter Mahon has given an excellent description of the difficulties involved in publishing an academic work on the Wake: it seemed that they [the rejecting editors] did not really believe anyone reads a text like Finnegans Wake (800). Peter Mahon concludes by claiming, people are still buying the Wake in healthy numbers (806), which once again raises Leonard Orrs issue regarding the necessity of scholarly work on Joyces challenging final masterpiece. This essay is meant to be a preliminary consideration of possible conjunctions between Lucretius (as interpreted by avant-garde traditions) and Joyce. It is my conviction that Joyces final work is a hotbed of potential literature (to use one of the Oulipos favorite expressions), and I will maintain throughout this essay that Finnegans Wake is a text of potential linguistics, poetics and semiotics.

AtomiSm: the ClinAmen And A PoetiCS of PotentiAl literAture

Both Emerson and Nietzsche shared an interest in Nature: Emersons usage of nature is metempsychotic and Lucretian; and, like Emerson, Nietzsches sphere of the subject is a theory of subjectivity aligned with Lucretiuss postulates regarding the movement of atoms through a void. Nietzsche writes: No subject atoms. The sphere of a subject constantly growing or decreasing, the center of the system constantly shifting; in cases where it cannot organize the appropriate mass, it breaks into two parts. On the other hand, it can transform a weaker subject into its functionary without destroying it, and to a certain degree form a new unity with it (270). The unification of opposites is a sort of Brunonian synergy,4 syzygy,5 or Bachelardian surrationalism (Castro-Klaren 224), where the trajectory of the sphere of the subject splits, due to either a Lucretian atomic collision or Lucretian linguistic collusion, resulting in the formation of a new unity within the structure of the subject. When Nietzsche claims there are no subject atoms he is claiming that subjectivity, as such, is always prone to splits, fissures, and declinations, unlike the atom which was believed (until 1931)6 to be the smallest indivisible unit of matter available in the universe (as its etymology suggests). Nietzsche continues: Against the physical atom. To comprehend the world, we have to be able to calculate it; to be able to calculate it, we have to have constant causes; because we find no such constant causes in actuality, we invent them for ourselves the atoms. This is the origin of atomism (334). Atomism is its own ontology, its own idealism: God moves into the indivisible unit of matter, historically and culturally inducing theories of subjectivity to follow suit. To

From Lucretian Atomic Theory to Joycean Etymic Theory

169

situate subjectivity within a realm of indivisibility is an act of imaginary plenitude: if the self cannot be split (as is the case in the Kantian transcendental subject for example, or even the Cartesian cogito) then it is protected from the postmodern critiques of Derrida, Lacan or even Baudrillard who, in Ecstasy of Communication suggests the existence of a fractal subject (40). Steve McCaffery, literary theorist and avant-garde poet, suggests that: Nietzsche suspends Lucretiuss atomic downward descent but preserves the agency of the clinamen in this obvious emblem of eternal recurrence (23). Atomism becomes, for Nietzsche, a potential model of eternal recurrence: a theory of historical movement which maintains the clinamen as a motivating force promoting complexity; or, as McCaffery argues: Nietzsches sphere of the subject is consistent with the dynamics of the clinamen (24). The clinamen is the swerve in Lucretian atomic theory that is resultant from atomic collisions that occur when atoms, after falling downward, impact and create a swirling positively-charged void. Bk defines the clinamen through its usage in Jarrys Pataphysics:
Jarry may borrow this notion [the clinamen] from a classical context (the clinamen in Lucretius or even the parenklisis in Epicurus), but such a principle of deviance also provides a pretext for postmodern philosophy about the theme of misprision (e.g., the dtournement in Derrida or the dclination in Serres) vagaries that diverge from what directs them, escaping the events of the system that controls them. The clinamen is simply the unimpeded part of a flow which ensures that such a flow has no fate. Not unlike the spiral of Ubu or the vortex of Pound, such a swerve is the atomic glitch of a microcosmic incertitude the symbol for a vital poetics, gone awry. (43)

Lucretius originally writes: For if they [atoms] were not apt to incline, all would fall downwards like raindrops through the profound void, no collision would take place and no blow would be caused amongst the first-beginnings: thus nature would never have produced anything (113). Nature produces due to atomic collisions resulting in the clinamen which creates the exception of natural law; or, as Bk asserts: the clinamen serves to interject turbulence into the reprise of such lawful cycles in order to disrupt the flow of influence from cause to effect (44). The clinamen has been adopted by poetics because it is a symbol of exception: of effect resulting from constraint (hence, its interest for the Oulipo), and while Lucretius himself relates the clinamen to words;7 Michel Serres similarly argues: there are the laws of putting together letters-atoms to produce a text. The alphabetical proto-cloud is without law and the letters are scattered at random, always there as a set in space, as language; but as soon as a text or speech appears, the laws of good formulation, combination, and conjugation also appear (113). Therefore, the clinamen is the exception that results in a successful or unsuccessful literary product; or, as McCaffery will later pataphysically aver in the erroneous column of Zarathustran Pataphysics: Atoms are to bodies what letters are to words: commonly heterogeneous, deviant, and combinatory particles (21).

170

Journal of Modern Literature Volume 33, Number 4

etymiSm: JoyCeS SummA SemiotiCA

Beyond tracing a rough genealogy of the clinamen from its Epicurean roots to its current position in contemporary poetics, this essay also argues for what I call etymic theory or the etym and its influence on avant-garde traditions as taken directly from the pages of the Wake. I am aligned with Donald and Joan Thealls position on the importance of Joyce: Joyce, though, is the focal point, for he performed in poetics an activity analogous to Einsteins in science. His final works are a living summa semiotica. He consciously demolished the stability of the sign symbol and began playing with the bits and pieces of a fragmented society (51). The consideration of Joyces work as a summa semiotica is a necessary corollary to considerations of the etymic theory that is at play in Finnegans Wake. If Joyces work in poetics is as important a discovery as Einsteins in science, then how can his discovery be situated in terms that are synonymous with the scientific discourse of Einsteins? One approach to this question (the one taken in this essay) is by focusing on Joyces references to atomic theory in the Wake, and analyzing his atomic theory in relation to the Lucretian linguistic theory of the avant-garde. It is my assertion that Joyce has contributed to the revival of interest in Lucretian atomism by creating his own etymism and has assisted in revealing the potential of a unified field theory of poetics. How so? Joyce writes in Part II, Chapter III of the Wake:
The abnihilisation of the etym by the grisning of the grosning of the grinder of the grunder of the first lord of Hurtreford expolodotonates through Parsuralia with an ivanmorinthorrorumble fragoromboassity amidwhiches general uttermosts confussion are perceivable moletons skaping with mulicules while coventry plumpkins fairlygosmotherthemselves in the Landaunelegants of Pinkadindy. Similar scenatas are projectilised from Hullulullu, Bawlawayo, empyreal Raum and mordern Atems. They were precisely the twelves of clocks, noon minutes, none seconds. At someseat of Oldanelangs Konguerrig, by dawnybreak in Aira. (353)

Finnegans Wake is a work that practices its own abnihilisation of the etym. Following from Vicos own interest in the potential of etymology to connect humanity to the divine,8 Joyce, by using Viconian etymological approaches (which can be seen as anticipating the deconstructive apparatus of a Derridean grammatology) employs Vicos theory in the only manner which would benefit an etymological approach; that is, in poetic language rather than philosophical language. However, the abnihilisation of the etym contemporaneously results in the atomic bomb,9 anticipating the explosion that (expolodotonates) over Hiroshima10 and the paranoia regarding nuclear threat so prevalent at the time of Joyces writing.11 Joyces etymic theory allows for far more potential correspondences in philosophy through the use of poetics. For example (from the earlier block quote by Joyce): the usage of moletons as a unit of measure (moles are the SI unit of measurement of atomic mass), mulicules as molecules, empyreal Raum is a play on Imperial Rome where raum is also German for room while empyreal means

From Lucretian Atomic Theory to Joycean Etymic Theory

171

belonging to heaven; followed by mordern Atems which is a play on modern Athens where atems can also be a play on atoms or the Egyptian Aten (the sun-disc which has rays as its fingers). Aten was the monotheistic incarnation of Akhenatens God; thus relating yet another level of play in the notion of Imperial rule between the Egyptians and the Hellenic. The abnihilisation of the etym is the discovery that foregrounds Joycean etymic theory: it foregrounds the grunder of the poetical apparatus of Finnegans Wake and allows for the semiotic-declinations that align with a Lucretian clinamen swerving beneath Joyces compositional approach. Donald and Joan Theall analyze the above block quote from Joyce in the following way:
[A] phrase which weaves together references to war, to the destructive transformation of the natural world and to the transmutation of language, and more particularly of writing, in our super-mechanized world. The etym, Joyces imaginary unit for the true source of a word in historic terms, and the atom, as the basic unit of matter until 1931 when the possibility of atom smashing arose, are based on a conception of assemblages of different bits. (6061)

The Thealls define Joyces etym (which Joyce himself does not) as: Joyces imaginary unit for the true source of a word in historic terms. I rather like this definition. Damon Franke writes about Joyces interest in the etymon (115), a term he defines in the following way: The annihilation of the atom becomes, through etymology, a comment on the earliest formation of words out of nothing (in Latin, ab nihil from nothing) (115). I prefer the term etym as opposed to etymon, because etym sonically reinforces the relationship to atom and the other atomic references contained in the excerpt on the abnihilisation of the etym. The etym and the potential offered by a Joycean etymic theory is an interest of McCaffery in his work Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics, where the protosemantic can be considered synonymous to the sort of grammatological fascination evinced by Joyces use of the word etym: The protosemantic is [...] that sublexical, alphabetic, and phonic domain of recombinant infinity that is the Western alphabet in operation and whose quintessential disequilibrium can be specified as the excess of information over meaning (xxiii). The excess of information over meaning can be considered a definition of Joyces compositional approach in Finnegans Wake: the excess in every sentence rejects many of the traditional analytical techniques scholars rely on. Perhaps, this is why Finnegans Wake scholarship has lost its stride: the excess on every page or sentence would require a chapter devoted to it alone; or, if one went further following the lexical and sub-lexical threads of Joyces narrativistic weave, every syntagm or morpheme would require a chapter of literary analysis. Whatever school of literary theory scholars claim membership to, be it New Critical, New Formalist, psychoanalytic, feminist, historicist, deconstructionist, Marxist, semiotic, etc., the excess of information over meaning contained on every page of the Wake rejects the very notion of approaching the Wake with a politically vogue or academically vogue

172

Journal of Modern Literature Volume 33, Number 4

approach. Instead, I am arguing the best approach is one suggested by the logic of the Wake: which would be, for lack of a better term, etymic. McCaffery does not directly analyze Joyces text in Prior to Meaning (the Wake is cited only once); however, this does not deter McCaffery from claiming: In a real sense, then, this book [Prior to Meaning] should be read as an earnest cartographical contribution toward mapping out the grammatological content of Finnegans Wake (xxiii). I know some scholars must be shaking their heads in disdain over such an assertion, especially when Joyce is not the featured writer of any of McCafferys twelve chapters. However, I feel that a strong case can be made for this claim if one considers etymism in relation to the clinamen. McCaffery does not face the Wake head-on; instead, he looks at poetical works that claim a canonic trajectory in relation to Joyces great work: Charles Olson, Ronald Johnson, Jackson Mac Low, and Karen Mac Cormack, are each situated in relation to the protosemantic (or etymic) found in Joyce. As well, McCaffery himself indicates in Zarathustran Pataphysics12 how the Lucretian clinamen can be implicitly attributed to Joyces compositional practices in the Wake. Again, McCaffery does not make explicit claims for this; however, I feel that a reading of Zarathustran Pataphysics can yield awareness of Joyces own etymic practices. Before I consider McCafferys experiment in Zarathustran Pataphysics where he incorporates the clinamen into theory and criticism, I want to precisely define the perspective this essay takes in terms of what a Joycean etymic theory is and how it can function. The theory itself can be considered the protosemantic, grammatological approach that is utilized to expolodotonate language in Finnegans Wake, an approach that has influenced subsequent writers (either avantgarde or otherwise) in their own literary endeavors. This theory is key to the summa semiotica that the Thealls find in Joyce, and is a prelude to postmodern theories of language, which is why Joyce went far beyond McLuhan, Benjamin, Barthes or Derrida (Theall and Theall 62). Donald Phillip Verene situates Finnegans Wake as the great book of the twentieth century (402), and the reasons for this can be grounded in the theory of etymism espoused therein. Joyce operates in a similar manner as a scientist: he intuits, maps out the hypothesis and composes a work that is both its own hypothesis and experiment. The overcoding of information over meaning is, on the one hand, essential to Joyces hypothesis/experiment that dominates the Viconian poetical excess of the prose; on the other hand, Joycean over-coding anticipates the linguistic crises so prevalent in postmodern thought. The theory of etymism operates in the following manner: a work of experimental literature is analogically considered a dynamical system where, like chaos theory, a text operates on the motto of sensitive dependence on initial conditions (Lorenz 89).13 Fluctuations occur in the text: bursts of surprise created by the constraint of composition applied by the writer to the page. The etym is the imaginary unit for the true source of a word in historic terms, but it can also be a letter, or the letter itself. The letter is the indivisible unit of writing. Therefore, the etyms collected on a page create clusters of singularities, monadic units or words,

From Lucretian Atomic Theory to Joycean Etymic Theory

173

which in turn, over time, suggest an etymology. The surprise exception of the constraint of the written form is the clinamen or the swerve created by the collisions of etyms, which when placed in patterns or poetic constructs mimic historical structures of prose and narrative to create plot, genre and meaning. Therefore, the collisions of the etyms create the clinamen of narrative or plot. By considering the text as a dynamical structure in allegiance with chaos theory, I am considering language and grammatology as alluding to a living language (Dewdney 22) not dissimilar from Christopher Dewdneys thesis in Parasite Maintenance. McCaffery similarly avers: I dont offer this fact to initiate speculation on a tantalizing parasitic sublime but rather to underscore the highly complex dissipative structures that language and literature truly are (xvii), and here:
Most stimulating to me is their [Prigogine and Stengerss] contention that complex stable systems carry within them unstable subsystems that pressure the dominant system into disequilibrium and expenditure. (Their term for such complex systems is dissipative structures.) At a maximal point the system bifurcates into either a higher complex organization or into chaos. Such bifurcation points (transported and renamed by Deleuze and Guattari schizzes and lines of flight) function in a manner similar to Lucretiuss clinamen as a force toward difference and morphological modification. (xviii)

Donald and Joan Theall consider the influence of Joyces thought on McLuhans theories of media and communication. The Thealls discuss the etym in relation to Joyce as an influence on McLuhans considerations of television:
For Joyce, TVs annihilating the etym is also very important, for it alters the relationship of memory with the root language. Since the etym does not completely disappear, the process is an ab-nihilisation, not actually a destruction. The etym is transformed into Joyces own root language directed at unmasking the mystification of audiovisual communication. (61)

The importance for McLuhan is that Joyces etymism signals possible ways to target, discuss and revolt against the dominant forms of media in modernity. McLuhans own obscure prose-style is reminiscent of both Joyce and the symbolist poets: One of the obstacles to McLuhans not contributing more was his failure to interest communication scholars and social theorists in the potential contributions of Joyce, symbolist poets and the avant-garde to our understanding of communication (Theall and Theall 51). Thus, the implications of an etymic theory (based on Joyce and the contemporary tradition of Lucretius) is not limited to poetics, but in fact radiate outwards to implicate various other discourses and disciplines, from communications theory, grammatology, semiotics, cultural theory and sociology: Joyce consciously developed wild semiology, a necessary corollary to a wild sociology (Theall and Theall 51). The applications of etymic theory are clearly related to a procedure of Pataphysics which, deriving from Jarrys science of imaginary solutions:

174

Journal of Modern Literature Volume 33, Number 4

is constructed upon pataphysical lines which assume that the world is basically aleatory. It can only be seen through the understanding of the science of the particular which postulates the law of exceptions [....] Dr. Faustroll employ[s] their pataphysical minds in trying to counteract the beckoning of logic by relating each thing and event, not to a generality, but to the singularity that makes it an exception and therefore real. (Castro-Klaren 229)

Pataphysics is a science of the particular which focuses on the epiphenomena of experience; for this reason, it is easily differentiated from phenomenology because it focuses on the exceptions of primary phenomena. Sara Castro-Klaren, writing about Cortazar and Pataphysics suggests:
Each time a paravision or punto velico (Cortazar), or point sublime (Breton) or epiphenomenon (Jarry) is reached, the surrealist and pataphysical goal of the absolute is experienced. Sandomir, one of the satraps of the College de Pataphysique, writes that total lucidity is achieved when an individual carries out the postulate of pataphysical equivalency. The apocryphal text is then a pataphysical text, beyond metaphysics because it eschews any systematic theory of the cosmos or of being. It is imperturbable and pays attention only to particulars and of course it is imperturbable within the absurd. (Castro-Klaren 235)

The particular that Pataphysics considers is the exception created by the clinamen of an imaginary problem. The etym as an imaginary unit is ideally suited to such a program. Jarry, who pre-dates Joyce, can be read in allegiance with Joyce. Both Jarry and Joyce abnihilate the etym through a similar practice of etymological overcoding that utilizes portmanteau experimentation: For Jarry, the wordplay of such deviance often takes the form of the portmanteau (e.g., cornegidouille or palcontentes) (Bk 44). As McCaffery suggests: Jarrys pataphysical strategies similarly involve the method of the clinamen without an attendant atomistic ontology (24), which is much like Joyce who rejects any formulae for ontology and instead studies the abnihilisation of mythology or mythography, creating a complex grammatological experiment where the etym expolodotonates on the page to suggest both the crisis of the word and the inability of ontology or myth to describe human history. As the Thealls assert: Artists or poets create new grammars and new rhetorics to cope with the changing sociopolitical and technological worlds (51), and indeed this is precisely what Joyce attempts. Through his postulate of an etymic theory he is responding to the over-coding of culture that will eventually lead McLuhan to claim that the medium is the message (Understanding 7) where media has extended mans consciousness through the technological medium (19). The over-coding of the etym, which results in its expolodotonation (indeed a new nation) is the same type of global village (Gutenberg 31) predicted by McLuhan and found in contemporary technologies (the Internet being the obvious example). The excess of information over meaning is indicative of cultural norms in modernity, where the protosemantic of McCaffery can be found in the expolodotonation of Joyces

From Lucretian Atomic Theory to Joycean Etymic Theory

175

etym, resulting in the swerve of the clinamen that foregrounds discourse and narrative structures. Joyces concept of vivisection by which poetry produces a dynamic imaginary reproduction of the everyday world (Theall and Theall 53) is intrinsic to conceiving his etymic theory. Take, for example, the following excerpt from Finnegans Wake:
anastomosically assimilated and preteridentified paraidiotically, in fact, the sameold gamebold adomic structure of our Finnius the old One, as highly charged with electrons as hophazards can effective it, may be there for you, Cockalooralooraloomenos. (615)

The first word in this excerpt anastomosically can, through the collisions of etyms in the word create the clinamen of excess information where the word connotes anatomically, mosaically and atomically where, like pataphysical absurdity, the etym is paraidiotically (beside idiotically) the sameold gamebold adomic structure of our Finnius the old One. The adomic structure is obviously atomic structure but acoustically suggests Adamic structure as in Genesis, which is supported by the reference to the same Finnegan whose Fall begins the movement of the Wake. Here though, Finnegan is Finnius the old One with the emphasis on the ontology of One: an ontology that suggests God, Man, or even the Greek fascination and conflation between One and number theory.14 This anticipates Badious assertion that mathematics is ontology (Being 4), and all ontologies require a heroic or divine figure who in the case of Finnegan, is us or everybody (as in H.C.E. here comes everybody). Finnius is highly charged with electrons as is the Wake as a book: it is bristling with energy, the type of electrons that empower the sort of etymic structure that Joyce is evincing through his compositional practice. The Thealls assert, regarding reading the Wake:
Joyce, therefore, designed Finnegans Wake in such a way that the reader had to both see the printed page with his eye, while simultaneously listening to it with his ear to be able to understand the workings of the language and the range of puns. This aural reading also provided a means for utilizing the differences between the oral and printed language to develop a poetic counterpoint by which he could generate completely new lexical items created to cope with the complexities of a contemporary world permeated by various new communication technologies. (56)

This is reinforced by H.C.E.s other name: Humphrey C. Earwicker and by the assertion that: The ear in Earwicker reinforces the fact that Joyces work is to be read aloud, like Homer (Verene 400). Verene later asserts a sonic collision between Earwicker and ear-Vico (403), as well as relating Vico to vicar (398). The interpretive possibilities offered by Joyces Wake with its puns, allegories and portmanteau creations seem as limitless as the potentials offered by quantum physics. The Wake is like a cosmos, with its own laws of physics, which become situated around the law of the etym (which has its own laws of Pataphysics).

176

Journal of Modern Literature Volume 33, Number 4

When Charles Altieri claims that puns result in moments where, collision implicates us in dualities which it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine escaping (242) he is also encompassing the cosmic/quantum world that the Wake pulls the scholar into. The Wake is overcoded with collisions and these are etymic collisions resulting in a clinamen of interpretation which must be addressed by both the scholar, and/or the reader. The Wake is a collideorscape (qtd. in 240) as Altieri asserts, and it is in this cosmos of the collideorscape that the etymic interactions of Joyces text occur.

the PoetiCS of the PArtiCle

In Zarathustran Pataphysics, McCaffery demonstrates how the clinamen helps formulate a Poetics of the Particle (xviii). If this metaphor is taken to its furthest implications where atomism becomes etymism, then the poetics of the particle can be enacted by explorations within the grammatological possibilities offered by textual experimentation in relation to the etym and clinamen. McCafferys essay: enacts, as well as speaks about, the inclination of the clinamen when the latter manifests within writing as a typographic error (15). By separating the page into two columns, McCaffery composes a pataphysical experiment where the right-hand column registers the correct information and the left-hand column registers the erroneous clinamenic elements, or the rumble beneath the word (McCaffery xix) as he calls it. I include a reading of this pataphysical experiment in this essay because it indicates one important element of Joyces compositional practice in the Wake; that is to say, his employment of portmanteau. Arguably, this is the dominant experimental approach Joyce employs in the Wake. It is by considering McCafferys experiment in Zarathustran Pataphysics that his assertion for his work as mapping out a Joycean cartography might make sense. It is by utilizing the clinamen as a typographic error that allows McCaffery to illustrate one aspect of portmanteau deviance, which can in turn be extended to Joyces etymic approach in the Wake. As Bk asserts: McCaffery transpose[s] letters, inserting them or replacing them, doing so in order to divert the flow of his text with each typo. The increasing frequency of such miscreance eventually results in a display of cacophasia (44); and: [w]hat repeats is not a rule of repetition and imitation but a game of competition and agitation, in which the clinamen is the smallest possible aberration that can make the greatest possible difference (45). I will use the erroneous column in the body of the essay, the correct column will appear in endnote. McCaffery writes: The clinamen appears as the periplum, or Adysseus wantering path thruogh Pounts Cantos and reappears as one of Bloots sex revisionary radios. It inheres implicitly in Derridas notion of irritabilty and the force de rupture virtual in any writden sing (19).15 McCaffery describes the well known semiological tension between parole and langue when he writes of Harold Blooms16 six revisionary ratios which become radios emphasizing the writden sing of the written sign calling to mind Joyces own ear-sighted view of old hopeinhaven (143) or the emphasis on the, Ear! Ear!

From Lucretian Atomic Theory to Joycean Etymic Theory

177

Not ay! Eye! Eye! (409) from the Wake that registers the complexity of sensory information when etymic collisions produce the sort of linguistic and lettristic rupture that announces the crisis of grammatology first outlined by Joyce (and later Derrida). McCaffery continues, claiming: Such assembloges enpower the chinamen to instell punks, acrosticx, anygrans, metaframs, parafrans, and teztual patapraxes withyn the comminatory economy of sigms (21).17 As the essay proceeds, it becomes easier to see how the puns and portmanteau constructs of Joyce can be considered a deviation of the clinamen (where the clinamen is considered the lettristic mark). Here, clinamen can become chinamen and puns become punks, which could also declare the rebellious aspects of Joyces writing where he composes against the colonial rule of the English (as a culture and a language). By deviating from the accepted norms of English language with its rules, grammar and syntax, and creating the experimental language of the Wake, Joyce highlights the hegemonic aspects of language: its ability to repress a culture and enslave a race. The power of the pun is that it can be used by a punk for the purpose of re-territorializing the unfair power relations between the English and the Irish. Before I conclude I want to mention one more example of McCafferys Joycean lettristic experiment: Enxisionet woll b@ a materialism pootics formed around the mojility of the jingle grapehme in partly or entirely aleateric confugurations (25).18 The distance and difference between sense and non-sense becomes negligible in both McCafferys experiment and the Wake. However, the humorous aspect of the Wake should not be forgotten when considering serious scholarly approaches to hermeneutical analysis in Joyce: the Wake is a text that is concerned with the paraidiotic which can occasionally create a pootics out of poetics. McCafferys Poetics of the Particle has inspired the poet/theorist Christian Bk to engage in a microbiological experiment in which he considers the pataphysical potential of writing onto/into a cell as if it were a piece of parchment: In this experiment, I propose to address some of the sociological implications of biotechnology by manufacturing a xenotext a beautiful, anomalous poem, whose alien words might subsist, like a harmless parasite, inside the cell of another life-form (229). Bk insists: I hope, in effect, to engineer a primitive bacterium [with Stuart Kauffman] so that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also a useable machine for writing a poem (229). This scientific/poetic experiment, if successful, would result in a living clinamen where the individual etyms of genetic and atomic material combine, recombine and conjugate to create the clinamen of a living poem. Bk further explains that: [w]e [Bk and Kauffmann] believe that, with such a burgeoning technology, books of the future may no longer take on the form of codices, scrolls, or tablets, but instead they may become integrated into the very life of their readers (230). Arguably, Bk is extending an abstraction into the real; to put this differently: books have always been metaphorically integrated into the lives of readers. If successful, then the metaphor of a readers engagement with a text would become far more

178

Journal of Modern Literature Volume 33, Number 4

literal than any literary text could be. Bk puts this intention in the terminology of viral infection: The Xenotext Experiment strives to infect the language of genetics with the poetic vectors of its own discourse, doing so in order to extend poetry itself beyond the formal limits of the book (230). This language of infection brings so-called serious science to a poetics of pseudoscience which would literalize Burroughss assertion that: [t]he word is now a virus[....] The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system (49). Bks essay extends the implications of a Poetics of the Particle by relating it to genomic glyphs, by using the alphabet available from the nucleotides that code for DNA to create a constrained lexicon (familiar territory for Bk) with which to construct a text with its available vocabulary of A (Adenine), C (Cytosine), G (Guanine) and T(Thymine). It is through such pataphysical experiments (and I am claiming that etymism can be considered an object of study for serious pataphysical endeavors) that: Science and pun merge, and in so doing, language and knowledge become profoundly disrupted, thrown into disequilibrium only to reach a higher complex order (McCaffery 30). I earlier mentioned Joyces interest in the philosophy of Giordano Bruno, and I feel that Brunos sygystic symbiosis of opposites can be considered Brunonian motion: a borrowed and altered variant of the Brownian motion of particle physics (Hawking 66). As McCaffery asserts:
Giordano Brunos contribution to atomistic grammatology should not go unremarked. In his poem De triplici minimo et mensura, Bruno significantly modifies Lucretiuss analogy by a further equation: atoms are to bodies what strokes and dots are to letters[....] This important change reduces the minimal vector of the clinamen from a swerve in primary articulation (i.e., the letter) to a gestural declination of the prelettristic mark, such as the horizontal graphic line that would transform an I into a T. (22)

This essay is meant as an introductory primer to what I would call etymistic poetics, which begins with Jarrys work on pataphysics (in 1911) and finds its apotheosis in the linguistic and grammatological experiment of Joyce (in 1939). The potential for poetics offered by further explorations into the movements and patterns of the etym, which contribute to the clinamen of textual experimentation, can yield new approaches to compositional practices and interpretive strategies in both academia and literary experimentation. The collisions of etyms create the: the volute rhythm of a fractal contour (Bk 43), which yield the clinamen, producing the Brunonian movement of textual possibility in future ages of potential writing and linguistics.

From Lucretian Atomic Theory to Joycean Etymic Theory

179

Notes
1. See Braune 134151. 2. A good overview of what McCaffery calls Lucretian linguistics (xx) can be found in Mottes excellent introduction to the Oulipo. See Motte 122. 3. From Clive Harts complaint in 1968 to Roland McHughs similar observation in 1981, Finnegans Wake criticism requires new approaches to offer possible readings. Harts criticism of Wake scholarship, McHughs and also Patrick McCarthys are noted in Orr (21). 4. Joyce was interested in both Vico and Giordano Bruno: Joyces interest in Bruno was focused on Brunos conception of the coincidence of opposites (Verene 399). 5. The concept of a syzygia is important to Jarrys Pataphysics: [Syzygy] is an astronomical term referring to a temporary planetary conjunction or opposition, and adopted by Jarry as the basic rule for writing (McCaffery 17); and: The syzygy of words reveals that language not only defines but also deletes this distance between extremes. It assumes the possibility of the incompossible: Plusand-Minus () (Bk 41). 6. Which is when atom-smashing first became possible (Theall and Theall 61). 7. Lucretius compares atoms to letters at three points in De rerum natura (McCaffery 17); for example, here: Just as the words themselves too consist of elements a little changed, when we mark fires and firs with a distinct name (7577). 8. Leonard Orr argues that Vicos project is recovering or reconstructing the wisdom of the ancient Italians by studying through semantics and etymology; the words, under this working method, contain the truth. In fact, Vico talks himself out of this as he goes along, for the words only contain human truth and the simulacrum of divine truth (23), and later: he [Vico] posits transcendental linguistics (23). Verene similarly points out that Joyce especially liked Vicos insistence on the importance of mythology and etymology in the interpretation of history and his granting to mere events a secondary role (396). 9. In 1934, Le Szilrd patented the atomic bomb. This research corresponded to later work by Fermi, Strassmann, Joliot-Curie, Hahn and others. Finnegans Wake was published May 4, 1939. 10. On August 6, 1945, the uranium nuclear weapon Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima at 8:15a.m. Three days later, Nagasaki was similarly bombed with the Fat Man plutonium nuclear weapon. 11. Margot Norris argues that Joyces reference to moletons and mulicules appears improbably to gesture toward nuclear fission and the splitting of the atom[....] Yet it is difficult to imagine how Joyce would have learned of the highly secret experiments that were conducted in Berlin and France in 1939 unless there was discussion of their possibility in the 1930s (473). Rather than give Joyce the less likely possibility of predicting these moletons and mulicules from nothing, I endorse Norriss latter suggestion and will claim that Joyce must have heard of the experiments in the 1930s. 12. Chapter 2 in Prior to Meaning. 13. In considering a text as a dynamical system, I must defer to McCafferys assertion: Deploying this seemingly bizarre conceptual apparatus allows me to consider poems and texts as dynamic structures containing within them subsystemic turbulences, such as the paragram and homophone (exemplars of the clinamen and fold respectively) (McCaffery xxi). 14. See Badious Number and Numbers, especially pp. 78. 15. The clinamen appears as the periplum, or Odysseuss wandering path, through Pounds Cantos and reappears as one of Blooms six revisionary ratios. It inheres implicitly in Derridas notion of iterability and the force de rupture virtual in any written sign (19).

180

Journal of Modern Literature Volume 33, Number 4

16. Considering McCafferys earlier assertion for his work mapping out Joycean cartography, it is possible that Bloom represses Joyces Leopold Bloom. 17. Such assemblages empower the clinamen to install puns, acrostics, anagrams, metagrams, paragrams, and textual parapraxes within the combinatory economy of signs (McCaffery 21). 18. Envisioned will be a materialist poetics formed around the mobility of the single grapheme in partly or entirely aleatoric configurations (McCaffery 25).

Works Cited
Altieri, Charles. Finnegans Wake as Modernist Historiography. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 21.2 (1988): 238250. Print. Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2007. Print. . Number and Numbers. Trans. Robin Mackay. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008. Print. Baudrillard, Jean. The Ecstasy of Communication. Trans. Bernard Schutze and Caroline Schutze. New York: Semiotext(e), 1988. Print. Bk, Christian.Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science. Chicago: Northwestern UP, 2002. Print. . The Xenotext Experiment. SCRIPTed 5 (2008): 228231. Print. Braune, Sean. The Meaning Revealed at the Nth Degree in Christian Bks Eunoia. Studies in Canadian Literature 34.2 (2010): 134151. Print. Burroughs, William S. The Ticket that Exploded. New York: Grove, 1992. Print. Castro-Klaren, Sara. Cortazar, Surrealism, and Pataphysics. Comparative Literature 27.3 (1975): 218236. Print. Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. Print. Dewdney, Christopher. Parasite Maintenance. Open Letter: Canadian Pataphysics 4.6/7 (198081): 1935. Print. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. History. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1983. 237256. Print. Franke, Damon. The Resurrection of Being in the Ricorso of Finnegans Wake. James Joyce Quarterly 45.1 (2007): 115132. Print. Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time: Updated and Expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition. New York: Bantam, 1998. Print. Jarry, Alfred. Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician: A Neo-Scientific Novel. Trans. Simon Watson Taylor. Boston: Exact, 1996. Print. Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Penguin, 2000. Print. Lorenz, Edward N. The Essence of Chaos. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1995. Print. Lucretius. De Rerum Natura. Trans. W.H.D. Rouse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982. Print. Mahon, Peter. Buying and Selling Finnegans Wake. James Joyce Quarterly 44.4 (2008): 800806. Print. McCaffery, Steve. Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics. Chicago: Northwestern UP, 2001. Print. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. Print.

From Lucretian Atomic Theory to Joycean Etymic Theory

. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Print.

181

Motte, Warren F., Jr. Introduction. Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature. Champaign, IL: Dalkey, 2008. 122. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1968. Print. Norris, Margot. Possible Worlds Theory and the Fantasy Universe of Finnegans Wake. James Joyce Quarterly 44.3 (2008): 455474. Print. Orr, Leonard. Vicos Most Ancient Italian Wisdom and the Epistemology of Joyces Finnegans Wake. Neohelicon: Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum 14.1 (1987): 2137. Print. Serres, Michel. Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Eds. Josu V. Harari and David F. Bell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. Print. Theall, Donald, and Joan Theall. Marshall McLuhan and James Joyce: Beyond Media. Canadian Journal of Communication 14.4 (1989): 4666. Print. Verene, Donald Phillip. Vicos Scienza Nuova and Joyces Finnegans Wake. Philosophy and Literature 21.2 (1997): 392404. Print.

Copyright of Journal of Modern Literature is the property of Indiana University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

Copyright of Journal of Modern Literature is the property of Indiana University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.