A genealogy which would operate outside the traditional synchrony-diachrony opposition could also be regarded as a kind of transversal. Like the relativity of inertial frames of reference in the train journey in Proust's In Search of Lost Time , the "genealogical movement" of the Wake's signifying structures renders the Cartesian organisation of temporal and spatial difference as simply one possible (chance) outcome, among many, of a "communication" between shifting contextual limits. In one section of the Wake this relativity of outcomes is demonstrated through the various possible significations brought about by differing alignments of the letters A B C and D:
Please stop if you're a B.C. minding missy, please do. But if you prefer A.D. stepplease. [272.09-14]
If B.C. and A.D. refer to the so-called pre-christian and christian epochs, then the distinction here is depicted not in terms of historical discontinuity, but of identification and (subjective) preference. Of course, the letters B.C. and A.D. could signify just about anything, and indeed, in one of the corresponding marginalia, they are "rendered" in musical notation (272.L2), thereby aggravating the question of precedence and of proximity between graphic and phonetic signification and meaning.
This transposition gives rise to some other very interesting complications. For instance, the relative positioning on the stave of the notes BC and AD is such that the range A-D immediately encompasses that of B-C, so that if we were to extrapolate the signifiers of the two historical epochs, B.C. and A.D., through the positions of the notes B, C, A and D according to the musical scale, we would arrive at an arrangement of historical time would no longer be linear, but rather a:
PANAOPTICAL PURVIEW OF POLITICAL PROGRESS AND THE FUTURE PRE- SENTATION OF THE PAST [272.R1]
In other words, a later epoch is shown, not strictly to proceed from an earlier epoch, but in a sense to proceed to it, and thus to enclose it -- as though historical time could follow heterogeneous trajectories, or as though something that we call a past is really only envisaged and contained within what "comes after": "[i]f there is a future in every past that is present" (496.35-36).
However, what is of particular interest is the way A.D. and B.C. orientate and articulate history in terms of a zero-point, the year "0". What Joyce's text seems to suggest is that this "point" of articulation cannot be situated as a singular event (for instance, of Christ's birth). Rather, the "0" marks a kind of fourth-dimensionality, an "ultimate [t]hole" (134.01-02) through which history turns itself inside-out, a kind of "Gyre O" (295.23), or the 0 as the panoptical Argus, Horus eye, or the blinded eye of a "sinister cyclops" (300.26-27), or "the O of woman" (270.25-26) as the opening of the birth of a "cyclewheeling history" (186.02). This 0 could also stand for the non-place, the copulative function, or punct-ion, of the hypertextual transverse -- a containment and uncontained "languo of flows" (621.22) -- and insofar as this transverse is able to draw upon the figure of ALP as the "riverrun" of language and time, it would also inhabit the "O" which begins the "Anna Livia" section of Finnegans Wake .
We could say that the O which opens a "langu-o of flows" would constitute a particular type of parenthetic space: O opens onto ( ). In a sense, the zero point also marks an infinity ("nought time *[INFINITY SYMBOL]* [284.11]), a mise en abyme whereby one text is opened up to admit another text within it whose outer limits cannot be defined according to traditional notions of finitude. The parenthesis act as a kind of "tardis" -- a multi-dimensional envelope and/or a textual "mail box" through which other text are continually coming into being: "(and may this hundred thousand welcome stewed letters, relayed wand postchased, multiply, ay faith, and plultiply!)" (404.36-405.01).
SHAUN! SHAUN! POST THE POST
The postal metaphor in Finnegans Wake also offers us the idea of circulation and the way "onanymous letters" (435.31) are shown to multiply, again, into a "languo of [libidinal] flows" or rivers of language. The multiplication and flow of letters, however, is a continual excessive process, an inflationary economy of self-engendered production and expenditure. Like Shem's onanistic writing, this flow is not involved in an exchange, instead it describes a "continual present tense ... unfold[ing] in all marryvoising moodmoulding cyclewheeling history" (186.01-02).
This inflation -- economic and linguistic -- is (among innumerable other examples) offered as a staged "event" in the line: "denary, danery, donnery, domm" (261.16-17). This line appears to mimic the conjugation of a Latin verb, although it also provides a sense of economy through the elision of sameness and repetition of difference, something of a "use-value" of the word -- which here begins with the possible signification of the currency of Ancient Rome, the "denarius". We can imagine this economy as emerging in a very simple fashion, "initiated" as a tax, levy, tariff, or stamp-duty -- a postal charge of, for instance, one "denarius" -- becoming over time a bribe, or tribute -- a "Danegeld" -- a gift or "donation," a mortgage on one's house ("dom") -- all of which would be recorded in a ledger of assets or book of accounts (a "Domesday Book"). That such a "book of accounts" could also be a metonym of Finnegans Wake is suggested, not just in the way that Joyce's encyclopaedic text emerges from a sequence of interwoven and inflationary accounts of, for example, HCE and the Phoenix Park incident, but in the way this interweaving itself -- Anna Livia and the phenomena of hearsay and gossip ("gossipaceous Anna Livia" [195.04]) -- is fundamentally related to the economic principle. The very fabric of Finnegans Wake is, in this sense, indistinguishable in any straight-forward way from the process of its production. Or as Joyce writes: "Honour commercio's energy yet aid the linkless proud, the plurable with everybody" (264.01-02). This "linkless" or seamless (seme-less) interweaving of HCE ("Honour commercio's energy") with ALP ("plurable") is suggested at the outset of the Wake as the "commodius vicus of recirculation" by which "riverrun" comes to HCE as "Howth Castle and Environs" (3.01-03): "Hencetalking tides we haply return ... to befinding ourselves when old is said in one and maker mates with made (O my!)" (261.05-08).
DIVIDENDS AND RETURNS
The O, the annulus, the circle, the cycle and the ring, are all borne together in this double-economy between ALP and HCE, and between A.D. and B.C. One of the many things this brings to mind is the Nietzschean eternal return, already seemingly evoked by the Wake in the line, "Also Spuke / Zerothruster" (281.L3). For Nietzsche, the eternal return marks what, in destiny, welcomes chance (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy 28). It is the persistence of the chance event -- through all that follows under the names of "becoming, multiplicity and chance" -- as affirmation (190). In other words, the return marks what brings together all the different parts of chance as what is essential or what affirms chance, at the same time as it marks the reproduction and re-affirmation of chance (itself). For Nietzsche this affirmation is also a sacrifice, which opens onto a second moment of affirmation. This second affirmation is like an Anima (187), and also constitutes Ariadne's double thread which thus passes again through the labyrinth of the eternal return describing a transversal. As we have already noted, this transversal annuls itself as the affirmation of its perpetual becoming in the monumentality of its affirmed Being: "Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharse for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish" (FW 4.15-17). The sense of a "secular" (versus "ecclesiastical," as well as "circular") "phoenish" ("finish," "Phoenix"), suggests the way in which the eternal return does not come to rest upon some apocalyptic-revealing, or eschaton, but rather arises perpetually out of its finitude like the Phoenix rising from its ashes (for instance, as "[t]ime's livid final flame" [U 583:03]). As Derrida suggests:
This has the signification of a sacrifice, of an offer by which the all-burning annuls itself, opens the annulus, contracts the annulus into the anniversary of the solar revolution in sacrificing itself as the all-burning, therefore in guarding itself. The sacrifice, the offer, or the gift do not destroy the all-burning that destroys itself in them; they make it reach the for-(it)self, they monumentalise it. [ Glas 240a]
For the Phoenix to be what it is it must cease to be what it is, it must efface (it)self, consume (it)self in its flames, while guarding (it)self against a "past" that might be anything but the pure affirmation of its own becoming ("The phoenix, his pyre, is still flaming away with truprattight spirit" [FW 265.08-10]).
This affirmation, the fall that opens at each moment onto a rising-up, recalls the Verfallen of Heideggerean Dasein as the fall of Spirit (Geist). According to Heidegger, the sense of Verfallen which belongs to Dasein is that of Spirit (Geist) as temporalisation, since Dasein is said to be "spiritual" (geistig). Spirit does not fall into time but exists as originary temporalisation of temporality ( Being and Time 436). In other words, Verfallen is not from Spirit into time, but from time into time, one time to another ("time one livid final flame" [U 24:10-11]). It marks a fall at the origin which is not from Spirit or the spiritual, but which belongs to Spirit. As Joyce writes: "[i]n the beginning was the gest" (FW 468.05). And this "in" is of particular importance if we consider it in terms of what we have already encountered in the passage containing "big innings":
There's a split in their infinitive from to have to have been to will be. As they warred in their big innings ease now we never shall know. Eat early earthapple. Coax Cobra to chatters. Hail, Heva, we hear! [271.22-26]
We can see how Spirit (Geist), as a possible signification of "gest," draws the word and concept of "split" closer to "big innings". The fall of Spirit is from time into time , "from to have to have been to will be," which is marked here as "a split". Also, "[i]n the beginning was the gest," and the fallen Geist, which has left a "split in their infinitive," thus marks a split also in "big innings," gathering around its fall what "we never shall know"; being, itself, "the geist that stays forenenst" (299.14-15).
This possible rend(er)ing of "beginning" suggests how, as Derrida has remarked, "Spirit seems to designate, beyond a (Destruktion), the very source for any (Destruktion)" ( Of Spirit , 14-15). Moreover, the passage cited above hints at how the fall, allegorised in the Book of Genesis as the fall of Eve ("Heva") and Adam and the fall of the "Turrace of Babbel" (199.31), is something "within" or belonging to Dasein (as the three-fold HCE -- the reversal and internal multiplication of the name also opening the scene of a kind of fall):
Now ... concerning the genesis of Harold or Humphrey Chimpden's occupational agnomen (we are back in the presurnames prodromarith period, of course just when enos chalked halltraps) ... Hag Chivychas Eve, in prefall paradise. [FW 30.01-15]
Jacques Derrida has already pointed out, in his essay 'Two Words for Joyce,' the complex interweavings of the fall of the Shemite Tower of Babel ("ruin of space, shattered glass and toppling masonry" [U 583:04-05]) with the confusion of language -- and the way this fall/confusion is brought about by the god Jehovah speaking his own name, Babel or Bavel, itself a confused signifier of "confusion". What is of further interest to us here, however, is the way this Babelisation of language remarked upon by Derrida is echoed in the Verfallen of Dasein as an experience of idle talk (Gerede).