SOURCE: Eide, Marian. “The Language of Flows: Fluidity, Virology, and Finnegans Wake.” James Joyce Quarterly 34, no 4 (summer 1997): 473-88.

[In this essay, Eide explores Joyce's “fluidity of language” in Finnegans Wake and asserts that the book “performs an exploration of the interactive relationship between oppositional entities.”]

Walking along the edge of the Irish Sea on Sandymount Strand, Stephen Dedalus reflects on the relation between the water's movement and language: “These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here” (U [Ulysses] 3.288-89). In “Proteus,” Stephen envisions language as a heavy sediment whose surface is disturbed by the implacable and constantly changing influences of water and wind. While in this episode of Ulysses Joyce suggests that language is a solid though alterable element, in Finnegans Wake language appears on the page in a constant, liquid state of flux. Joyce's last book records the tracings of water on land, the interaction of ALP and HCE, in a protean language aptly represented by the babbling flow of the river Liffey's fluidities as they wash against the weighty sediments of two changeable shores. While Stephen envisages writing as sand itself, Finnegans Wake is presented as the writing of water on sand. If this prose is not fluent, in the usual sense of the term, it is turbulently fluid with the currents of varied languages and idioms.

The fluidity of language in Finnegans Wake demands of its readers (and at the same time demonstrates the methods of) a fluidity of perception, interpretation, and understanding. Fluidity is also Joyce's sign for the negotiation of difference between nations in the colonial situation, between siblings in a family, and between genders in a marriage. The necessary adoption of fluid perception trains Joyce's readers in an alternative mode of understanding opposition. As a complement to the fluid mechanics provided by the text, I offer a virological approach, arguing that the exchange of genetic material in a viral invasion illuminates Joyce's exploration of oppositional interaction in colonial invasion.

The river Liffey, an embodiment of the character Anna Livia Plurabelle, provides an image for flexibility and fluctuation both in the writing of Finnegans Wake and in the perceptual habits necessary to interpret this text.¹ In other words, fluidity is a sign in the text, but it is also a sign of the text. The river signifies a perceptual system, which, informed by the mechanics of fluids, creates an assemblage operating between water and embankments, fluids and solids, writing and interpretation, the reader and the text.²

In varying contexts throughout the work, the river is portrayed flowing between its two opposing banks in an image that illustrates the mediation between rival factions. The banks of the river are represented as the oppositional and yet merging brothers, Shem and Shaun. Between them, the river that is their mother moves against her banks in such a way as to create a constant flux in the relationship between her twin sons. Presenting this familial and geographical interaction, Finnegans Wake [FW] performs an exploration of the interactive relationship between oppositional entities.

In exploring this relationship, Joyce draws on his enduring interest in the theory of Giordano Bruno of Nola concerning the coincidence of opposites. According to Joyce's 1903 essay, “The Bruno Philosophy,” Bruno professes that “[e]very power in nature or in spirit must evolve an opposite as the sole condition and means of its manifestation; and every opposition is, therefore, a tendency to reunion” (CW [Critical Writings]134).³ Bruno's philosophy unsettles a metaphysics of difference that depends on a preordained, hierarchical arrangement of oppositions such as body and spirit, passion and reason, feminine and masculine, colony and imperial center. Joyce sets Bruno's theory at the center of his text and illustrates it in multiple contexts that emerge from the central metaphor of the warring and yet mutually dependent brothers. By illustrating Bruno's theory, Joyce simultaneously performs a narrative critique of the philosophies of dualism. Following Bruno, he notes a collapse of the double entities into a singular reality by embodying difference as an identity of opposites.

Unlike Bruno, however, Joyce also opens up a new, fluid space between dueling elements by illustrating the flow of the river between two opposite banks. The river's physical appearance touches on opposition in order to destabilize it. Moving against opposite banks, the river enacts the principles of Bruno's theory as it draws by erosion the properties of the one into the other and makes one possible only by the existence of the other. And building on that first step, the river's currents pick up speed in the middle, altering the inflexibilities of binary forces with the playful complexities of currents in the stream. The river is the image through which Joyce critiques a history of dualist philosophy and begins to perform at its limit another approach that flows from the properties of fluid mechanics. Joyce's critique addresses dualism as a philosophy that made possible, by a metaphysics of separation and a preordained, hierarchal arrangement of difference, the dominant ideology of colonialism.

Responding to the agonistic legacy of dualist theory, Joyce's introduction of fluid mechanics integrates the oscillating movement of fluids as a strategic model for negotiating the obstacles of opposition. In “Nightlessons,” Joyce refers to Bruno's theory in which that oscillation is described through the metaphor of the river: “totum tute fluvii modo mundo fluere, eadem quae ex aggere fututa fuere iterum inter alveum fore futura, quodlibet sese ipsum per aliudpiam agnoscere contrarium, omnem demun amnem ripis rivalibus amplecti” (FW 287.25-28).⁴ Recognizing that we understand objects by way of comparison, that language arises out of an integrated system of differences, the dynamics of opposition in the model of the river erode both agonism and identity to touch on possibilities of integration. The rival banks of the river are locked in a mutual dependence that wears away the positions both of rivals and of twins.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, pursuing the same river metaphor, develop their theory of “between-ness” by locating the negotiation of difference in the rapid currents between opposite river banks.

The Middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.

(25)

Instead of locating opposition on the permanent river banks, Deleuze and Guattari find difference within the impermanent movements of the stream. The differential motion of currents within the water represents a theoretical conception of opposition as a transient interaction of current differences.

Writing about the mechanics of flow, which she associates with women's writing, Luce Irigaray in This Sex Which Is Not One describes an activity whose process, she asserts, is at its crucial level metonymic.⁵ The metonym, which relies upon contiguity, facilitates a language of “touching upon” and creates writing enabled by a logic of relation and connection or contact: what lies next to or is a part of the whole. Irigaray's idea of metonymy suggests a revolutionary resolution of the conflicts between identity and difference.

In an essay on fluid mechanics, Irigaray lists the shared properties of metonymy and fluidity, suggesting the role that those properties might play in the negotiation of difference:

determined by friction between two infinitely neighboring entities—dynamics of the near and not of the proper, movements coming from the quasi contact between two unities hardly definable as such … easily traversed by flow by virtue of its conductivity to currents coming from other fluids or exerting pressure through the walls of a solid; … makes the distinction between the one and the other problematical; … already diffuse “in itself,” which disconcerts any attempt at static identification.

(111)

The physical properties of fluids provide Irigaray with a model for the possibilities of cohesion between the “one and the other.” The conductivity of fluid undermines the solid distinctions between “unities.” By flowing between, for example, the river mingles the solid materials of the banks and the stream and makes problematic the idea of their distinct and separate identities. In a fluid system, as in metonymy, differences are associated through proximity rather than separated by their distinctive properties, as is the case in metaphor.

Irigaray argues that interpreting the flow of women's writing has been perceived as difficult because most readers have been accustomed to “solid” models for interpretation. If a reader falls back on habitual methods and congeals fluid language or paralyzes it, crucial information is lost. Finnegans Wake, like the women's writing she discusses, makes these habitual processes impossible; this writing demands a constant movement of perception between fluid and solid in order to achieve any recognition or understanding of the text.

The mechanics of the fluidity informing Finnegans Wake, like the mechanics of the river moving between its two banks, are in a constant process of negotiating opposites. This movement does not produce homogeneity, nor does it prefer one side of the opposition to the other. Rather, the river allows for internal frictions between its two banks of contradiction. At points, the language, like a river, can bring pressure to bear on one side while leaving behind a residue at the other. Sometimes the flooding of water over its banks is later replaced by the resistance and containment of the shore. There is a constant renegotiation between the fluidity of the stream and the solidity of the land that alters the banks by either erosion or accretion. This model for language becomes a conceptualization of the colonial politics of cultural difference that emerge in Finnegans Wake.

In contrast to the combined fluid and solid mechanics defined here, traditional methods of composing and reading a text might be said to obey only the laws of solid mechanics. Based on a model of extraction, solid mechanics depend on orthodox and utilitarian connections between code and significance that narrow the gap in perception between expectation and gratification. The fluid associations in Finnegans Wake erode solid interpretive connections and disrupt a reader's habitual procedures of deriving significance.

The interaction of fluid and solid mechanics is evident in ALP's “languo of flows” (FW 621.22), the Wake's version of the “language of flowers.” This phrase describes the writing of ALP's letter in defense of HCE in the terms of her flowing river waters. The “languo of flows” recalls the codified language of flowers in which each bloom carries a burden of traditional meanings. In Ulysses, for example, Leopold Bloom receives a pressed yellow flower enclosed in his correspondence from Martha Clifford. He remarks on the heavy stylization both in her letter and in the language of flowers that relies on the stable or solid connection between bloom and sentiment.

He tore the flower gravely from its pinhold smelt its almost no smell and placed it in his heart pocket. Language of flowers. … Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your cactus if you don't please poor forgetmenot how I long violets to dear roses when we soon anemone meet all naughty nightstalk wife Martha's perfume.

(U 5.260-66)

Bloom's mischievous interpretation of Martha Clifford's words plays on the language of flowers, indicating the solid interpretive connection between each bloom and its corresponding sentiment.

The languor of flows in ALP's monologue moves through and over the language of flowers to enact its own, different method of engaging perception. The Wake's “languo of flows” disrupts received codes by the “undecidable” gesture of water's language.⁶ It is a writing that, as it moves through and touches upon, is in constant flux and cannot be held in one stable signifying position before it flows into another.

Following the currents of this kind of movement, the method employed to write Finnegans Wake, seen in the changes from draft versions to eventual publication, was accretive and expansive. Joyce worked with associative methods to add later impressions to his drafts of initial ideas. These methods allowed friction against earlier assumptions and invited complication from the borders into the mainstream of his prose.

Joyce's writing in Finnegans Wake demands an altered process of reading that is compatible with the workings of fluidity, a reading that allows for selective intrusions of interpretation without collapsing into solidifying habits of extraction. The fluid disorganization of the text redefines signification as that which accrues to the movement of language as it passes over and draws along a reader's intellectual debris. A reader, following the interaction between fluid and solid in the river, gets in the way of the flow at certain passages, putting boulders into the stream to draw water around her own questions; at other times, a reader widens the banks of conceptual impositions to allow for the erosion that language enacts upon the expectations with which he had tried to contain the text.

Joyce's composition relied not only on fluidity of perception but also on practices of exchange. He composed by adding on to early drafts the connections arrived at both from outside sources (in history or geography, for instance) and from the internal sources in his own unconscious, which constantly exposed submerged patterns of connection. Reading compatibly with this permeable text demands not just comprehension but exchange. A reader might allow viral transformations of genetic code to form an assemblage between Joyce's mutating language and his or her reading. Interpretation is infected with the virus that moves through the text in order to permeate the reader's intelligence and initiate another series of fluid associations.

The connection that I am making between fluid mechanics and viral infection is not only strategic but also etymological; the Latin word virus means slimy liquid,⁷ an obvious source of poisonous infection and an apt description of the filthy waters of the Liffey. The river's language resembles a dangerously active virus; infecting the reader in the space between text and understanding, it shifts and reorganizes our perceptions.

The fluid disruptions within Joyce's language recall the workings of a virus, a strand of genetic code that mutates constantly within itself by moving through the chromosomes of various organisms and scavenging bits of genetic material. The virus is a machine of chromosomal subversion; it survives by entering parasitically into a host cell and altering the cell's genetic structure to disrupt the functioning of that cell.⁸

According to Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus:

a virus can connect to germ cells and transmit itself as the cellular gene of a complex species; moreover, it can take flight, move into the cells of an entirely different species, but not without bringing with it “genetic information” from the first host.

(10)

The viral infection forms temporary and surprising connections between disparate elements. The flu virus, for example, maintains its contagion by transmitting “genetic information” between animal species. Attaching itself to the genetic code of one species, the flu mutates by scavenging partial codes from that species and altering its genetic profile in order to bypass the antibodies of another species. To use one of Deleuze and Guattari's examples, when virus C moves from baboon to cat it carries into the cat some of the baboon's genetic material, creating a strange conversation across species.

The genetic or linguistic changes in Joyce's Wake have the effect of fluidity. Each cell or word in the text transmutes itself constantly, resolving into one genetic pattern before altering into another, reflecting through these changes the movement of fluid currents in the Liffey.

The slimy liquid of the infectious virus and the principles of fluid mechanics both work to form fleeting and unexpected connections between disparate elements. These heterogenous and multiple bonds are surprisingly resilient; the hybrid forms that result are well-adapted to survive. To temporarily shift the frame of reference, this connective movement reflects also the dynamics of a marriage that, like that of HCE and ALP, is also always an adultery.⁹ Marriage is a bond that, by virtue of its linkage of disparate elements in an adulterous union, is always in the process of altering.

One of the most compelling examples of Joyce's viral or fluid language occurs during an interruption in the children's guessing game in II.i. In a passage describing, among other things, the marriage of HCE to ALP, the influence of ALP's babbling river voice disrupts solid understanding. Her language infects “foriverever” (FW 242.31), transferring chromosomal material between signs, mutating language by carrying genetic code through bodies, and scavenging bits of genes along its way. To begin to interpret the word, I fall back on orthodox methods, extracting from “foriverever” familiar strands of code.

The sound of the word babbling nonsense or the sound of water flowing over stones draws attention to the disruptive potential of the river on the surrounding land. And the word “river” that glides through the middle of the word performs this disruption. “River” separates “forever” just as ALP's water flows between two banks formed by her sons, Shem and Shaun, whose spacial configuration models the literal placement of “for” and “ever.” But, just as the banks of the stream form one entity—the land, the father, or HCE—so do these words recombine into one, “forever,” which surrounds and contains the river like the more permanent land surrounding and containing the “impermanent waves” of water. “Foriverever” begins to signify a simultaneous marriage and divorce, disruption and connection between two differentiated elements, between “river” and “forever,” between fluid and solid, water and land, ALP and HCE. The elements of the word merge and coalesce; at the sight of the overlapping “R” where the left bank and the stream meet to form “foriverever,” there is an inextricable interdependence; the elements lean together in the muddy region where they share this “R.”

At the end of the “Ricorso,” adulterous marriage is interactive on a number of different levels. ALP reflects on her marriage to HCE in a language that is constantly fluctuating; each of her conclusions about that relationship is grafted to its own contradiction or exception. That complication of essential differences is repeated in the interactions of fluid and solid. Because ALP is figured as the fluid river Liffey throughout the text and HCE as the solid land of Dublin, the monologue reflects the exchange between fluid currents and the solid landscape. The result is a more mutable version of Stephen's language: “These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here.”

The idea of the river Liffey winds through ALP's inscription of herself as she signs her letter in defense of HCE: “Alma Luvia, Pollabella” (FW 619.16). The names that she chooses for herself and that Shem transcribes for her mark her connection to the river. The “Polla” embedded in her surname refers in Italian to a spring of water; the source of both the river and author is represented as a spring from which water emerges. And the source of fluidity is also the fall of tears. Polla is written over another version of her family name, Plurabelle, written over pleur, the fall of tears, or crying, the wail that will form her final monologue. The “Luvia” in “Alma Luvia” approximates the Latin diluvium, a deluge of water.

The river's flow is bounded on both sides by the warring riverbank brothers, Shem and Shaun, who enact the movements of opposition and strife in the book. The river of their mother flowing between them does not work to bring them into unity or erase their differences. Rather, difference is placed under erasure.¹⁰ It is scored through in its present condition only to underscore, to highlight and embrace, another logic of dissimilarity. Oppositional orders are defined, examined, touched on, and moved through, after which we find our concepts slightly altered.

At the beginning of her monologue, ALP describes her warring sons: “The sehm asnuh. Two bredder as doffered as nors in soun. When one of him sighs or one of him cries ‘tis you all over” (FW 620.16-17). On the most overt level of her narrative, ALP describes here two brothers as different as north and south, locked in opposition. This difference is placed under erasure by her correction in the next sentence: when one of them sighs or cries, they remind her of HCE, of “you”; they are him “all over,” unified in their shared similarity to another. The distinction between them can arise again but more subtly; they might only be as different as noise and sound (“nors in soun”), still different but in a subtle and moving opposition. In this case, the difference depends upon the position of the perceiver, on what language we speak. If we are not Norse (“nors”), then the “soun” (written zoen in Dutch but pronounced “soun”) will be more likely to affect us as mere noise (nors) than as meaningful sound (soun).

The first sentence contains an anagram of the two names (“sehm”-Shem, “asnuh”-Shaun) of the oppositional brothers. But phonetically, the first sentence also reads “the same as new.” The brothers mark both oppositional positions and repetitions of the same position with the slight change of the new. In the next sentence, ALP illuminates the idea of the brothers as different sides of the riverbank; “bredder,” which sounds like the English “brother,” is spelled like the Norwegian word for riverbanks. The Norwegian context arises at the end of the sentence, where we are reminded of the presence of “nors” (Norse) elements. Similarly, in her phrase, “[w]hen one of him sighs or one of him cries,” each brother has both a singular identity, “him,” and a share in the combined entity formed by a reader's tendency to read “him” as “them” in this sentence.

The difference between the brothers is not only directional, north and south, but also qualitative. In Dutch, “nors” is surly while “soun” means peace, reconciliation, and the kiss. But it is the same anew. It is not only “and” that is written between “nors” and “soun,” but the sound of the written “in” merges into the sound “and,” allowing us to interpret the word as a conjunction. The written word “in,” however, also suggests that the elements of each can be located within the other. We are offered two brothers: the surly in the peaceful, difference within the same anew.

As the rivalry of opposition is placed under erasure by the language of flows, strategies of difference converge also on the strategies of identity. While a politics of opposition requires a set of well-defended subject positions that can be encapsulated and transmitted in language, Finnegans Wake undermines the permanence of opposition by means of the process through which we have just seen the two brothers described. Each word in the novel is infected by a virus. Writing over itself, the text constantly reveals its own process and the associative logic that contributed to that process. “Work in progress” is the state that the text reaches us in, always still being written.

It is with this “double and undecidable stroke” that ALP touches upon disparate moments of colonial history in simultaneous gestures. Mingling similar and dissimilar dynamics, she is able to demonstrate that polar positions can erode to touch upon each other, so “that everything recognises itself through something opposite & that the stream is embraced by rival banks.”¹¹

The actual geography of the river Liffey is a constant presence in Joyce's narrative because of its fluid mechanics. Like most other rivers that flow through major cities, the Liffey is hemmed in by concrete embankments on either side. The immobility of the river's banks in the city of Dublin seems to refute quite physically any argument concerning the revolutionary action of fluids upon solids; the erosion or accretion that can occur in the interaction between concrete and water is minimal. In fact, the purpose of the concrete embankments within the city is to prevent this mutable interaction between fluid and solid. If this is the river that ran through the author's imagination when he wrote ALP's words and designed her interactions with her sons (the banks of that river), how are we to understand the relations between fluid and solid in the geographical image provided by the city of Dublin?

Stephen Conlin and John de Courcey, in their book, Anna Liffey: The River of Dublin, indicate that from 1600 “the Liffey has been progressively confined within quay walls, land reclamations and the great walls in the bay.”¹² 1600 also marks an era of increasingly organized English control in Ireland. Roy F. Foster begins his indispensable history, Modern Ireland, with the year 1600, which he marks as a pivotal point in colonial rule.¹³ In that year, “[t]he last great Gaelic counterattack under Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, was challenging the imposition of Englishness” (3). By 1607, however, the defeated O'Neill was living in exile. The concrete embankments of the Liffey with their attendant dissolution of interaction, emphasis on conformity, and distortion of fluid lines provide a particularly potent image of the results of colonization.

The city of Dublin was the center of colonial power in Ireland under both the Vikings and the English. The river's straitened shores within the city illustrate the constraints of colonial rule, a rule that ossifies the line of difference between cultures.¹⁴ Under colonial influence, the oppositional organization of perception hardens difference into immutability. The traffic of thought is deployed between solidified, binary borders, like the river's dirty waters between their concrete shores.

But it is also at the colonial center, where the embankments are most concrete, that the river moves out into the Irish Sea and to a decrease in the influence and importance of its containing banks, to a concentration on flow and movement. It is precisely at the point at which the contrary structure of thought is organized most inflexibly and authoritatively that differentiating potentials begin to erode completely. The river flowing between its cement embankments through Dublin and out into the Irish Sea is a visual reminder that structures of rigid authority carry within them the potential for resistance and the means of self-destruction.

Elsewhere along the course of the river, however, the banks are more flexible; there are points outside the city of Dublin where the interaction between fluid and solid is more supple. While this interaction in thought is increasingly obvious outside the boundaries of authoritative thinking, before ideas become concrete, the interaction continues even within authoritarian structures. Relying on a visual or geographical analogy, the river still erodes its banks even if they are made of stone; it is only that the pace slows to imperceptibility. Similarly, the relationship between the structure of contraries and the fluid infections of Joyce's thought proceeds at different paces and with varying results. Our recourse to solid or to fluid models of perception fluctuates, as does the geography of the river.

We have looked at the way that the river wields its influence on the solid banks of opposition that frame its waters. The site of opposition from this perspective is in the relationship between two banks. A slight shift of focus indicates another site of differentiation, that of the fluid currents in the river from the solid land that surrounds it. To express this in terms of the characters that these geographical signs indicate, we have seen difference residing in the struggle between the opposing brothers who, locked in opposition, nonetheless recognize themselves in the mirroring of that opposition. But we can also examine the difference between the watery ALP and her solid husband, HCE, whose body makes up the landscape of Dublin, and in this case the issue of difference emerges in a gender problematic. The issues of sameness and difference emerge differently in the framework of gender competition than in the context of a sibling rivalry.

Joyce explores colonial ideology through his metaphor of the differential interaction of the river with the land that borders it and through the marriage of ALP and HCE. The reconfiguration of the issue of difference within the marital situation gives his readers complex access to understanding systems of difference. Looking at the strategies for maintaining separation within the union of marriage, we find patterns of compromise and cohesion as well as betrayal and subversion of control. Joyce's treatment of the marriage between his central characters also incorporates much of the violence and coercion characteristic of a colonial system.

It is through the marriage of contrasts in the union of ALP and HCE that Joyce allows us to see difference as not merely structurally oppositional and irresolvable but often as viral, infectious. Marriage in Finnegans Wake is a fearsome, violent, colonizing exchange, but it is also a transition into unity, a transference of genetic material between separate elements, a conversion.

ALP describes the ways in which invader and invaded touch upon one another, the masculine and the feminine become dependent on each other, and fear and joy are participants in the same emotional cues: “I was the pet of everyone then. A princeable girl. And you were the pantymammy's Vulking Corsergoth. The invision of Indelond. And, by Thorror, you looked it! My lips went livid for from the joy of fear. Like almost now” (FW 626.26-30). ALP's discursive ambiguity unsettles stable assumptions about both marriage and colonial history. Rather than obscuring clear issues, she intensifies clarity by acknowledging complication. First, we plainly see the structure of personal history written over by Irish history and repeated once again in her memory. She recounts the story of her seduction by HCE and his invasion of her body; at the same time, she illuminates a history of the seduction and colonization of Ireland by, successively, the Vikings and the English.

HCE, to whom she addresses herself, is both “pantymammy,” a version of himself dressed in women's clothes, and “Vulking Corsergoth,” the invading or penetrating hypermasculine “hero.” But HCE only touches on these stereotyped roles, merely pantomiming the “pantymammy's Vulking Corsergoth.” Pantomime engages the dynamic of mimicry, approaching the object without actually taking up the place of the original. Thus HCE's pantomime imitates both the ultra-masculine conqueror and the “feminized” conquered.¹⁵ By touching on these oscillating possibilities, ALP's language recognizes each in the other. HCE is both a colonized Irishman and Thor (“by Thorror, you looked it!”), the god of the conquering Norwegians.

The livid horror with which ALP contemplates her conquering hero beautifully encapsulates the conjunction through which the incommensurable positions of different cultures are joined in colonization, just as different genders are joined in the act of seduction that she describes. The dread is experienced on both sides and is a reaction engendered by the uncanny experience of absolute difference and absolute familiarity appearing simultaneously. In ALP's evocation, horror is double and interchangeable, for while we can imagine HCE in his coarse Viking Visigoth guise, experiencing an abomination of her native Irish difference, the words here define, first, ALP's fear of the violence of her conqueror, the assumption of his difference from her perhaps more peaceful ways. But the next sentence—“My lips went livid for from the joy of fear”—describes a simultaneity of horror and pleasure in her mutual recognition and abhorrence of HCE's colonizing strength. “By Thorror,” says ALP, pantomiming the colonizing portrayal of such as herself and turning it back on the process of colonization itself. The projection of colonization doubles in her discourse as each member of the opposition is confronted with itself in the mirror of that opposition: “everything recognises itself through something opposite.”

The ambiguous negotiation of contradictions in this passage does not move in any singular direction—with the influence of English colonization on Ireland, for instance. Influences also move centripetally from the marginal colonized subject into the central power. “The invision of Indelond” refers, then, not only to the invasions of Ireland and India but also to the invasion of England by Irish and Indian visions. The “lond” in “Indelond” reminds us of London and of the entire country of England, the land east of Ireland. Invasion in this discourse is matched up with envisioning, vision inward or imagination.

ALP describes not only opposites recognizing themselves in each other—invader and invaded, for example—but also colonial histories moving across seemingly huge differences to have similar visions. Ireland and India are woven together in the “invision of Indelond.” ALP's “invision” arranges a palimpsest, inscribing a series of echoing subversions, betrayals, uprisings, and suppressions over the received codes of colonial history.

“Like almost now,” as ALP ends this particular memory. That “like” encapsulates her pantomime method throughout the passage. She creates through simile a trope that carves out a certain distance or space between its objects, allowing one to touch upon the other like a river upon its banks without removing the identity of one in order to appropriate it into the image of the other. In each of her moments of simile, one object of discourse touches upon, approximates, or recognizes itself in other ideas or images. But this overlapping does not allow for complete replacement.

The amalgamation of marital remembrances and political history superimposed together in ALP's words unleashes an association to a strong current in Joyce's theory of the colonization of Ireland. It is through the immediate domestic circumstance, and through the differential of gender within marriage, that Joyce is able to imagine and transmit a theory of colonization that clearly encounters and contemplates the mutuality and ambivalence of this experience. Joyce complicates our understanding of the lines of colonial history by restaging the terms of conquest in the situation of seduction, by understanding political power in the terms of marital negotiation.¹⁶

It is important to remember, however, that the particular marriage Joyce uses to make this argument, that of ALP and HCE, is an adulterous bond, a bond that is always changing, always other to itself.¹⁷ We must not presume that these spousal positions will remain constant. ALP will not always represent a colonized and subjected Ireland, domesticated and domineered over in her marriage. Nor will HCE always play the role of conquering invader and brutal husband. The roles that this adulterous couple enact alter and change course, mutating with the virus of Finnegans Wake.

Joyce recognizes that ossified, stereotypical readings of history become less true as they become more stable. If we are tempted to pair ALP with mother Ireland and HCE with the Viking Dane, if we position ALP always as the subject of HCE's violent colonization, we need only remember one of their first mutations in the text. In the first chapter, the fable of the prankquean and Jarl Van Hoother changes the valences in the equation of colonization. ALP mutates into a figure much like the pirate Grace O'Malley, “grace o'malice” (FW 21.20-21), and invades the land at Howth on the outskirts of Dublin, terrorizing the local lord and stealing his children. The fable mutates these cadences again when it concludes with the domestic scene in which the prankquean settles into the Lord's home with his children and “they all drank free. For one man in his armour was a fat match always for any girls under shurts. And that was the first peace of illiterative porthery in all the flamend floody flatuous world” (FW 23.07-10). The relations of power are ambiguous in this concluding scene of the prankquean episode. Though the pirate woman has been domesticated and “matched” by her mate, she is also a powerful (“fat” or fair) match for him though he wears “armour” (both armor and love) and she is only a girl “under shurts.”¹⁸

The Wake intervenes in a colonial ideology of opposition by marking the space in which fluid and solid simultaneously meet, interact, and separate. We might imagine ourselves drifting upon the fluidity of the text, tempted at any time to trail our solid fingers in the currents of the stream. And by doing so, we create a wake that attracts our attention. The disturbance we create in the text by our intervention produces a smooth space in the general turbulence of the waters. The Wake that we read by these interventions is the space of interaction between the fluid and the solid; it is the smooth space created in the wake of a vessel's movement through water.

Notes

1. The fluid mechanics that inform the writing of Finnegans Wake do not emanate specifically and solely from the voice or writing of ALP. Rather, there is an aggregation of disruptive influences in the language of the Wake around the figure of the river, which, as we know, is one of the figures for ALP. It is because of ALP's association, by way of the river, with fluidity and because of the disruptions performed in and by water that I link this perceptual and creative method with ALP, not because the character is responsible in any naturalistic fashion for the stylistic innovations in the text.

2. On the idea of “assemblage,” see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Masumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983). The concept of “assemblage” is discussed within the system of linguistics (see chapter 4, “November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics,” and especially pp. 79-80). “Assemblage” can also be understood as one of the functions of a “desiring-machine.” Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. For an earlier discussion of “assemblage,” see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 1-50.

3. Joyce paraphrases here a footnote concerning Giordano Bruno in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's essay XIII of The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), p. 94: “Every power in nature and in spirit must evolve an opposite, as the sole means and condition of its manifestation: and all opposition is a tendency to re-union.” Coleridge goes on to write:

   This is the universal Law of Polarity or essential Dualism, first promulgated by Heraclitus, 2000 years afterwards republished, and made the foundation both of Logic, of Physics, and of Metaphysics by Giordano Bruno. The Principle may be thus expressed. The Identity of Thesis and Antithesis is the substance of all Being; their Opposition the condition of all Existence, or Being manifested; and every Thing or Phaenomenon is the Exponent of a Synthesis as long as the opposite energies are retained in that Synthesis. Thus Water is neither Oxygen nor Hydrogen, nor yet is it a commixture of both; but the Synthesis or Indifference of the two: and as long as the copula endures, by which it becomes Water, or rather which alone is Water, it is not less a simple Body than either of the imaginary Elements, improperly called its Ingredients or Components.

   (p. 94)

   I quote Coleridge's treatment of Bruno at length in order to draw attention to his example of water as the substance that exemplifies the coincidence of opposites.

4. Roland McHugh translates this passage as “the fact that the whole of the river flows safely, with a clear stream, & that those things which were to have been on the bank would later be in the bed; finally, that everything recognises itself through something opposite & that the stream is embraced by rival banks”—see McHugh, Annotations to “Finnegans Wake,” rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), p. 287.

5. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977) pp. 106-18. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

6. See Jacques Derrida, “The Double Session,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 173-285. The concept of “undecidability” is discussed most specifically in pp. 210-11 and 222.

7. See Alfred Grafe, A History of Experimental Virology, trans. Elvira Reckendorf (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1991), p. 1.

8. There are several recent books that provide a layman's insight into the biology and genetics of virus. Among the best are Robin Marantz Henig, A Dancing Matrix: Voyages Along the Viral Frontier (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993) and Peter Radetsky, The Invisible Invaders: The Story of the Emerging Age of Viruses (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1991).

9. The word adultery is derived from the Latin verb adulterare, which stems from alter or “other,” indicating change, alteration, or othering.

10. I am greatly indebted, as my language indicates, to Derrida's discussion of the flux between differing properties in “The Double Session” from Dissemination, pp. 173-286, and in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), especially in the section “The Written Being/The Being Written,” pp. 18-26.

11. See McHugh's translation in endnote 4.

12. See Stephen Conlin and John de Courcy, Anna Liffey: The River of Dublin (Dublin: O'Brien Press, 1988), p. 11.

13. See Roy F. Foster, Modern Ireland: 1600-1972 (London: Penguin Books, 1988), pp. 3-5. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

14. Vincent Cheng's Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995) details the extent of this colonial insistence on difference with an extensive discussion of the “othering” of the Irish by English discourse and representation. See especially his introduction (pp. 15-74).

15. I refer here to theories proposed by Ashis Nandy, in The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 4-11, that the process of colonization entails a certain “feminizing” of colonized populations, in that they are represented as having the attributes and characteristics usually associated with women. Because those feminine attributes are perceived as a form of degradation, the complication of gender difference becomes a salient means for examining colonial difference.

16. Imagining the colonial situation through an abusive marital bond recognizes the real damage inflicted on the subjected partner in the relationship. But Joyce's examination of both versions of domination shifts the emphasis from victimization to complicity. He has noted, for example, that colonial rule fosters self-betrayal in the indigenous population, making Ireland a partner in her own domination. Though that complicity is passive and unconscious, it is nonetheless troubling.

17. By drawing attention to power shifts in this marriage, I do not intend to imply that these changes are equivalent exchanges or that the partners merely switch roles within a stable hierarchy. Rather, I wish to indicate that the power hierarchy itself is constantly changing, evolving, and solidifying into new patterns as the figures within it alter.

18. For a more complete treatment of the Grace O'Malley myth in Finnegans Wake, see Vicki Mahaffey, “‘Fantastic Histories’: Nomadology and Female Piracy in Finnegans Wake,” Joyce and The Subject of History, ed. Mark Wollaeger, Victor Luftig, and Robert Spoo (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 157-76.