What follows is an exposition and a conceptual experiment around James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, with attention directed at what we might call the work’s ambient logic, or its atmospheric sense-field. I wish to examine FW as a turbid medium, as the written rendering of a tropospheric river, a filamentary water vapor conveyance channel also called a sky river. Of course, turbidity signifies the cloudiness or haziness of a determined fluid. And the verb-form “to cloud” signifies the deliberate obfuscation or pollution of clear discourse. On this point our equation of Finnegans Wake to turbid media seems straightforward: few readers could conceive of a more “cloudy” read than the Wake, so full of puns – an intrinsically turbid sense-practice – seepages of obscure, opaque materials.
On the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, researchers of the Sky River Project have labored over a complex system of climate engineering, where “cloud seeding stoves” deliver chemical exhaust into cloud formations in order to produce rain. The interlocking dimensions of atmospheric and ground-based machineries have led these researchers to arrive at a surprising assemblage: “Sky rivers are a conceptual model of water vapor transport that can, hypothetically, be turned into precipitation” (Hunchuk, et al[1])
Not only are sky rivers observable phenomena, through satellite tracking of water vapor displacements, they are also conceptual models; “four-dimensional topologies of flow” which rearticulate our understandings of atmosphere. I will attempt to suggest Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as an algorithm encoding hydrological procedures through an ever-shifting gamut of verbal renderings. That is, as conceptual model and material occurrence simultaneously. A “positively grotesquely distorted macromass” of all sorts of cloudhappy values and masses of meltwhile cloud.[2] In turn, the soundscript of FW, which consistently eludes “consistent” literary-theoretical approaches, seems to me to suggest a Joycean nephology, or science of clouds, where ALP and her many avatars, “Bringer of Pluralibilities” (FW 104) – where plural interacts with pleure, crying, and pluie, rain – enact a “latent topography of opportunities” (Hunchuk, et al).
While the Sky River Project, atmospheric engineering and its state-sponsored applications raise a number of environmental preoccupations, I wish to approach its findings from an experimental, if not conceptually ill-advised, speculative framework. Joyce’s unparalleled writing of physiological, metabolic and verbal transformation-processes, his “cantraps of fermented words” (FW 184) along with his wide-ranging readings in natural philosophy, allow us a number of permutations between the descriptive vocabulary of contemporary nephology and the speculative vocabulary of literary criticism – even if we may end up with what Peli Grietzer has called a “lossy compression schema” (Grietzer, 2017).
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Evaporation
Joyce understood that written words are only the “enveloping facts” (FW 109) of sensible qualities which cannot translate into script without generating ambient noise. Articulated language, “the vocative lapse from which it begins and the acusative hole in which it ends itself” (FW 122), produces a “nightside”, or a field of background noise where values flutter and transport in an isthmus of provisional meaning, a topology that Finnegans Wake sets into motion, “sensationseeking amid the verbiage”, making “soundsense and sensesound akin again” (FW 121). This approach, however, is not one of recovering a lost phoné behind the mute surface of the written word, “the curt witty-wotty dashes never quite just right at the trim trite truth letter” (FW 120). Joyce knew that the “chaosmos” of the printed page, with its semiotechnical implications, is also “moving and changing every part of the time” (FW 118).
Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read – or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something, it is that something itself. (Beckett, 1929, p. 14)
Beckett writes that the Wake is not meant to be read, much less understood, but heard or seen: its materials are not so much words, sentences or paragraphs which the eye combs over, but “variously inflected, differently pronounced, otherwise spelled, changeably meaning vocable scriptsigns” (FW 118). We will treat Joyce’s writing in Finnegan’s Wake as states of a system, rather than a collection of phenomena or metaphors. This allows us to articulate its components as ambient occurrences in a supersaturated system, in the sense that the most delicate local accident (such as the equivocated meanings in a verbal or phonological pun) has at its disposal a vast amount of accumulated energy – this is how the reader feels the Wake itself, as a compaction of potential meaning or energy, exploding through the mouth.
One of the scriptsigns that Joyce made use of is “cloud”. Since the story in Dubliners named A Little Cloud, Joyce played, for example on the “intermisunderstandings” between “cloud” and “clod”. A Little Cloud is followed closely by Clay (the protagonist of which is named Mrs. McCloud), and we are made to believe that Joyce is playing on the modern sense of “cloud” being a metaphorical extension of the Old English “clud”, as in “clod”. We are left with legible echos between diametrically opposite physical individuals, since the same modern usage of cloud probably arises from the formal similarity between cumulus clouds and rock formations. Joyce’s cloud, however, is neither wispy nor earthy, the airy suspension of the cloud congeals with the concentrated, malleable solidity of the clod into a composite, undecidable signifier, setting off reactions between the latent senses of each word, their phonetic utterances and conceptual associations.
This is an example of Joyce’s mode of writing understood as the deliberate habitation of semiological fractures. His “cloud” is not Wordsworth’s wandering, airy, lyrical guide, but a non-hilemorphic encounter of materials, a unified plurality (or pluralized unity) of particles of meaning. Meanings which do not become clearly outlined, and whose metaphorical exchange is not observed as the transference of signifying properties from one idea to another, but as cloudmaking. Joyce himself approximates writing to a sort of condensation-precipitation dynamic: “(…) by writing thithaways end to end and turning, turning and end to end hithaways writing and with lines of litters slittering up and louds of latters slettering down” (FW 114), like rain.
Condensation
I would like to propose that Joyce’s writing procedure is non-hilemorphic, which is Gilbert Simondon’s way of meaning “not an encounter between form and matter”, but a cluster of differential relations on multiple simultaneous scales. In accordance with Simondon’s theory of individuation, the acquisition of verbal consistency in Finnegans Wake cannot be adequately described in terms of the fictional elaboration of verbal matter into literary form, or even in terms of the minute semiological coupling of the material image acoustique and its corresponding, “formal” sign. Just as in the following description of the cloudforming we cannot ascribe form or matter-functions to the components partaking in the transformational process.
Particles of water vapor move into the atmosphere from bodies of water (evaporation) or the exhaling of leaves (transpiration). As the particles are carried up and out into the atmosphere by wind (advection), they meet aerosols—sometimes the result of natural sources like volcanoes, sometimes the result of human activities like air pollution. Some of these aerosols are hygroscopic: both attracted to and ready to hold water vapor. If the conditions are right, and if they find themselves in a stable but saturated parcel of air, these aerosols pull water vapor particles in, becoming the cores of cloud droplets. This moment of saturation is also known as the dew point, when the congregation of droplets—a cloud—grows in volume, weight, and height until they fall back down toward the surface of the Earth. (Hunchuk, et al)
Finnegans Wake is made up of many such “dew points” or moments of saturation where language, referentiality and meaning become overdetermined by their “nightside” underbelly of puns, half-formed senses, double entendres and equivocation; where turbidity becomes the underlying principle of a liminal verbal environment.
Sky Rivers, then, “require a double move, from terrestrial topography, where watersheds are determined by geomorphology, to a topography of winds and pressure gradients” (Hunchuk, et al). These shifting gradients, which scan continuums like syllables or feet scan a poem, are best described through the Simondonian “haecceity”, which is neither a thing nor a unit of measurement but a transport or transposition between states that can be singled out as a relay point between systems.
There was a koros of drouthdropping surfacemen boomslanging and plugchewing, fruiteyeing and flowerfeeding, in contemplation of the fluctuation and unification of her filimentation (FW 208).
In passages such as these, the graphically inscribed “paperspace” of reading twists into the vocable, sonorous dimension of speech,[3] as sense is produced (and simultaneously eroded) by a condensation of signifiers. That the little verbal contraption quoted above takes place while two washerwomen gossip about Anna Livia Plurabelle or the Liffey itself seems of little consequence here. What we may grasp is a congregation of droplets of sound and sense entering into the aerosol of verbal artifice, held as vapor – which joins with the other minuscule cloud of spittle droplets produced in articulating these words out loud. Elsewhere Joyce does take this mode into inevitably comic territories, as the “riverness” of ALP is enacted in imitative verse, sound being subject to a mimetic river water:
Well, arundigrond in a waveney lyne aringarouma she pattered and swung and sidled, dribbling her boulder through narrowa mosses, the diliskydrear on our drier side and the vilde vetchvine agin us (FW 209).
The technical “imaging” of a sky river involves mapping the concentrations of “white water” or vapor in the sky onto the location of basins and catchments on the ground so as to establish a field for visualizing their transformations over time. As white water itself exists “where moisture with a high potential to precipitate moves into discontinuities in the atmospheric flow fields” the imaging of sky rivers relies on the extraction of these discontinuities (or haecceities) and their transformation into a “written” line: “riverrun” read the opening letters of Finnegans Wake.
The resulting image is a sort of script, an “essay on the ground” as the director for the Sky River Project puts it, in a startling (probably involuntary) echo of Lacan’s Lituraterre, where the French psychoanalyst maps the ravines of the glacial Russian tundra onto the inscriptions of signifiers over the symbolic consistency of the real. Further, just as Joyce’s Nuvoletta (literally “little cloud”) character, a sort of rococo coquette made from cloudlike permutations, is made up of “a myriad of drifting minds” (FW 159), the “sky river is not a single stream but many streams that flow through bodies, territories and data centers”. As transboundary atmospheric fracture-points, sky rivers require imaging global wind circulation “as a latent topography of opportunities”, which is precisely what the metastable systematics of Finnegans Wake require that we conceive writing as. Opportunities, that is, to make “sensesound and soundsense akin again” in that provisional concrescence of meaning that Joyce condenses from the dew-points of heterogeneous sources. Joyce writes: “we are in for a sequentiality of improbable possibles” (FW 110).
Perceiving the coherence of a sky river or a passage in Finnegans Wake requires the apprehension of a cluster of transboundary relations interacting simultaneously at various levels. Since sky rivers can be adequately described as both “bodies” and “durations” of tropospheric water filaments (Hunchuck et al), they hold identifiable spatiotemporal relations, even if their contours are amorphous and their behavior independent of ground-based demarcations like national borders or regional frontiers. Accordingly, Joyce’s soundscript is both a body of writing and a time in which the apprehension of this writing elapses, a “continuous present tense” or, “the pressant”, “slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history” (FW 186) independent of the arbitrary grammatical laws separating languages, flowing on like “the waters of babalong”, bobbing along as a cloud in the sky, in boundaryless movement.
In most visualizations featured in the foundational papers, sky rivers are portrayed as linear structures or fractures across the Earth’s atmospheric continuum: a clear departure from the more conventional representations of atmospheric rivers, characterized by heat maps and field graphs (…) While heat maps portray water and moisture in flux as snapshots of a field of forces wherein the atmosphere is imagined to be pictured as a whole, the lines of sky rivers seem to establish a long-term knowledge of recurrence – something that can be wired to an infrastructure (Hunchuk, et al)
At this point I feel we might take up Beckett’s conception of Finnegans Wake as an iteration of the Viconian science of cyclicity. While his small essay does succeed in articulating crucial points for our present discussion, it does ascribe a religious or moral dimension to the Wake which we will bypass. Beckett equates each book in the Wake to a preordained Viconian cycle, each corresponding to a parallel cycle of symbolic making (poetic, mythological, narrative, etc). This Beckettian-Viconian reading of Finnegans Wake is similar to the “diagram-as-definition” conception of the hydrological cycle as subject to regular patterns of recurrence. Sky rivers are also, apart from a latent topography of opportunities, the image of a “long-term knowledge of recurrence” and something that can be “wired to an infrastructure”. For Joyce and Beckett this infrastructure is world-history as welded onto symbolic invention: intellectual traditions’ ascent and fall, shifting nation-boundaries, processes of linguistic transformation and acquisition, scientific disenchantment and mythical re-enchantment of the world and so on. This knowledge of recurrence and corresponding infrastructure enact Joyce’s “purgatorial” concept and device in Finnegans Wake:
A last word about the purgatories. Dante’s is conical and consequently implies culmination. Mr. Joyce’s is spherical and excludes culmination. In the one there is an ascent from real vegetation – Ante-Purgatory, to ideal vegetation – Terrestrial Paradise. In the other there is no ascent and no ideal vegetation. In the one absolute progression and a guaranteed consummation. In the other, flux – progression or retrogression, and an apparent consummation. In the one movement is unidirectional, and a step forward represents a net advance: in the other movement is non-directional – or multi-directional (Beckett, 1929, p. 22)
Precipitation
While the above quote from Beckett may illustrate the opposition between a succession of states and a superposition of intensities, as in classic Deleuze & Guattari, it also accounts for the global, multipolar implications of Joyce’s “soundscript” as interweaving fractures of semiological discontinuities made into catchments of physical/artificial cloud matter in a global or spherical atmosphere. “A round thousand whirligig glorioles, prefaced by (alas!) now illegible airy plumeflights, all tiberiously ambiembellishing” (FW 119). The “recurrence” component to all this is less Nietzschean or Freudian (as in the pathological return of the repressed) than Lacanian, in the sense that symbolic manoeuvres themselves require the scavenger-like use of recurrent verbal matter, its extraction from the matrix of language and subsequent recomposition into an utterance, a turbid script, “cayennepeppered over the text, calling unnecessary attention to errors, omissions, repetitions and misalignments” (FW 120). Verbal materials circulate, therefore, in a cloud river of unuttered language fields, the writing or uttering of which produces a combinatorial actualization of these “communities of droplets”.
Finnegans Wake, much like Simondon’s notion of the individual, is a transductive reality. Through the spreading-out of its active existence in temporal flow, it augments that capacity, already baked into any living process, of resolving structural problematics: a being that translates incompatible potentials into metastable equilibrium (much like sky rivers and the imaging thereof), which can only be maintained through the acquisition of successive complexities. In this, reading Finnegans Wake is participating in a physical system’s relational activity, sorting through the “climactogram” amid “portraitures of changes of mind” (FW 165).
I believe, in a rather roundabout or cloudy manner, to have laid out some coordinates for considering a particular literary device as an atmosphere. Particulate populations abound in Finnegans Wake, and noxious vapors interact with cloudy nocturnal vistas. Truly, “it scenes like a landescape” (FW 53), and it is only because of this kinship between the Wake and physical processes that we could unwind the written tangles of its pages. What brews, however, in the Joyce’s clouds, are long filamentary rivers of calumny, forgery, error and equivocation. Given our limited space here, I’ve settled for what might be a decent “methodological” introduction to our set of problems. If I’ve even come close to succeeding in seeding Joycean clouds, an immediate next step would be to wire them to a concept of Joycean pollution, acoustic disturbance, psychossexual punning and all sorts of referential tampering. Lacan writes that “literature is an accommodation of remains” (“accomodation des restes”) (Lacan, 2001, p. 3). While “remains” certainly bears the meaning of “waste”, particularly important for the Lacanian objet a as the quasi-object composed of the waste material unfiltered in the subject’s relation to the Other, we might translate “restes” as “residuum” or “residue”.
This residue would be all that flows into ALP, or the Liffey, along the hydrological transformations of Finnegans Wake. A voice accuses Anna Livia: “you, who ever since have been one black mass of jigs and jimjams, haunted by a convulsionary sense of not having been or being all that I might have been of you meant to becoming” (FW 193). The sky river might seem an overly pristine image, or might be understood as antiseptic aerosol, bearing nothing noxious. It was useful to us, however, to keep clouds as a rarefied droplet-community, even if we now have to dwell on the more turbid, more polluted rains brewed in Joycean clouds.
Notes
[1] http://averyreview.com/issues/53/prologue-to-the-sky-river?fbclid=IwAR3lrddk9eybeXdTSlrSpdNOv-oPftFMqkHiOOG-0p75dt_q9wT6udKoQNI
[2] FW, p. 111 : “a positively grotesquely distorted macromass of all sorts of horsehappy values and masses of meltwhile horse”
[3] Or, as Grietzer has it: “A given literary work’s invariant style or vibe, we argued, is the aesthetic correlate of a literary work’s internal space of possibilities. This space of possibilities is, from the reader’s point of view, an extrapolation from the space of transformations that encodes the logic of the work’s narrative, lyrical, and rhetorical ‘difference engine.’ “ (Grietzer, 2017)
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Bibliography
Beckett, Samuel. Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress: James Joyce/Finnegans Wake: A Symposium. New Directions, 1962.
Hunchuk, Elise Misao; Ferrari, Marco and Cheng, Jinru. Prologue to the Sky River. in The Avery Review, nº 53.
Grietzer, Peli. A Theory of Vibe. in Glass Bead, 1, 2017.
Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake. Penguin Books, 1999.
Lacan, Jacques. Autres Écrits. Editions du Seuil, 2001.
Simondon, Gilbert. A individuação à luz das noções de forma e de informação. Editora 34, 2019.