“He Proves by Algebra”: James Joyce's Post-Literary Incest Machines

Abstract

Richard Ellmann's well-known assertion that "we are still learning to be James Joyce's contemporaries" carries with it a number of proscriptive implications for how we view the very possibility of a "writing after Joyce." We see these refracted not only within the Joyce Industry, but in the persistent haunting of contemporary (experimental) literature by what we might call a modernist false-consciousness, which is to say the false-consciousness of what continues to speak in modernism's name, as the determination of a cultural present that is always somehow both in arrears and yet to come. This proscriptive false consciousness is the focal point of the après-Wakean writings of Iain Sinclair, in particular Downriver, and of Alan Moore's excavations of Lucia Joyce's "institutionalization" in his recent anti-novel Jerusalem. Echoing Derrida's critique in "Cogito and the History of Madness"—Sinclair and Moore draw together questions of anachronism, hauntology, recursivity, totality, and incest in the proto-cybernetic Joycean text, into a reconceptualising of post-literary writing practice in Joyce's wake. In doing so, their work treats the amalgam of texts in which the signifier of Joyce is thereby inscribed, as a machinic assemblage—autopoietic, incestuous, metamatic—in which a cybernetic consciousness constructs itself in a retrospective projection. Joyce's anachronistic ghost is not in the machine so much as the machine is in it, in an incestuous involution of signifying production and consumption defining of a cultural economy over which the one exercises a spectral hegemony that the other simultaneously deconstructs.