“[T]he deprofundity of multimathematical immaterialities”: Finnegans Wake II.4 as a Parody of Mechanical Encryption

“[T]he deprofundity of multimathematical immaterialities”: Finnegans Wake II.4 as a Parody of Mechanical Encryption

In The French Joyce, Geert Lernout claims that Philippe Sollers mistook Finnegans Wake for a Nazi-annihilating bomb. Lernout’s sarcasm is remotely evocative of Alan Turing’s “Bombe,” a deciphering machine that accelerated the Allies’ victory over the Axis. However, the connection between Joyce’s and Turing’s endeavors could be more than tangential: the former wrote the enigmatic Wake to gesture resistance to the fascist encryption of language as well as to the Nazi persecution of his allegedly schizophrenic daughter, whereas the latter constructed a singular machine capable of simulating any other machines and carrying out any algorithms. More explicitly speaking, the duo of contemporaries’ attempts to fight against fascism resulted in two extreme solutions: Joyce celebrated the opacity of schizophrenic language and saw mental illness as uniquely human, whereas Turing invented a prototypical artificial intelligence whose digital computation pitted the material infrastructure of mathematical algorithms against the assumed immateriality of human consciousness. Therefore, this article aims to reread Finnegans Wake II.4 as Joyce’s response to the advent of computational devices. By turning “memostinmust egotum sabcunsciously senses” of Isolde/Issy/Lucia into an ocean of encrypted free indirect speech, Joyce wards off the imminent threat of mechanical encryption.