The physics of fiction

Sokal : from hoax to malaise

In the spring of 1996, the deconstructionist journal Social text published an article by New York University physicist Alan Sokal entitled " Transgressing boundaries : towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravitation "¹. This article begins with the following preamble :

" Many scientists, and among them physicists even more than others, continue to reject the idea that disciplines concerned with the analysis of society and culture can contribute in any way, except perhaps peripherally, to their own research. They are even less receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview might be revised or rebuilt in the light of analyses of this kind. "

Under the guise of drawing a parallel between the development of quantum mechanics and the contemporary deconstructionist approach in the human sciences, Alan Sokal is in fact writing a hoax article parodying the apology of a generalized relativism, whose scientific model would be Einstein's relativity.

We'd like to take Sokal at his word here : Decoding the eternal laws of nature is not simply a matter of calculation, but also of modelling, and modelling calls on the creative imagination. The virtual space of theoretical questioning overlaps with the imaginary space of fictional invention. Ridiculing and caricaturing a clumsy exploitation of relativistic and quantum models by deconstructionists in the human sciences, Sokal stigmatizes a hermeneutic, where the release of a transformative poetics is at stake, on an altogether different basis than relativistic : not criticizing the theory of criticism, but trying, seriously, to theorize a creative practice in an interdisciplinary way.

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The examination of this imaginary circulation between physical modelling and artistic creation is not only motivated by the massive irruption of physics into literature and art as a fictional theme, as a decorative motif, as a claimed model  it is reciprocally necessitated by the new relationship that physicists now have with fiction in their own research practice, in the absence of possible experimentation and faced with phenomena that seem to escape the human possibilities of representation ;

I. Physical modeling and fictional modeling

In fact, fiction cannot be taken to mean simply the borderline gratuitous elaboration of a work of fantasy. Fiction is the ability to forge a world² that escapes common representation, which doesn't necessarily mean that this world doesn't exist, that it isn't physical, or that its modeling is without consequence for reality. The upheaval in physics brought about by Planck's theory of quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of special relativity have placed fiction at the heart of contemporary physics, not only as a supplement to experience (this was already a classical practice), but also as an opening onto new, unpresentable dimensions³, of the real. The new scientific status of fiction is linked to the phenomenon of gravity, which has polarized much physics research since Newton. In The Nature of'space and time, Stephen Hawking highlights the radical difference of gravity from other force fields :

" it is radically different, because it itself shapes the stage on which it plays, unlike other fields which play in a fixed space-time setting⁴. "

Shaping is precisely no longer the order of the stage and its fixed set : shaping is fiction. Under extreme conditions, gravity has the power not only to alter the nature of space and time, but to assign them a limit, which is the modern limit of representation. A force field is defined in physics as a system or principle of interaction between distant particles or objects: when we identify an actantial interaction at the base of any scene of representation, we define a force field. What contemporary physics introduces is a force field capable of shaping on sight the scene where it occurs, i.e. fictionalizing that scene rather than representing it.

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The singularity, or the collapse of the scene

When gravity is extreme in a given spacetime, it affects the circulation of light in such a way that the trajectory of photons is not just deviated, but imprisoned. This imprisonment cannot simply be represented as a material immobilization of matter or energy in a uniform space-time. Inside this trapped zone, both space and time at the boundary no longer exist: they collapse. A " singularity " is created. When the singularity is of the " black hole " type, it is surrounded by an " event horizon " i.e. a limit beyond which, when coming from the outside, there are no more events. This limit is not a spatio-temporal limit, a wall, a boundary beyond which light, time could continue. The singularity implies, when accessed, a tipping⁵ and, within it, a collapse. Indeed, gravitation is so strong that the object attracted by the singularity reaches the speed of light, at which time ceases to flow. To the " trapped surface " of the black hole corresponds the space of invisibility of the chamber in fiction, that place of brutality⁶ that cannot be viewed from a distant point, like the scene the voyeur breaks into.

The event horizon

The event horizon circumscribes, in physical space, a zone within which there can be no more events. This zone can therefore be defined neither as a scene of representation, nor even as the darkroom of the unrepresentable, since the darkroom imprisons without completely annihilating an event that will be revealed at the end of the investigation. Unlike the darkroom, the black hole does not simply withhold information  it collapses the event and destroys it: it collapses the event and destroys the information that constitutes it ; it constitutes itself, out of time, metaphysically, as the unthought of the event, like Kasimir Malevich's Black Square on Background white (1913)⁷ : neither a secret nor an enigma, but a depression of color, a reduction of matter to its principal undifferentiatedness.

Maurice Dantec's Artefact systematically implements this new device of scenic collapse. In the second part of the novel, the /// narrator describes the collapse of his own schizophrenic psyche as constituting the singularity of a black hole :

" In a black hole, in a singularity, in what grounds an indivis, an individual, the time and space that govern the dimensions of the visible world are unthinkable, and unthought [...].
. I myself am this hollowness, this hypersphere in continuous expansion/contraction, and this is why, when language emerges in me, when the star approaches, when the darkness reveals itself somewhat, hinting at the infinite brilliance it contains, a cognitive process sets in motion, and this cognitive process, in this black hole that connects the two poles of my disjointed identity, inevitably takes physical form.
It becomes a phenomenon.
It becomes a phenomenon. It becomes a phenomenon.
It becomes an event.
It becomes another world.
Or rather, it becomes an other being.
It becomes what I am. " (Maurice G. Dantec, Artefact. Machines à écrire 1.0, Albin Michel, 2007, pp. 300-301.)

There can be no question here of the darkroom of the unconscious. Beyond the mnemonic traces of trauma, the cognitive black hole is embodied in the unthinkable interiority of a man whose memory, disjoined from itself, has been erased, so to speak. The man notes that pages of writing are typed by him, yet he never keeps track of the experience of being in the act of writing: something of him types these pages in the room. The hollowness, the black hole of his collapsed consciousness is countered by the emergence of a depersonalized cognitive process, fixed and objectified in the writing pages: information is produced, but fictional information, an artifact that replaces the collapsed reality in his disjointed consciousness, the lost subjective information. The artifact is the assumed product of fiction in post-representational civilization.

II. Fictional implementation of the black hole : the example of Dan Brown

This fictional device of the black hole is not the prerogative of avant-garde scholarly deconstructionist art. It is widespread in mainstream cinema, science fiction and popular and commercial literature. Dan Brown's novels are a case in point.

At the start of Da Vinci code, Louvre curator Jacques Saunière, the last guardian of a secret that dates back to the dawn of Christianity, locks himself in his museum's Grande Galerie to escape the assassin who is stalking him. He rips a Caravaggio from the wall, thus triggering the security system, which drops a grating between him and the man stalking him. But the killer mortally wounds him through the grate  it then becomes a death trap for him, inside which he must preserve the secret, the information of which he is, for a few minutes before he dies, the sole and precarious custodian : " The secret must be passed on⁸. "

In Deception point, Dan Brown sets the heart of the action at the North Pole, where a meteorite has been faked to make it look like a sensational discovery. Wailee Ming, an inconvenient witness, gets too close to take water samples from " the black hole⁹ ", an extraction shaft that has been dug into the ice. Ming is then executed for getting too close to the site of the discovery and the deception. A remote-controlled flying microrobot causes him to lose his balance when it hits his right eye (chap. 36, pp.170-171). The death /// Ming's death, like Saunière's, is executed from a distance, from outside the black hole where the collapse of information is to be precipitated. This death is not an event: Ming is, by his death, purely and simply retracted. The anguishing power of this scene, paradoxical in that it cannot be seen from any point of view other than that of the dead man, lies in the disintegration of the character, which here takes the form of drowning, whereas in Da Vinci code the gastric juices spilled inside Saunière's body wreak their acidic havoc. Here, too, the icy water permeates death like acid, entering Ming's lungs. Ming's speech, cut off by the cold, folds in on itself, no longer able to emerge from the hole, which traps the geodesics of sound.

Speed, logic and challenge : the video game model

In Anges and Demons¹⁰ the action this time takes place between the Vatican, meeting in conclave, and CERN, in Switzerland, where revolutionary experiments on antimatter have been conducted. On the surface, the novel follows an extremely linear narrative pattern: the two heroes, Robert Langdon, an American art history professor, and Vittoria Vetra, a young Italian physicist who collaborates with her father¹¹ on the isolation and storage of antimatter, follow a treasure hunt¹² through Rome and the Vatican, organized by what appears to be a terrorist sect, which must lead them to the final explosion of the antimatter bomb stolen from CERN by the Illuminati.

In fact, this game of the goose is no more than a convenient alibi for juxtaposing in narrative order, and thus superimposing in fictional order, the stages of the game, ie, on a model that is less that of the medieval quest than that of the video game¹³, meeting spaces and interactive frameworks that are always new. Against the narrative alibi of progression, the principle of play constitutes the essential structural spring of the story: we can, and must be able to, add new squares indefinitely, which are neither exactly adventures (implying a narrative path, a progression in a plot), nor scenes (where a symbolic transgression would be played out, where a mimetic discourse of the world would come to ruin). Rather, each new stage of the game functions as a challenge, where the speed and logic required by the player's interaction with the setting on offer supplant the slow meandering of narrative indirection as well as the suspense required by theatrical intensity.

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Deconstruction of optical devices

Welcomed to Geneva by CERN director Maximilien Kohler, Langdon is joined by Vittoria Vetra and taken to the secret laboratory of Leonardo Vetra, who has just been murdered and had an eye plucked out to violate his sanctuary : access to this laboratory is in fact protected by a retinal scanner programmed to open only to the physicist and his daughter (chap. 17, p. 80). The chamber of secrets¹⁴, an inviolable space within the inviolable confines of CERN, is protected by an optical device, i.e., despite the ultra-modern technological cladding, by an old-world structure, where the eye, the gaze, orders the world according to a system of visibilities. The great gallery of the Louvre, for Saunière's death, and the flying mini-robot, for Ming's, played the same role of presenting an optical framework of representation, destined to be overturned into the unpresentable of fiction. The optical exteriority of the device is opposed by the deceptive interiority of the chamber, in this case the laboratory where antimatter is stored.

Anti-matter can only be seen in its annihilation (chap. 22, p. 99). The explosion, which radiates, is followed by a " regression " of light towards the disappearance of the event, its reduction to a point. Initially blinding, the space of the event is then reduced to its blind spot, which leaves no trace: " Langdon blinked in pain " ; pain replaces vision, repeating, in an attenuated way, Vetra's liminal enucleation, and anticipating the final fireworks (chap. 123, p. 123). The narration insists heavily on the almost divine nature of this apocalypse, in front of the world's cameras. The event is a simulacrum of a miracle. First a villainous murder, then a scientific experiment, finally a media stunt, the repeated stage collapse seems to link together the most rational and explicable events. But in the realm of performance, this collapse, this simulacrum, actually produces the reverse side of the rationality it claims to denounce, revealing the invisible, between horror and wonder, right up to the sincere outbreak of faith. Scoundrels, artifice, lies are at once mystical impulse and real experience of spiritual communion.

The most consistent form this simulacrum takes in the novel is the sect of the Illuminati, under the tutelary figure of Galileo.

Extinction of signs : the ambigrams of the Illuminati

The Illuminati represent the rational obverse and terrorist reverse of the capitalist energy machine : they both fuel it and destroy it. This ambivalence is reflected in their ambigram seals. When the camerlengue unveils the seal's red-hot iron imprint on his chest for the cameras, this seal is, moreover, the subject of a symptomatic scenography in his television broadcast (chapter 116, p. 478).

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To show viewers the properties of the ambigram, televisions rotate the image, so that the word, oscillating between legibility and illegibility, unravels into a trace to reappear upside down identical to its right side. The pivoting is therefore at the same time a flashing: the logic of the sign, which is read and produces meaning, unravels into that of the logo, which solicits another recognition, another skill of the eye, no longer reading and linguistic, but visual and logical, detached from the heritage, the slowness of language, attached to the speed, the reactivity of play.

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The glass cage¹⁵

The scenic collapse and the end of the optical economy of visibilities on the one hand, and the emergence of the black hole, particle physics and the complex microspaces of string theory on the other, challenge novelistic representation : the very object of mimesis becomes anti-mimetic.

Fiction is summoned to organize the repetitive, mediated production of the black hole as a signature of reality in the event-forms of narrative. The aim is to reverse and positivize the invisibility and unrepresentability of the collapsed chronotope that is the black hole. The fiction then seeks to reconcile the obscure closure of the space of invisibility with the media brilliance of the televised spectacle, the subject's fall into nothingness and the globalized deployment of its image: Vetra's gruesome murder and the explosion of anti-matter in the annihilation chamber are turned into the spectacle of the camerling showing off his scarred chest and the fireworks over the Vatican, globalized by the media relay. Though hyper-visible, this explosion is an annihilation, i.e., a chronotopic collapse, a trapping of visibilities.

" Mur invisible ", " sphère vitrée ", " bornes invisibles " (p. 503) : invisibility is transferred from space itself to its circumscription ; /// the sphere, the glass cage¹⁶, reverses the unrepresentability of the darkroom, of the black hole into the exhibitionist saturation of the show, i.e. the hyper-demonstration, which supplants in the order of representation the collapse of the scene in the order of fiction.

To the metaphorical glass cage of the explosion, we can compare the material glass cages of the Vatican Archives. It is into one of these cages that Langdon must first enter to consult the last existing copy of Galileo's Diagramma (chap. 50, pp. 227-8). In the glass cage, not the event of a scene is triggered, but quite the opposite, the reading; visibility is there, by an irremediable countdown, condemned in time to collapse : " The sensation of suffocation had come faster than he would have thought. It had to be done quickly. Archival puzzles were nothing new to him, but he usually had time on his hands " (chap. 52, p. 236).

Two hours later, Langdon has to return to the Archives to consult the catalog of Bernini's works that the Vatican owns in Rome. This time, he is the victim of a power cut in the glass cage, whose death trap seems to be closing in on him for good: in the darkness, the cage becomes once again a space of invisibility and a black hole of anguish. To escape, Langdon tilts the shelves against the wall, which implodes (chap.86, pp.364-5). In its internal destruction, the glass cage finds its fulfillment as a fictional device of the black hole: its explosion is an implosion, due to the rarefied air, the rain of glass returning to the interior of space. In many ways, this sequence anticipates that of the final explosion of antimatter, right down to the ecclesiastical (" the crypt " for the glass cage) and biblical (" Like blessed manna falling on the wilderness... ") comparison that allows us, throughout the novel, to identify scenic collapse, big-bang, black hole and singularity with the spiritual representation of God's power.

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The problem of information loss in the black hole

The Illuminati trail game, which is in fact the work of Ventresca alone, disseminates throughout Rome the singularities of four assassinations and the apotheosis of a papal enthronement whose media hyper-visibility constitutes the ultimate reversal, the completion of the black hole device. The challenge is to articulate this reversal of the black hole's anti-scenic invisibility into the media hyper-visibility of the show, i.e. to substitute an economy of fictional monstration for the old scenic representation. In the black hole, it's a matter of organizing escape.

Or in principle, what characterizes the black hole is that information is not simply retained there, but destroyed. Unlike the darkroom, the black hole is not a storage space ; it's a non-collapse space, characterized by what physicists call " the hairless theorem "¹⁷.

The physical and metaphysical stakes of this loss of information are considerable, as it introduces uncertainty into the subsequent production of events. This anti-deterministic imbalance, in which Hawking sees the hand of God, is contested by Penrose, who contrasts the loss of information in the black hole with the concentration of information during its constitution, one calling for the other¹⁸. The installation of a black hole device certainly stifles, obscures and destroys information, but in a second phase, the informational depression it creates introduces a sort of draught and generates events around it. These informational vortices can't be measured in the same way. /// like the information lost in the black hole : it's representation that's lost (classical information), whereas it's fiction, simulacra that's created, which isn't reduced to pure disinformation (a lie isn't a null truth), but produces artifact, and therefore reality, and thus what we might call quantum information, with regard to which, conversely, the collapse of representation isn't a loss of truth, but a stake in the ideological transformation of reality. There is therefore no common measure between classical information and quantum information, even if the loss of one is compensated by the production of the other: this is where we can speak of " asymmetry of the measurement process ".

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The five fundamental characteristics of scenic collapse

We can now identify the five fundamental characteristics of what manifests itself in Dan Brown, in spectacular fashion, as a device of scenic collapse, this collapse constituting both the form and content of what it is to represent the contemporary world.

First of all, if there can no longer be a stage as such, it's because, in the classical culture of representation, the stage is structured by difference from narration : provisionally, the stage thwarts the norms of narration, technical norms that regulate the production of discourse, and symbolic norms that frame the representation of the world. Narration, for its part, can do without the scene, but not without the progression of a story. It's this progression that disappears here: like the video game, which updates the old sequential model of the game of the goose, the narrative doesn't progress, but jumps from square to square. Each square, or sequence, imposes its own norms, its own rules of the game  to leave the rule is to move on to the next sequence. It doesn't make a scene.

The stage thus survives only as the memory of a bygone narrative economy. Scenic collapse then manifests itself in the failure, at the periphery of the scenic space, of the optical articulation systems that should ensure its visibility to the outside world. Saunière dying amidst the paintings in the Louvre, Wailee Ming hurled into the ice by an electronic eye, Leonardo Vetra's eye enucleated to enter his laboratory, all reproduce the same face-to-face confrontation: on one side, the old optical system of representation constitutes the flaw (the weakness or, on the contrary, the weapon) that precipitates the catastrophe ; on the other side, the trap that closes in figures the space of invisibility where the anguish of modernity presents itself as the unpresentable remainder of representation.

Because the third and most singular and novel feature of this device is the collapse of space and time that affects the location of the scene, not as a stable datum that can be used to define or establish the nature of a performance, but as a process of chronotopic collapse. The space is reduced to the figure and consciousness of the person precipitated into it, and this figure and consciousness tend to dissolve within it. It's Langdon threatened with suffocation in the glass cage of the Archives, or under the sarcophagus in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria  it's the bodies of the cardinals disfigured by the four elements and by the ambiguous seal of the Illuminati ; better still, it's the tragic epiphany of the camerlingue, who turns into light and vanishes before the eyes of the Roman crowd massed in St. Peter's Square. Time, too, enters a process of reduction and collapse: the linear time of narrative unfolding is replaced by the recursive time of the /// countdown. The time of chronotopic collapse is negative : the unfolding of a sequence goes to a time zero of the catastrophe, which itself triggers a second countdown to the time zero of the next catastrophe, and so on.

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The catastrophe is the typical event of the scenic collapse device, and here we touch on its fourth characteristic. What differentiates catastrophe from any other event is that it threatens the very eventuality of the event, i.e. the information that the stage is capable of producing. Alongside space and time, it is now information that collapses: it's no longer a question of the disappearance of the optical visibility of things, of the fact that, when things explode, we can no longer see anything. What really makes the hole here, and strikes at the very substance of representation, is the fact that nothing is happening: we're waiting for Godot. Ultimately, Galileo's book doesn't exist, there are no murdered cardinals, there was never any question of blowing up the Vatican, the Illuminati don't exist  the narrative organizes the non-existence of the book, the invisibility of the assassinations, and reveals the lure of the sect as well as the explosion.

What is visible, then, is neither real event, nor more generally information in the order of representation, but the simulacrum that precipitates the scenic collapse. What is spectacular is not the reality of what is played out on stage (nothing, or almost nothing is played out), but the fiction that its collapse arouses, triggers at its periphery.

The fifth characteristic of the scenic collapse device consists in this production of fictional information that supplements the loss (or retraction) of representational information. Scenic collapse generates the simulacrum of a world (the fiction of the camerlengue as Savior), in which a media visibility, with no common measure of effectiveness with optical visibility, is established : in the absence of an impossible conclave scene, Anges et démons produces the planetary spectacle of Gunther Glick's BBC report. The televisual simulacrum, and behind it the terrorist artifact of the camerlingue, unfold in a process both grandiose and shabby  they mobilize all imaginary resources in the service of an absolute symbolic void. It is in this tension that not a new reality emerges (for there is no, or perhaps not yet any, neo-representation), but a new real  the worldwide fervor of television viewers before this grotesque farce is not, itself, a feigned fervor.

What validity for this device ?

The metaphorical use we've made of the questions and issues of contemporary physical science to model a fictional device is not, as is often objected, a methodological flaw : every device rests on an imaginary substratum, and imagination knows no boundaries between literature and science, serious speculation and recreational fantasy, human events and particle trajectories. What validates the model's relevance is, firstly, its applicability to the most heterogeneous objects within the same episteme; secondly, its ability to figure (and thus metaphorize) this episteme.

Or it is clear that the very content of the fiction of Anges et démons motivates, on the novelist's part, an imaginary recourse to the world, to the representations of contemporary physics. Basically, particles and even black holes are the obligatory imaginary substratum of such a story. The metaphor here is neither arbitrary nor gratuitous. The possibility of exporting the device outside this system of thematic and imaginary constraint will therefore constitute a decisive test.

The second challenge posed by exporting the device is that of the possibility of circulation, of a formal community between so-called commercial, or popular, literature and scholarly literature : can Anges et Démons help us read Joyce ?

So it won't simply be a matter of exporting the narrative black hole model from a Dan Brown novel to another novel in the same genre, but about a different subject. The problem is to know whether the device applies in the case of a highly written text, a text that is not read like a film script, but indeed as a work in progress of language, a text in the full sense of textuality, where a priori the problem of the scenic visibility of things is quite secondary compared to that of the play of signifiers. Yet no novelist has gone further than Joyce in the sense of this play.

III. Joycean brilliance

Quarks and strings

Aside from the challenge of signs that his work throws down to device theory, two elements motivate Joyce 's choice: on the one hand it was in Finnegans Wake that physicist Murray Gell-Mann, in 1963, found the name for the elementary particles of quantum physics, quarks, below the primary constituents of atoms in classical physics (protons, neutrons, electrons). In Joyce's novel, a chorus of seabirds sing Three quarks for Muster Mark¹⁹ : yet you have to put together, muster, three quarks to make a proton or a neutron²⁰, to make a " point ", mark, in the atom, muster making a pun with mister, while quarks would distort quarts to better mimic the raucous cry of birds : three quarts for Mister Marcus, three quarts [of beer to put] on Mr. Marcus's account, is originally a pub word, heard at H's pub.C. Earwicker.

On the other hand, when Lacan devoted his 1975-1976 Seminar XXIII to Joyce, under the title Le Sinthome, he completed the break with his first topic, which he had modeled with the instruments of linguistics²¹, by the generalization of a knot topic that cannot but be linked²² to the contemporary development of string theory, initiated by the work carried out at Harvard by Georgi, Helen Quinn and Weinberg in 1974²³. Lacanian strings, winding and unwinding like quantum strings, participate in a common post-linguistic imaginary.

Lewis Carroll, the logic of play : misch masch and doublets

To understand how the logic of play is at work in Joyce as a principle of narrative collapse, we need to go back to Lewis Carroll²⁴. During his youth, in the 1850s, the mathematician-writer-photographer wrote and illustrated with his siblings a kind of private, handwritten magazine for family use, whose general title was The Rectory Magazine. The last of the eight issues was entitled Misch Masch.

Misch Masch takes its name from the board game Lewis Carroll suggests in the magazine :

The principle of this game consists, for one of the players, in proposing a " nucleus " (a group of two or more letters, such as " rd ", " itr ", " erso "), and, for the other player, to try to find a " correct word " (a word known in ordinary society, and not a proper noun), containing the kernel. Thus, " chapardeur ", " citron ", " personne ", are correct words containing the nuclei " rd ", " itr ", " erso ". (I translate.)

On March 29, 1879, an article in Vanity Fair magazine introduced a letter from Lewis Carroll proposing to his readers a new puzzle, or guessing word game, entitled Doublets. Two words with the same number of syllables and the same arrangement of consonants and vowels are taken. These two words form a doublet. We then start from one of the words and, by successive substitutions of a single letter each time, forming a new word, we must arrive at the other word. The intermediate words are called links, and the complete series of words needed to go from one word to the other in the doublet is called a chain. The aim of the game is to find the smallest possible chain. Lewis Carroll gives an example : head and hare being given as a doublet, the proposed chain is head, heRd, herE, hAre (of which a very imperfect French equivalent might be head, earth, third, hare, hare).

In Lewis Carroll's imagined games, we recognize the basic principles of the technique of verbal invention that Joyce puts to work first sporadically in Ulysses, then systematically and on a grand scale in Finnegans Wake : Doublet itself echoes Dublin, the location of Finnegan's wake, double Dublin, both the capital of Ireland and Dublin in Georgia, the American city.

Misch Masch like Doublets situate verbal invention, so to speak, below the signifier. In Misch Masch, the material of the game is a " nucleus ", which the addition of peripheral letters will enable to be transformed into a " correct word ". This combination of sound particles, totally independent of linguistic or etymological logic (the nucleus is not necessarily a root, syllable or grammatical component of the word) tends to promote the signifier no longer as a stable atomic component of language, but as a process that produces a trace in which the signifier can appear amidst the noise. As for the Doublets, they introduce a " chain " that is indeed composed of signifiers, but does not obey a syntagmatic logic : not only are the doublets not linguistic doublets, linked to a common etymology, and are paired according to purely sonic criteria, but the chain that links them makes chain for the ear independently of meaning as well as language logic.

Text as a system of trajectories /// quantum

In Finnegans Wake, the quantum trajectory of word-particles constitutes the basic principle of textual deployment²⁵ :

" coursenrapide, passé Saint-Eve-et-Adam, d'une courbure de la côte à un biais de la baie, ramène nous par un commodius vicus de réinjection dans le circuit, retour au château de Howth et environs.
Sire Tristan, fiddler of loves, from beyond the short sea, had bispasse rearrived from Northern Armorica on this shore this gaunt isthmus of Europe Minor to combatmener his peculpenisular war : neither the rocks of the king of the log, near the river Oconee, had rengorgeées to the aristos of the County of Laurens when they doubledublinaient their vagabond all the time ; nor in voice since the en feu soufflatisé moich moich until the tébénitébéni ci-es-mardick ; not yet, though it ezra very soon, had a cadet chevrotiné an old Isaac mielleux ; not yet, though all foire au mieux dans la vanissa, n'estèrent sisters sosies furious contre deuxenun Joe-Nathan²⁶. "

From the outset, we are caught up in a flow that is not the flow of a discourse, but rather the river run, the torrent-like race, of a trajectory to which different spaces are assigned. Space of the coast near Dublin, where we pass Adam-and-Eve's church, the old Franciscan church on the south quays of the River Liffey, where we follow the coast, where we return to Howth Castle ; then, further offshore, the space of Greater and Lesser Brittany, or Armorica, where we follow the Tristan of the medieval gesture, crossing the English Channel twice, back and forth  finally, from higher still, the space of Europe and America, where the Dublin of Georgia, near the River Oconee and its Topsawyer's Rocks (almost Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain's boyish hero), doubles the Dublin of Ireland.

This non-discursive trajectory is also that of a song, and a music : song of Ireland first, mimed by the initial concretion, riverrun, which starts from the riverbank drawn in Irish, European and American space, to go towards the song, amhrán, which is said everâne, paronym of riverrun ; Tristan's song, which he accompanies on his viola d'amore (Sir Tristram, violer d'amores) ; literary rivalry finally, " although it ezra very soon " (though venissoon after), which alludes to Ezra Pound's pseudonym, Alfred Venison, and " deuxenun Joe-Nathan " (twone nathandjoe), which summons Swift by his decomposed first name, all against the backdrop of the primitive biblical scene in which the deceived Isaac blesses Jacob instead of Esau. The two shores, the two towns, the two brothers (twins Shem and Shaun), overlap to form the frame, the medium of textual recirculation.

Equivalence of sound and image in the collapsed scene

But there's also a visual use of the quantum trajectory of Joycean language. The auditory circuit corresponds to an optical refraction, which is the visual mode of the recirculation announced at the start of Finnegans Wake. This visual mode is more accentuated in Ulysses, as in the prelude to the chapter known as " Sirens " :

" Bronze near gold heard the fersabots, cliquetacier
Impertuntne, tuntne
Small skins, pecking small skins with a rocky thumb, small skins.
Horrible! And gold still blushes.
Veiled a fifrenote blousa.
Blousa. Blues Bloom bleuet
The golden hair pyramid²⁷. "

The starting point is sound. But refraction /// of sound, reduced to the quantum effect of trajectory and brilliance, reverberates in the eye : the shod hooves clatter on the pavement in front of what we understand later to be the front of the Ormond Hotel bar, where the " sirens ", the waitresses Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy, are lying in wait. This sonic brilliance is visually echoed inside the bar by the placement of the head of Miss Douce, the bronze-haired brunette, next to the head of Miss Kennedy, the golden-haired blonde:

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" Bronze near gold, Miss Douce's head near Miss Kennedy's head, over the breakwater of the Ormond bar heard the vice-royal hooves go by, sonnantacier.
[...] She rushed, bronze, to the very end of the room, flattening her face against the glass in a halo of panting breath²⁸. "

The bronze near gold is thus both sonorous and visual, both on either side of the storefront, which Joyce calls crossblind, crossing and blinding, because it favors the crossing of glances on either side, and at the same time, through the play of reflections, it forbids, it blinds this encounter. Rather aveuglanture than brisebise, the crossblind is the screen of the visual device, an optically deconstructed screen : faced with the crossblind, seeing is hearing, the spectacle is equivalent to the voyeur, who refracts its luminous brilliance into sonic brilliance. There is no transparency : Miss Douce crushes her face (flattening her face) not against the glass of a window pane, glass, but against the surface of a tile, pane, panel.

Then the imperial clatter of hooves muffles, disappears : Imperthnthn thnthnthn. While outwardly impertiunt (they communicate [the noise]) becomes less than thin, inwardly it corresponds to the gesture of picking chips, the tearing off of skin shavings with the thumbnail. It's a refraction again, the muffled sound of hooves becoming visibility of this small, dry gesture of torn skins, equivalent to it. To thnthnthn corresponds chips, picking chips... chips. The visual emerges from the pulsating noise, first as the blushing gold of Miss Kennedy surprised in her voyeuristic intrusion, then as the return effect of Bloom's gaze that surprised her, an effect Joyce notes blue by sonic homology of blew, souffla, which notes the brilliance of sound, of blue, blue, and bloom, the words almost forming a chain in the manner of Lewis Carroll's doublets.

Modalities of narrative collapse

We can then reconstruct the scene, supplementing its representation : Bloom is sitting at the bar of the Ormond Hotel, picking at the little skins on his fingers with his fingernails ; the viceroy's car drives by  Miss Kennedy observes Bloom's carousal  Bloom catches her watching  Miss Kennendy blushes  she rushes to the window to look at the car.

But precisely the text doesn't give this representation. Instead of representing reality, it fictionalizes it, by quantum refraction. This infra-representative fictionalization begins with the narrative hole : not that there is no narrative, but all the elements of narrative are precipitated, crushed into a hole, a kind of synesthetic maelstrom whose origin is a collapsed scenic device (exchange of glances in the bar and outside, in the " Sirens " ; reversal in Jacob's blessing, at the start of Finnegans Wake), and the outcome - the establishment of a flow (riverrun or imperthnthn) whose circuit, inflection (from swerve... to bend or Blew. Blue bloom) closes in on itself, produces in itself the crushing of itself.

Bloom is on the hair /// d'or de Miss Kennedy, bloom is on the / Gold pinnacled hair, it reflects  better, it constitutes its blue breath, Blew. Blue bloom. Similarly, the Sir Tristram at the start of Finnegans Wake is certainly Yseut's Tristan and Sir Amory Tristram of Armorica, Norman conqueror of Ireland, first Earl of Howth. He changed his name to St Lawrence, and gave rise to the line of St Lawrence of Howth. As a result, the mention of Howth Castle and Environs, then North Armorica, and even the Laurens County refers back to the one and only Tristram, the geographical deployment from Armorica to America, from Dublin to Dublin, Georgia, appears in reverse as a closing of planetary space on the incomprehensible obscurity of this cryptic name.

Space closes in on the name²⁹, and the name unravels into the nucleus of the misch-masch. So of Bloom in the prelude to " Sirens " :

" La cloche ! Cuisse clac. Confession. Fiery. My heart, farewell !
Clique. Bloo.
Boom thundered the shattering chords. When love takes you³⁰. "

The tinkling of the passing carriage, steelyringing, cliquetacier, suddenly unfolds into a theatrical bell sound, whose scenic play is solemnized by the use of French. But it immediately closes in jingle, clique, where Bloom 's name unravels: Bloo, then Boum, exactly boomed in Joyce, which passive an intransitive verb. To boom : resound, rumble, roar ; it's the viceroy's carriage, it's the sea, it's Bloom's only name that unravels into noise.

In the final analysis, all the simulacra of Ulysses scenes resolve themselves in this kind of hole, which must be grasped in its dimension as a quantum device, for which the hole tends to become the structure of the singularity, i.e. of the collapsed scene.

Time collapse

Time, too, is affected, by a phenomenal slowing down : the almost thousand pages of Ulysses describe in all and for all a day, a very ordinary one at that, of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin. This extreme temporal dilation, according to the principles of narratology, would be the essential characteristic of the novel scene : we see that just the opposite happens  dilated time collapses the scene.

Because its very dilation reveals its complex structure, which involves not just the external, objective dimension of the inexorable flow of universal time, but a whole series of other dimensions, internal, subjective and even infra-subjective, where time remembered, associated, diffracted by the flow of consciousness obeys complex trajectories that authorize not just loops, crossings and knots, but transfusions of time into space and space into time. This temporal collapse is at the heart of the Proustian project, exactly contemporaneous with Joyce, and in La Recherche is the subject of an entire discourse, the real spring of which goes far beyond mere phenomenological description.

Just as informational inflation produces the loss of information, temporal dilation destroys time, or more precisely, reduces it to its infinitesimal structure, in which it is undifferentiated from space. It then manifests itself as radiance, as time-flash which is also space-flash, carried along by the flow of consciousness or imported from reality into this flow, and inflecting it.

Campbell's retrograde shadows

This microtime of tearing and shining works backwards  in order to operate the loop that binds it on itself, it takes a retrograde march, particularly noticeable towards the end of the chapter known as the /// " Lestrygons ", during which Bloom, who has left the newspaper where he was busy placing advertisements (that's his job), is looking for a place to eat. The mediocre mayor of Dublin, John Howard Parnell, brother of the famous Irish nationalist activist Charles Stewart Parnell who died in 1891, then passes by, accompanied by a woman :

" They passed Mr. Bloom along the sidewalk. Beard and bicycle. Young woman.
And here's that one too. This really is a coincidence: second time around. Future events cast their shadows in advance. The approval of the illustrious poet Mr. Geo Russel. It could well be Lizzie Twigg with him. A. E. : what could it be ? [...]
He followed with his gaze the tall figure wearing tweed, beard and bicycle, at his side a woman listening³¹. "

Doubled on the sidewalk by Parnell and his companion, Bloom observes these figures who temporarily bend the course of his thoughts. Then another couple appears: the Irish nationalist poet George William Russel, who signs his poems with a mysterious Æ. Russel's silhouette is a true replica of Parnell's: he too wears a beard, a bicycle and a young wife.

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Bloom then quotes a line from Thomas Campbell's " Lochiel's Warning ". Campbell's ballad consists of a dialogue between the knight Lochiel and a magician, who predicts disaster at the Battle of Culloden. If Lochiel goes to the battle, he will die. Hence the magician's words:

" Lochiel, Lochiel, beware this day ! For, dark and despairing, I can seal my vision, but man cannot cover what God would reveal : It is the sunset of life that gives me mystical science, and future events project their shadow to l'advance. " (I translate and underline.)

The magician's prediction loses its dark tragic aura in the context of Bloom's ratiocinations predicting the Parnell brother's electoral rout.

On the other hand, as Bloom watches Parnell pass, the sun returns : " The sun was slowly clearing and making pools of light in the silverware exposed across the street in Walter Sexton's storefront in front of which John Howard Parnell passed, unseeing. " (P. 208.) Parnell walks in front of the sun, which, as it passes Bloom, casts its shadow upstream, towards Bloom³². What comes after in the order of the march, of the trajectory, coming events, thus casts its shadow upstream in time, before. Or, in other words, the sun draws on the street, through the shadows it casts, a retrograde path.

Time doesn't just run backwards  it cycles, repeats itself. Russel's passage succeeds Parnell's, who splits himself into himself and his brother. In a way, it's the same figure three times over. Campbell's formula, detached from Bloom's consciousness and assumed directly by Joyce, then takes on a general significance for the reading of Ulysses, which can only be understood in the system of retrograde shadows cast a posteriori by successive events on pages long past. The time of fiction runs in reverse to the time of narration.

The quantum device of scenic collapse

If we now bring together the fundamental characteristics we have identified in Joyce's creation, we can draw up a picture of a quantum device of scenic collapse symmetrical to that observed in Dan Brown's work, which its generic inscription, its facture, the audience and the effects it seeks, seemed in every way to distance from Joyce³³.

That leaves the fifth point, which concerns the production of fictional information. We can see how, for Dan Brown, the advent of a media spectacle society on the one hand, and the shift from political to terrorist management of world values on the other, place the fictional production of information at the heart of contemporary symbolic machinery. But what is the equivalent in Joyce, for whom this machinery, American, televisual, marked by evangelical neo-conservatism, makes little sense ?

It's true that, on the one hand, Bloom's profession of placing newspaper advertisements, and his obsessive attention to posters, commercial slogans, shop windows³⁶, that on the other hand Irish nationalism and the pent-up rage against the English occupier somehow prefigure for us, a posteriori, this machinery. To the polarity of media spectacle and terrorist management of values, we can even add, in both cases, the familiar yet abject retreat into the Catholic Church. But the fictional production of information that should result does not appear clearly in Joyce and, necessarily, does not take on the spectacular forms of the Roman show of a deranged camerling.

This fictional production of information, which compensates for both the deficit of the real (the collapse of the chronotope) and the deficit of the symbolic (the loss of information), nevertheless constitutes the central spring of Joycean poetics : this is what Lacan designates under the name of sinthome.

Notes

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