Methods of Manipulation

Jennifer Bloomer
Methods of Manipulation

In her text about James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, she identifies and quotes "signifies do not signify in a linear or hierarchical fashion but in multiple directions: they slide, they move". This suggests that a space created by the signifier indicates the directions of its own movement through fields of knowledge. 

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

wikipedia

"Significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words, which many critics believe attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams."

The material is manipulated through strategies of:

Deformation

splitting

multiplication

Repetition

motifs 

numbers

geometrical configurations (euclidean and non-euclidean)

Collision

portmanteau words (two or more words that collide to form one)

Ambiguity

sliding signifiers

portmanteau words

a dominant presence of hermaphroditic emblems

Necessity to use extra - visual senses to decipher
blurring of distinctions between visual and verbal
homophonies
Superimposition
of strcutrues
of disseminated material
of sematic content (ambiguity)
Fragmentation
Thematic weaving and Layering
"phenomenal transparency"
Absence of hierarchies
Plays of resemblances
Presence of syntactic armatures
Residues of processes left in the object
Excess
Reflexivity
self-allegorizing

For Bloomer these moves are Joyce's manipulations that shift the linear time based narrative to a space of the "potentially infinitely generative neighborhoods and spatial relations, not sequences of events and causes and effects.