The Great Letter and the Infinite Process of Self-Embedding

"When a part so ptee does duty for the holos 

we soon grow to use of an allforabit." 

- FW p. 18-19

"Will you walk into my wavetrap? 

said the spiter to the shy." 
- FW p. 287

"Joyce wants his text to contain the whole universe with all its recursive times (recorso) and histories. He also wants the whole of the Wake to be contained in each of its self-similar parts. His ideal reader is supposed to grasp the text both in recursive loops of readings and in a holistic perception of the whole text in each part. If one wants to imagine a fractal text that entails the 'infinite self-embedding of complexity,' Finnegans Wake comes as close to it as possible. The Wake enfolds words into words that enfold other words, and all these imaginary word-worlds enfold narratives within narratives of other narratives, or characters that are the effects of other characters, and so on ad infinitum. Joyce even seems to tease us about this infinite process of self-embedding when he deposits the Great Letter in the muddy surface of his text. The Great Letter is figured as a miniature Finnegans Wake which in turn, contains the Great Letter which contains Finnegans Wake which contains the Great Letter which contains Finnegans Wake... Chaos theory has termed this well-known mise-en-abîme 'self-similarity.' Defined as symmetry across scale, self-similarity 'implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern' (Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, 103). 'Fractal meant self-similar,' writes Gleick (...). The Wake drives this dream of infinite self-similarity to its extreme: as an enfolded replica of Finnegans Wake which, in turn, is figured as a text able to store all texts, sounds, and signs of all times, past and future, the Great Letter also embodies, somewhat self-ironically, the Wake's dream of being a written hologram of a self-similar universe."

- Gabriele Schwab, The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language, p. 76

(Encountered on p. 145 of Joyce & Liberature by Katarzyna Bazarnik, which I discussed further here.)