In his “Ulysses Gramophone: Here Say Yes In Joyce” Jacques Derrida speaks of Ulysses as an “overpotentialized text,” as a text which has “already [. . .] anticipated [. . .] the scene about academic competence and the ingenuity of metadiscourse” (281). Ulysses anticipates its own exegeses, anticipates whatever hermeneutics are developed to systematize and contain its meaning productions, and, because of this anticipation, Ulysses evades comprehensive understanding. Finnegans Wake shows the same behavior. In both these works there are multiple textual maneuvers which lead to overpotentialization: portmanteau words, structural and semantic intratextual references, metatextual words and passages, language games which subvert their own rules, and dialectics which produce confusion and multiple meanings instead of clarity. Collectively these maneuvers create a kind of metatextual atmosphere wherein the text seems to be not only talking about itself, to be showing a textual self-awareness, but seems to be reading its reader and addressing its reader. For every move the reader makes to pigeonhole the text, there is the countermove, by the text, which signifies “Yes. I’ve thought of that already. Guess again.”