Marshall McLuhan on James Joyce
Transcribed by Alan B. Scrivener.
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"The Wake is a strange book - a compound of fable, symphony, nightmare;
a monstrous enigma beckoning imperiously from the shadowy pits of sleep."
( mycanvassesaresurrealist.blogspot.com/ )
'The task of art', McLuhan says, echoing Harold Innis, 'is to correct the bias
of technological media.'
( ligghmcluhan.org/art.html )
Quotes concerning James Joyce from Marshall McLuhan's books:
Marshall McLuhan (1951) The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man
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This collection of essays is illustrated with "lowbrow" cultural icons, mostly from advertisements and funny pages.
- p. 3
It is on its technical and mechanical side that the [newspaper] front page
is linked to the techniques of modern science and art. Discontinuity is in
different ways a basic concept both of quantum and relativity physics. It
is the way in which a Toynbee looks at civilizations, or a Margaret Mead
at human cultures. Notoriously, it is the visual technique of a Picasso,
the literary technique of James Joyce.
Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan, eds. (1960) Explorations in Communication
Marshall McLuhan (19____) Joyce's Portrait
- p. ____ ???
Any movement of appetite within the labyrinth of cognition is a "minotaur"
which must be slain by the hero artist. Anything which interferes with
cognition, whether concupiscence, pride, imprecision, or vagueness is a
minotaur ready to devour beauty. So that Joyce not only was the first to
reveal the link between the stages of apprehension and the creative process,
he was the first to understand how the drama of cognition itself was the
key archetype of all human ritual myth and legend. And thus he was able
to incorporate at every point in his work the body of the past in
immediate relation to the slightest current of perception.
Eugene McNamara, ed. (1969) The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism
of Marshall McLuhan, 1943-1962
%%
Several of the essays in this book deal with the writings of James Joyce in detail. I have only
excerpted a few representative quotes.
- p. 1
Trivial and Quadrivial
"We've had our day at triv and quad and writ our bit as intermidgets."
Many people would probably welcome an elucidation of Joyce's celebrated retort to a critic
of his puns: "Yes, some of them are trivial and some of them are quadrivial." For, as usual,
Joyce was being quite precise and helpful. He means literally that his puns are crossroads
of meaning in his communication networks. . . .
- p. 24
... If geology could reconstruct the story of the earth from the inert strata of rock and clay,
the scienza nuova could do so much better with the living languages of men.
. . .
... We can sit back and watch the "all night news reel" of Finnegans Wake reveal as interfused
the whole human drama past and present.
- pp. 25 - 26
... All actual and potential scientific theories are implicit in the verbal structure of the culture
associated with them. By 1885 Mallarmé had formulated and utilized in his poetry these
concepts about the nature of language uniting science and philology. which nowadays are
known as "metalinguistics." However, these views of languages were commonplaces to
Cratylus, Varro, and Philo Judaeus. They were familiar to Church Fathers, and underlay the
major schools of scriptural exegis. If "four-level exegis" is back in favor again as the staple
of the "new criticism," it is because the poetic objects which have been made since 1880
frequently require such techniques for their elucidation. Finnegan's Wake offers page by
page much of the labyrinthine intricacy of a page of the Book of Kells. A central feature of
the Wake is a letter dug up by the musical fowl Belinda. Pope wrote "A Key to the Lock"
by way of an elaborate exegis of the symbolic senses of his poem. Joyce made his poem
in the shape of a key which unlocks it. But for Joyce as much as for St. Augustine the
trivial and quiadrivial arts form a harmony of philology and science which is indespensable
to the exegitist of scripture and of language, too.
- p. 33
The analogical relation between exterior posture and gesture and interior movements and
dispositions of the mind is the irreducible basis of drama. In the Wake this appears everywhere.
So that any attempt to reduce its action, at any point, to terms of univocal statement results in
radical distortion. Joyce's insitence on the "abcedminded" nature of his drama can be illustrated
from his attitude to the alphabet throughout. He was familiar with the entire range of modern
archeological and anthropological study of pre-alphabetic syllabaries and hieroglyphics,
including the traditional kabbalistic lore. To this knowledge he added the Thomistic insights
into the relation of these things with menatl operations. So that the polarity between H.C.E.
and A.L.P. involves, for one thing, the relationship between agent and possible intellect. H.C.E.
is mountain, male and active, A.L.P. is river, femaale and passive. But ALP equals mountain
and historically "H" is interfused with "A," and "A" is both ox-face and plough first of arts and
letters; so that, dramatically, the roles of HCE and ALP are often interchangeable. Punning on
"Dublin," he constantly invites us to regard his drama as the story of "doubleends joined."
Irremediably analogical, Joyce's work moves as naturally on the metaphysical as on the
naturalistic plane.
- p. 34
It is the liturgical sense of Joyce that enables him to manipulate such encyclopedic lore, guided
by his analogical awareness of liturgy as both an order of knowledge and an order of grace.
- pp. 41 - 42
In an important book, Communication, The Social Matrix of Psychology, a psychologist
and an anthropologist, Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, have recently followed the
method of Ulysses in attempting to convey the working image of cultural communication.
Their work serves as a useful approach to Joyce, if only because it demonstrates how
in some ways modern science falters along in the distance behind the art of Ulysses. For
Joyce has solved numerous problems which science has not yet formulated as problems.
And Joyce's superiority to Freud and Jung is not so much one of a talent as his ability to
avail himself of the entire wisdom of the collective human past. The propriety, for example,
of using a solar day as a ground plan of a presentation of the body politic would require a
treatise to explain. iIt can only be suggested that the movement of the sun, controlling and
paralleling the movements of individual and social organs, is an archetypal situation which
is infinitely responsive to poetic manipulation. It is all-inclusive and, literally, encyclopedic.
Such an archetype permits Joyce to utilize Cicero's entire doctrine of the orator and the body
politic with ease. It also enables him to include the corpus of Eastern wisdom in the
structure of the emancipation and return theme which is traditionally associated with
solar myth.
- pp. 46 - 47
... Joyce uses the pun as a way of seeing the paradoxical exuberance of being through language.
And it was years after he had begun the Wake before he saw that the babble of Anna Livia
through the nightworld of the collective consciousness united the towers of Babel and of sleep.
In sleep "the people is one and they have all one language" but day overcomes and scatters them.
Of this nightworld Joyce says "it is dormition," linking it in a single gesture to Domitian, damnation
and and all the senses of "subliminial," or doormission, with its links to dormitory, dormeuse,
doormouse (Lewis Carroll), door-muse and the daughters of memory.
- p. 91
Wyndham Lewis
. . .
... Between this view and the earlier quotation concerning art as a game played on the
edge of the abyss of extinction, it is possible to get a very adequate image of Lewis' activity
as a painter and novelist. He is a mystic or visonary of the comic, moving toward the
pole of intelligibility instead of that of feeling. Joyce establishes a similar distinction in
his notebooks as quoted by Gorman:
When tragic art makes my body to shrink terror is not my feeling because I am urged
from rest, and moreover this art does not show me what is grave, I mean what is constant
and irremediable in human fortunes nor does it unite me with any secret cause . . . .
Terror and pity, finally, are aspects of sorrow comprehended in sorrow — the feeling
which the privation of some good excites in us.
In short, Joyce tends like Lewis to reject the way of connatural gnosis and emotion favored
by Bergson, Eliot, and theosophy, in which the emotions are used as the principle window
of the soul. And Joyce continues, ". . . but a comedy (a work of comic art) which does not
urge us to seek anything beyond itself excites in us the feeling of joy. . . . For beauty is a
quality of something seen but terror and pity and joy are states of mind." Joyce, that is,
argues that beauty is entirely of intellectual apprehension wheras the passions or states of
mind a gnostic windows on the soul which cause us to be merged with that particular
quality. The intellectual, comic perception is for Lewis what beauty is for Joyce.
- p. 133
Coleridge as Artist
. . .
... compications and interruptions are necessary artisitically (witness those which impede
the narrative of Sweeney in Sweeney Agonistes) in order that not just the understanding
but the whole man may become involved in response to the developing situation. The few
interruptions which Coleridge at first provided for the narrative of the old navigator may
well have seemed insufficient for the artistic purpose, and so he may have been lead to add
the gloss to the poem years later to provide a kind of cosmic chorus. So completed, the
poem achieves a kind of continuous parallel between the levels of action, as does Joyce's
Ulysses in moving simultaneously in modern Dublin and ancient Ithica.
- pp. 142 - 143
Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry
. . .
Looking back over the landscape developments of a century and more, Ruskin in introducing
the Pre-Raphaelites in 1851 ... [wrote]:
The sudden and universal Naturalism, or inclination to copy ordinary natural objects,
which manifested itself among the painters of Europe, at the moment when the invention
of printing superseded their legendary labors, was no false instinct. It was misunderstood
and misapplied, but it came at the right time, and has maintained itself through all kinds
of abuse; presenting in the recent schools of landscape, perhaps only the first fruits of its
power. That instinct was urging every painter in Europe at the same moment to his true
duty — the faithful representation of all objects of historical interest, or of natural beauty
existent at the period; representations such as might at once aid the advance of the sciences,
and keep faithful record of every monument of past ages which was likely to be swept away
in the approaching eras of revolutionary change.
This amalgam of moral duty, aesthetic experience, scientific discovery, and political revolution
was first effected in the age of Leibniz, Locke and Newton; and we are still engaged today in
contemplating its unpredictable derivatives. For the moment, and in the arts, the terminus
appears as the fascinating landscapes of Finnegans Wake and Four Quartets. So that, if we
take our bearings with reference to this new work it will be easier to access the intentions and
achievements of Tennyson, whose works falls just midway between that of James Thomson
and Mr. Eliot. The huge tapestries of the Wake are not merely visual but auditory, talking and
moving pictures; not just spatial in their unity, but effecting a simultaneous presence in all
modes of human consciousness, primitive and sophisticated. Rocks, rivers, trees, animals,
persons, and places utter with classical dramatic decorum the kind of being that is theirs. The
poet in effacing himself utterly has become a universal Aeolian Harp reverberating the various
degrees of knowledge and existence in such a hymn of life as onlyb the stars of Pythagorus
were ever conceived to have sung. To this concert came all the arts and sciences, trivial and
quadrivial, ancient and modern, in an orchestrated harmony that had first been envisaged by
Joyce's master Stéphane Mallarmé.
Flaubert and Baudelaire had presided over the great city landscape of Ulysses. And Mr.
Eliot's The Waste Land in 1922 was a new technical modulation of Ulysses, the latter of
which had begun to appear in 1917. The Quartets owe a great deal to the Wake, as does
The Cocktail Party. There is in all these works a vision of the the community of men
and creatures which is not so much ethical as metaphysical.
Marshall McLuhan (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
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- pp. 74 - 75
[Consider] the natural dichotomy which the book brings into any society,
in addition to the split within the individual of that society. The work
of James Joyce exhibits a complex clairevoyance in these matters. His
Leopold Bloom of Ulysses, a man of many ideas and many vices, is
a freelance ad salesman. Joyce saw the parallels, on one hand, between
the modern frontier of the verbal and the pictorial and, on the other,
between the Homeric world poised between the old sacral culture and the
new profane or literate sensibility. Bloom, the newly detribalized Jew,
is presented in modern Dublin, a slightly detribalized Irish world.
Such a frontier is the modern world of the advertisement, congenial,
therefore, to the transitional culture of Bloom. In the seventeenth or
Ithaca episode of Ulysses we read: "What were habitually his final
meditations? Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to
stop in wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions
excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding
the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life."
In the Books at the Wake, James S. Atherton points out (pp. 67-8):
Among other things, FW is a history of writing. We begin with writing on
"A bone, a pebble, a ramskin leave them to cook in the mutthering pot:
and Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter, tintingfats and great prime must
once for omniboss stepp a rubrickredd out of the wordpress." (20.5) The
"mutthering pot" is an allusion to Alchemy, but there is some other
significance connected with writing, for the next time the word appears
it is again in a context concerning improvement in systems of
communication. The passage is: "All the airish signics of her dipandump
helpabit from an Father Hogam till the Mutther Masons,..." (223.3).
"Dipandump helpabit" combine the deaf and dumb alphabet's signs in the
air — or airish signs — with the ups and downs of the ordinary
ABC and the more pronounced ups and downs of Irish Ogham writing. The
Mason, following this, must be the man of that name who invented steel
pen nibs. But all I can suggest for "mutther" is the muttering of
Freemasons which does not fit the context, although they, of course,
make signs in the air.
"Gutenmorg with his cromagnon charter" expounds by mythic gloss the fact
that writing meant the emergence of the caveman or sacral man from the
audile world of simultaneous internal linkresonance into the profane world
of daylight. The reference to the masons is to the world of the bricklayer
as a type of speech itself. On the second page of the Wake, Joyce is making
a internal linkmosaic, an Achilles shield, as it were, of all the themes
and modes of human speech and communication: "Bygmeister Finnegan, of the
Stuttering Hand, freemen's maurer, lived in the broadest way immarginable
in his ruchlit toofarback for messuages before joshuan judges had given
us numbers..." Joyce is, in the Wake, making his own Altamira cave drawings of
the entire history of the human mind, in terms of its basic gestures
and postures during all the phases of human culture and technology.
As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can
disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn
cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but
if again, then let's make it a wake or awake or both, Joyce could
see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle
as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living
simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious. The
means he cites for such self-awareness and correction of cultural bias
is his "collideorscope." This term indicates the interplay in colloidal
mixture of all components of human technology as they extend our senses
and shift their ratios in the social kaleidoscope of cultural clash:
"deor," savage, the oral or sacral; "scope" the visual or profane
and civilized.
( fusionanomaly.net/ridingrangewithmarshallmcluhan.html )
- pp. 83 - 84
It is strange that modern readers have been so slow to recognize that the
prose of Gertrude Stein with its lack of punctuation and other visual aids,
is a carefully devised strategy to get the passive reader into participant,
oral action. So with E. E. Cummings, or Pound, or Eliot. Vers libre is
for the ear as much as the eye. And in Finnegans Wake when Joyce wants
to create "thunder," the "shout in the street" indicating a major phase of
collective action, he sets up the word exactly like an ancient manuscript word:
"The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronn-
tuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once
wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later: on life down
through all christian minstrelsy." (p. 1)
( english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v613/cryder.htm )
- p. 150
What [Rabelais critic John Cowper] Poways says here of tactility
and affinity for wood and stone ties in with much said earlier
about the audile-tactile features of scholasticism and Gothic
architecture. It is in this tactile and audile, and ever so
unliterary, mode that Rabelais gets his naughty, "earthy" effects.
Like James Joyce, another modern master of medieval mosaic, Rabelais
expected the public to devote its life to the study of his work. "I
intend each and every reader to lay aside his business, to abandon his
trade, to relenquish his profession, and to concentrate wholly on my
work." Joyce said the same thing, and like Rabelais, was free with
the new medium in an especial way. For Joyce, throughout Finnegans
Wake, television is "the Charge of the Light Brigade," and the
whole world is conprised in a single book.
- p. 183
Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel
as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption,
or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.
- p. 217
James Joyce devised a new form of expression in Finnegans Wake
in order to capture the complex interplay of factors in the very
configuration that we are considering here. In the following passage
"fowl" includes La Patrie, the Great Mother, and "foule" or
mob created by the homogenizing powers of print. When, therefore
it is mentioned that "man will become dirigible," the way this
happens is simply an inflation by accretion of homogenous units.
Lead, kindly fowl! They always did: ask the ages. What bird
has done yesterday man may do next year, be it fly, be it moult,
be it hatch, be it agreement in the nest. For her socioscientific
sense is sound as a bell, sir, her volucrine automutativeness right
on normalcy: she knows, she just feels she was kind of born to
lay and love eggs (trust her to propagate the species and hoosh
her fluffballs safe through din and danger!); lastly but mostly, in
her genesic field it is all game and no gammon; she is ladylike in
everything she does and plays the gentleman's part every time.
Let us auspice it! Yes, before all this has time to end the golden
age must return with its vengeance. Man will become dirigible,
Ague will be rejuvenated, woman with her ridiculous white bur-
den will reach by one step sublime incubation, the manewanting
human lioness with her dishorned discipular manram will lie
down together publicly flank upon fleece. No, assuredly, they are
not justified, those gloompourers who grouse that letters have
never been quite their old selves again since that weird weekday
in bleak Janiveer (yet how palmy date in a waste's oasis!) when
to the shock of both, Biddy Doran looked ad literature.
- p. 245
Lancelot Law Whyte in his The Unconscious Before Freud gives some
idea of the rise of the "discovery" of the unconscious as a
result of the restriction of conscious life within the extreme
limits of print technology. "Sink deep or touch not the Cartesian
spring" is the relevant jest of Joyce in Finnegans Wake (p. 301).
- p. 263
...the new mechanical instrument and its mesmerized and homogenized
servants, the dunces, are irresistible [to quote Alexander Pope's
"The Descent of Dullness" from The Dunciad (1728), Book IV]:
In vain, in vain — The all-composing Hour
Resistless falls: The Muse obeys the Pow'r.
She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
Of Night primæval and of Chaos old!
Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying Rain-bows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
As one by one, at dread Medea's strain,
The sick'ning stars fade off th' ethereal plain;
As Argus' eyes by Hermes' wand opprest,
Clos'd one by one to everlasting rest;
Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,
Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.
See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled,
Mountains of Casuistry heap'd o'er her head!
Philosophy, that lean'd on Heav'n before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
For public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor'd;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall,
And universal Darkness buries All.
This is the Night from which Joyce invites the Finnegans to wake.
- p. 268
Earlier, in presenting Pope's prophetic vision of the return of tribal or
collective unconscious, the relation to Joyce's Finnegans Wake
had been indicated. Joyce had devised for the Western man individual
pass-keys to the collective consciousness, as he declared on the last
page of the Wake. He knew that he had solved the dilemma of Western
individual man faced with the collective or tribal consequences of
first his Gutenberg, and next his Marconi, technologies. Pope had
seen the tribal consciousness latent in the new mass culture of the
book-trade. Language and the arts would cease to be prime agents of
critical perception and become mere packaging devices for releasing
a spate of verbal commodities. Blake and the Romantics and the
Victorians alike became obsessed with the actualization of Pope's
vision in the new organization of an industrial economy embedded
in a self-regulating system of land, labour, and capital. The Newtonian
laws of mechanics, latent in Gutenberg typography, were translated by
Adam Smith to govern the laws of production and consumption. In
accordance with Pope's prediction of automatic trance or "robo-centrism,"
Smith declared that the mechanical laws of the economy applied equally
to the things of the mind: "In opulent and commercial societies to think
or to reason comes to be, like every other employment, a particular
business, which is carried on by a very few people, who furnish the
public with all the thought and reason possessed by the vast multitudes
that labour."
- p. 278
Thus the technique of the suspended judgment, the great discovery of the
twentieth century in art and physics alike, is a recoil and transformation
of the impersonal assembly-line of nineteenth century art and science.
And to speak of the stream of consciousness as unlike the rational world
is merely to insist upon visual sequence as the rational norm, handing art
over to the unconscious quite gratuitously. For what is meant by the
irrational and the non-logical in much modern discussion is merely the
rediscovery of the ordinary transactions between the self and the world,
or between subject and object. Such transactions had seemed to end with
the effects of phonetic literacy in the Greek world. Literacy had made
of the enlightened individual a closed system, and set up a gap between
appearance and reality which ended with such discoveries as the stream
of consciousness.
As Joyce expressed it in the Wake, "My consumers are they not my producers?"
Consistently, the twentieth century has worked to free itself from the
conditions of passivity, which is to say, from the Gutenberg heritage
itself. And this dramatic struggle of unlike modes of human insight
and outlook has resulted in the greatest of all human ages, whether
in the arts or in the sciences. We are living in a period richer and
more terrible than the "Shakespearean Moment" so well described by
Patrick Cruttwell in his book of the same title.
Marshall McLuhan (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
YY
- p. 32
Again, in a visual and highly literate culture, when we meet a person for
the first time his visual appearance dims out the sound of the name, so
that in self-defense we add: "How do you spell your name?" Whereas, in an
ear culture, the sound of a man's name is the overwhelming fact, as Joyce knew
when he said in Finnegans Wake, "Who gave you that name?" For the name
of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
- p. 162
Lewis Carroll took the nineteenth century into a dream world that was as
startling as that of Bosch, but built on reverse principles. Alice in Wonderland
offers as norm that continuous time and space that had created consternation
in the Renaissance. Pervading this uniform Euclidean world of familiar
space-and-time, Carroll drove a fantasia of discontinuous space-and-time
that anticipated Kafka, Joyce and Eliot. Carroll, the mathematical
contemporary of Clerk Maxwell, was quite avant-garde enough to know
about the non-Euclidean geometries coming into vogue in his time. He gave
the confident Victorians a playful foretaste of Einsteinian time-and-space
in Alice in Wonderland.
Marshall McLuhan, et. al. (1967) Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations
YY
This little small-press book begins to show some of the typographic tricks McLuhan later embraced
on a larger scale.
- p. 5.1
IT SEEMS HISTORY IS TO BLAME
Haines the Englishman sympathizes with Stephen for the wrongs done to Ireland:
I can understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think like that, I
daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It
seems history is to blame.
For Stephen of the Irish oral tradition on the other hand, "History is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake." In Finnegan's Wake the entire life and
experience of the race is compressed in simultaneous present in true bardic style.
- pp. 16.1 - 16.2
... Until about 1600 in art, literature and music, the only way of organizing a
structure was the song technique of superimposing or parallel themes and melodies.
When the Romantics say that "Shakespeare draws his characters in the round" they are
using their own flat, painterly language to describe the Shakespearean music. All of
Shakespeare exists in auditory depth.
...
So persistent is Shakespeare in this auditory mode that he has none of the pictorial
habit ... [of] displaying characters against local background.
...
The sudden shift to painting people in their humours, or as dominated by a ruling
passion (Don Quixote) corresponds to the sudden discovery of harmonics in musical
narrative. ... The landscape could now function pictorially as humour or ruling passion
in narrative, dreams or essay.
...
The contrapuntal stacking of themes once more in an auditory song structure was back
in all the arts by 1900. James Joyce's Chamber Music is strategic in selecting the
vocal art of 1600 as a prism through which to reflect all the new motifs of 1900.
Chronological, lineal narrative against a social background had ended. The very
"background" of Proust's Paris or Joyce's Dublin had become themes and characters
themselves.
- p. 18.1
%%
- pp. 19.1 - 19.2
TELEVISION MURDERS TELEPHOPHONY IN BROTHERS BROIL
Anna was, Livia is, and Plurabelle's to be
FINNEGANS WAKE
The bell and/or belle is/are simulteneously all things. The age of electronic and the
simultaneous is to be an age of the bell(es).
Joyce gives the history of human culture and man's fallen state in a single phrase:
"BALBUS WAS BUILDING A WALL."
The youthful Stephen Dedalus meditated on this phrase from his Latin grammar.
On the second page of Finnegan's Wake his meditation on this theme has expanded
to include the development of all speech and architecture:
Oftwhile balbulous, mithre ahead, with goodly trowel in grasp and ivoroiled
overalls which he habitacularly fondseed, like Haroun Childeric Eggeberth
he would caligulate by multiplicables the alltitude and malltitude until he
seesaw by neatlight of the liquor wheretwin 'twas born, his roundhead staple
of other days to rise in undress maisonry upstanded (joygrantit!), a waalworth
of a skyerscape of most eyeful hoyth entowerly, erigenating from next to
nothing and celescalating the himals and all, hierarchitec-titiptitoploftical,
with a burning bush abob off its baubletop and with larrons o'toolers clittering
up and tombles a'buckets clottering down.
Which is to say, when bulbous begins to build a wall then Humpty Dumpty has
decided to have a great fall.
When the spherical word tries to become the lineal brick then the language stutters
"entowerly."
[As in this Lego Tower of Babel? -ABS]
YY
...
Perhaps Humpty Dumpty, the shattered word, can be heard once more, can be reassembled
electronically? — the ineluctable modality of the audible, plurabelle's to be.
A bell is to auditory space what a polished surface is to a visual space — a mirror. ALP is
river mirror of HCE the mountain. It is he for whom the belles toil.
They toil to restore him to life, the life of unified and inclusive consciousness. 'Till he
wakes to that life the artist attempts artificial respiration.
SPICKSPOOKSPOKESMANOF OURSPECTURESQUE SILENTIOUSNESS! |
%%
%%
- pp. 21.2 - 21.3
By contrast with England, Ireland is an extremely oral culture. Reviewing Lady Gregory's
Poets and Dreamers, Young Joyce remarks:
Out of the material and spiritual battle which has gone so hardly with her, Ireland
has emerged with many memories of beliefs, and with one belief — a belief in
the incurable ignobility of the forces that have overcome her.
Such is the belief of every oral society overcome by a methodical, written culture. Such,
for example, is the belief of the American South, and such was the feeling of the ancient
Hebrews towards Egyptians.
Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore and Jerome Agel (1967) The Medium Is the Massage:
An Inventory of Effects
This "collage book" combines avant-garde typography and graphics with McLuhan's jarring prose to create an experience
designed to awaken the somnabulist.
YY
- pp. 108 - 109
"History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order."
- p. 120
YY
Listening to the simultaneous messages of Dublin, James Joyce
released the greatest flood of oral linguistic music that was ever
manipulated into art.
"The prouts who will invent a writirig there ultimately is the poeta,
still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally.
That's the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now
in soandso many counterpoint words. What can't be coded can be
decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now,
the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing effects
and affects occasionally recausing altereffects."
Joyce is, in the "Wake," making his own Altamira cave drawings of
the entire history of the human mind, in terms of its basic gestures
and postures during all the phases of human culture and technology.
As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can
disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn
cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but
if again, then let's make it a wake or awake or both, Joyce could
see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle
as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living
simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious.
- p. 143
"The West shall shake the East awake... while ye have the night for morn..."
— James Joyce
Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore and Jerome Agel (1968) War and Peace
In the Global Village
YY
deeplinking.net/sample-spotting-mcluhan
As the first quote reveals, this book is all about James Joyce; as I went through putting Post-ItTM notes
on the pages with Joyce references I realized it would've been easier to mark the pages without them.
Nevertheless I completed the effort.
- pp. 4 - 5
The frequent marginal quotes from Finnegans Wake serve a variety of functions.
James Joyce's book is about the electric retribalization of the West and the West's
effect on the East:
The west shall shake the east awake....
while ye have the night for morn...
Joyce's title refers directly to the Orientalization of the West by electric technology
and to the meeting of East and West. The Wake has many meanings, among them the
simple fact that in recoursing all the human pasts our age has the distinction of
doing it in increasing wakefulness.
Joyce was probably the only man ever to discover that all social changes are the
effect of new technologies (self-amputations of our own being) on the order of
of our sensory lives. It is the shift in this order, altering the images that we make
of ourselves and our world, that guarantees that every major technical innovation
will so disturb our inner lives that wars necessarily result as misbegotten efforts to
recover the old images.
There are ten thunders in the Wake. Each is a cryptogram or codified explanation
of the thundering and reverberating consequences of the major technological changes
in all human history. When a tribal man hears thunder, he says, "What did he say
that time?", as automatically as we say "Gesundheit."
Joyce was not only the greatest behavioral engineer who ever lived, he was one of
the funniest men, rearranging the most common items to produce hilarity and insight:
"Where the hand of man never set foot."
In The Codebreakers, David Kahn reveals a key item that seems to have eluded
Joyce scholars. It concerns J. F. Bryne, the Cranly of The Portrait, the author of
Silent Years, a lifelong friend of Joyce's. Cranly lived all his life at the address
of Leopold Bloom: 7 Eccles Street, Dublin. He spent his mature life in devising
a cryptograph that would confer "the gift of perfect security upon the communi-
cations of all natiopns and all men." Kahn reports: "It required nothing more
than a cigar box and a few bits of string and odds and ends for its operation."
On page 135 of Finnegans Wake, Joyce describes his own verbal method,
which is an exact parallel of Byrne's: "... can be built with glue and clippings,
scrawled or voided on a buttress; the night express sings this story, the song of
sparrownotes on his slave of wires;..." For anyone discouraged by Joyce's
method, let him consider that it is no more than the habit of penetrating
the mosaic forms of every environment, linguistic or geographic.
- p. 7
... experiencing a jolting series of prearranged disappointments, down the long
lane of ... generations, ...
FW 107.
The solid man saved by his sillied woman. Crackajolking away like a hearse on fire.
FW 94.
- p. 10
...severalled their four-dimmansions.
FW 367.
- p. 11
... those flickers which are returnally reprodictive of themselves.
FW 298.
- p. 15
... and, an you could peep inside the cerebralised saucepan of his
eer illwinded goodfornobody, you would see in his house of
thoughtsam ... what a jetsam litterage of convolvuli of times lost
or strayed, of lands derelict and of tongues laggin too, ... and
equally so, the crame of the whole faustian fustian, ... though
a day be as dense as a decade, ...
FW 292.
- p. 16
The war is in words and the wood is the world.
FW 98.
- p. 17
A peek in a poke and a pig in a pew.
FW 273.
- p.18
The whool of the whaal in the wheel of the whorl of the Boubou
from Bourneum has thus come to taon!), ...
FW 415.
- p.19
When old the wormd was a gadden and Anthea first unfoiled her
limbs wanderloot was the way the wood wagged where opter
and apter were samuraised twimbs.
FW 354.
- pp. 21 - 22
Fashion, the rich man's foible distracts him from distraction by
distraction. Fashion is, as it were, the poor man's art, the usually
unbought grace of life which he participates in only as spectator.
In sensory terms fashion has a kind of infallibility about it. As
with hit tunes and hit pictures and hit entertainments, fashion
rushes in to fill vacuums in our senses created by technological
displacements. Perhaps that is why it seems to be the expression
of such a colossal preference while it lasts. James Joyce gives
it a key role in Finnegans Wake in his section on the Prankquean.
The Prankquean is the very expression of war and agression. In her
life, clothing is weaponry: "I'm the queen of the castle and you're
the dirty rascal." In the very opening line of Finnegans Wake —
"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's..." Joyce thus indicates the reversal of
nature that has taken place since the fall of man. It is not the world
of Adam and Eve, but one in which there is priority of Eve over Adam.
Clothing as weaponry has become a primary social factor. Clothing is
anti-environmental, but it is also creates a new environment. It is
also anti- the elements and anti-enemies and anti-competitors and
anti-boredom. As an adjustment to the world, it is mainly an adjustment
to a wolrd that has been made by fashions themselves and consists of
imitations of older dress.
- p. 22
But you'll love her for her hessians and sickly black stockies,
cleryng's jumbles, salvadged from the wash, isn't it the cat's
tonsils! Simply killing, how she tidies her hair! I call her
Sosy because she's sosiety for me and she says sossy while I
say sassy and she says will you have some more scorns while I
say won't you take a few more schools ...
FW 459.
- p. 24
The humming, it's coming. Insway onsway.
FW 371.
- p. 26
All's fair on all fours ...
FW 295.
- p. 27
Down with the Saozon ruze! And I am afraid it wouldn't
be my first coat's wasting after striding on the vampire
... Impregnable as the mule himself.
FW 411.
- p. 28
The specks on his lap-span are his foul deed thougths, wishmarks
of mad imogenation. Take they off! Make the off!
FW 251.
- p. 29
(Oop, I never open momouth but I pack mefood in it) ...
Stamp out bad eggs.
FW 437.
- p. 31
Look at that for a ridingpin!
FW 419.
Sport's a common thing. It was the Lord's own day for
damp (to wait for a postponed regatta's eventualising
is not of Battlecock Shettledore-Juxta-Mare only) and
the request for a fully armed explanation ...
FW 51.
- p. 32
Toborrow and toburrow and tobarrow! That's our crass,
hairy and ever-grim life, ...
FW 455.
- p. 33
He beached the bark of his tale...
FW 358.
They ought to told you every last word first stead of trying every
which way to kinder smear it out poison long.
FW 283.
- p. 36
The information environment and effects created by the computer are as
inaccessible to literate vision as the external world is to the blind.
For example, the computer has made possible our satellites which have
put a man-made environment around the planet, ending "nature" in the
older sense. The new information technology will shortly encompass
the entire astral system, harnessing its resources for terrestrial use.
The important thing is to realize that electric information systems
are live environments in the full organic sense. They alter our
feelings and sensibilities, especially when they are not attended to.
"Yes, the viability of the vicinals if invisible is invincible." (FW 81)
- p. 43
As Ollover Krumwall sayed when he slepped ueber his grannya-
mother. Kangaroose feathers. Who in the name of thunder'd
ever belevin you were that bolt?
FW 299.
- pp. 46 - 48
What the thunders said...
Thunder 1: Paleolithic to Neolithic. Speech. Split of East/West.
From herding to harnessing animals.
baba bad babble. Black sheep. Ali Baba.
bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronn
tuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!
Thunder 2: Clothing as weaponry. Enclosure of private parts.
First social aggression.
kod husk
Perkodhuskurunbarggruauyagokgorlayorgromgremmit
ghundhurthrumathunaradidillifaititillibumullunukkunun!
Thunder 3: Specialism. Centralism via wheel, transport, cities: civil life.
klik of wheel clique in society. klas
klikkaklakkaklaskaklopatzklatschabattacreppycrottygrad
daghsemmihsammihnouithappluddyappladdypkonpkot!
Thunder 4: Markets and truck gardens. Patterns of nature submitted to
greed and power.
Blady bloody. ughfoul awful. moecklenburg Mucktown.
Bladyughfoulmoecklenburgwhurwhorascotastrumpapo
rnanennykocksapastippatappatupperstrippuckputtanach
Thunder 5: Printing. Distortion and translation of human patterns and
postures and pastors.
Thing crookly ex in every pasture
Thingcrooklyexineverypasturesixdixlikencehimaround
hersthemaggerbykinkinkankanwithdownmindlookingated.
Thunder 6: Industrial Revolution. Extreme development of print
process and individualism.
Lukkedoeren locked doors. The Phoenix Playhouse in which exhibitionist
masks are supreme.
Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdylooshoofermoyportertoory
zooysphalnabortansporthaokansakroidverjkapakkapuk.
Thunder 7: Tribal man again.
Both all choracters end of separate, private man. Return of choric.
Bothallchoracterschumminaroundgansumuminarumdrums
trumtruminahumptadumpwaultopoofoolooderamaunsturnip!
Thunder 8: Movies. Pop art, pop Kulch via tribal radio. Wedding of
sight and sound.
Pappa apparras big guy again projected on arras.
Pappappapparrassannuaragheallachnatullaghmonganmac
macmacwhackfalltherdebblenonthedubblandaddydoodled
Thunder 9: Car and Plane. Both centralizing and decentralizing at once
create cities in crisis. Speed and death.
hussten hassten caffin [caffeine] coffin
husstenhasstencaffincoffintussemtossemdamandamnacos
aghcusaghhobixhatouxpeswchbechoscashlcarcarcaract
Thunder 10: Television. Back to tribal involvement in tribal mood-mud.
The last thunder is a turbulent, muddy wake, and murk of non-visual, tactile man.
Ullhodturdenweirmudgaardring hello turd (toured, toward)
ford — mud-mood gathering
Ullhodturdenweirmudgaardgringnirurdrmolnirfenrirlu
kkilokkibaugimandodrrerinsurtkrinmgernrackinarockar!
%%
%%
- p. 51
You may fail to see the lie of that layout ... she'll confess it by her figure
and she'll deny it to your face.
FW 271.
For a burning would is come to dance insane.
FW 250.
- p. 53
Various people have pointed out that the computer revolution is greater
than that the wheel in its power to reshape human outlook and human
organization. Wheras the wheel is an extension of the foot, the computer
gives a world where the hand of man never set foot. (James Joyce made
many such observations. He once said: "I am the greatest engineer who
ever lived." When his work is understood and wafted out of the hands
of the esthetes, his claim will appear modest.)
As much as the wheel is an extension of the foot, the computer is an
extension of our nervous system, which exists by virtue of feedback
or circuitry.
- p. 57
A spitter that can be depended on. Though Wonderlawn's lost us for ever.
Alis, alas, she broke the glass! Liddell lokker through the leafery,
ours is mistery of pain.
FW 270.
- p. 59
Willed without witting, whorled without aimed.
FW 272.
- p. 65
But the world, mind, is, was and will be writing its own wrunes forever,
man, on all matters that fall under the ban on our infra-rational senses...
FW 19-20.
- p. 68
Where flash becomes word and silents selfloud.
FW 267.
- p. 75
Spickspookspokesman of our specturesque silentiousness!
FW 427.
- p. 90
The play thou schouwburgst, Game, here endeth.
The curtain drops by deep request.
FW 257.
- p. 91
...denary, danery, donnery, domm, who, entiringly as he continues
highly-fictional, tumulous under his chthonic exterior but plain
Mr Tumulty in muftilife...
FW 261.
- p. 92
(Stoop) if you are abcedminded,... in this allaphbed!
FW 18.
- p. 93
...take your mut for a first beginning, big to bog, back to bach.
FW 287.
- p. 94
...it's the muddest thick that was ever heard dump since Eggsmather
got smothered in the plap of the pfan.
FW 296.
- p. 97
Who gave you that numb?
FW 546.
- p. 104-105
Jehosophat, what doom is here!
FW 255.
- p. 111
One feared for his days. Did there yawn? 'Twas his stommick.
Eruct? The libber. A gush? From his visuals. Pung? Delivver
him, orelode! He had laid violent hands on himself, it was
brought in Fugger's Newsletter...
FW 97.
...what all where was your like to lay cable...
FW 25.
- p. 113
With acknowledgment of our fervour of the first instant he
remains years most fainfully. For postscrapt see spoils.
FW 124.
- p. 117
The house of Atreox is fallen indeedust (Ilyam, Ilyum!...)
averging on blight ...
FW 55.
- p. 119
But's wrath's the higher where those wreathe charity.
FW 251.
- p. 120
...old man without a thing in his ignorance...
FW 125.
- p. 125
...all differing as clocks from keys since nobody appeared to
have the same time of beard...
FW 77.
- p. 126
You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy?
FW 112.
- p. 127
For then was the age when hoops ran high.
FW 20.
- p. 133
In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds
the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation
that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches
birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality.
FW 18.
- p. 136
... speared the rod and spoiled the lightning ...
FW 131.
Let us now, weather, health, dangers, public orders and other
circumstances permitting, of perfectly convenient, if you police,
after you, policepolice, pardoning mein, ich beam so fresch, bey? ...
FW 113.
- p. 139
...the innocent exhibitionism of those frank yet capricious underlinings:
that strange exotic serpentine, since so properly banished from our scripture,
about as freakwing a wetterhand now as to see a rightheaded ladywhite don
a corkhorse...
FW 121.
- p. 142
...making his pillgrimace of Childe Horrid, engrossing to his
ganderpan what the idioglossary he invented under hicks hyssop!
FW 423.
- p. 147
... how on the owther side of his big belttry your tyrs and cloes and
noes and paradigm maymay rererise in erin.
FW 53.
- p. 183
Accusative ahnsire! Damadam to infinities!
FW 19.
He was down with the whooping laugh at the age of the loss of reason
the whopping first time...
FW 423.
- p. 184
And so everybody heard their plaint and all listened to their plause.
The letter! The litter! And the soother the bitther!
FW 93.
- p. 185
Somebody may perhaps hint at an aughter impression of I was wrong.
No such thing! You never made a more freudful mistake, excuse
yourself! What's pork to you means meat to me while you behold
how I am eld.
FW 411-412.
- p. 192
Lead, kindly fowl! They always did: ask the ages. What bird
has done yesterday man may do next year, be it fly, be it moult,
be it hatch, be it agreement in the nest.
FW 112.
Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker (1968) Through the Vanishing Point:
Space in Poetry and Painting
YY
- p. 7
Electronic man has to train his perceptions in relation to a total environment that
includes all previious cultures. Home is the hunter — at least so say the
Nielsen audience-rating agencies. In Joyce's Finnegans Wake we read:
"Though he might have been more humble, there's NO POLICE LIKE
HOLMES." The modern sleuth is unmistakably the all-round hunter.
- p. 137
YY
Henri Füssli THE NIGHTMARE Goethe-Museum, Frankfurt, Germany
A transparent overlay of the human and the superhuman.
The recovery of iconic and sensory involvement via horror.
"This nonday dairy,
This allnights newseryreel"
— JAMES JOYCE, Finnegans Wake
By introducing the proprioceptive-visceral into the tortured,
neo-classical pose, the artist induces an empathic response.
Dream vision as escape from the dominance of
rational-visual values.
Is Füssli more fanciful than the imaginative?
To the spectator the horrific images are background. To the
dreamer they are foreground. You can't dream pictorially but
only iconically. Does the psychiatrist form a story line for
the dreams?
- p. 139
The symbolists ... began to use language, not as a package of prepared messages,
but as a heuristic probe into new experience. Prepared by their work, W. B. Yeats
encountered Blake as a revolutionary experience. Blake will serve to remind us
that a considerable interval of poetry and painting is to intervene between his
discoveries and their further development by people like Rimbaud, Mallarmé,
Eliot and Joyce.
- p. 206
The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a damp
crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles
beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada. Unwholesome sandflats waited
to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath, a pocket of
seaweed smouldered in seafire under a midden of man's ashes. He coasted
them, walking warily.
— JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses
( www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/ulysses/strand.html )
- pp. 218 - 219
A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Kafka's Castle stands above the world
like a last bastille
of the Mystery of Existence
Its blind approaches baffle us
Steep paths
plunge nowhere from it
Roads radiate into air
like the labyrinth wires
of a telephone central
thru which all calls are
infinitely untraceable
Up there
it is heavenly weather
Souls dance undressed
together
and like loiterers
on the fringes of a fair
we ogle the unobtainable
imagined mystery
Yet away around on the far side
like the stage door of a circus tent
is a wide wide vent in the battlements
where even elephants
waltz thru
One of the features of this poem is its environmental-like quality.
When a poet puts aside the narrative pattern of discourse, it is
natural to dwell on environments. Witness The Waste Land or
Finnegans Wake. An environment is unclassifiable in a sense.
Perhaps it is too multisensuous to afford any simple pictorial
experience. This poem has much in common with a newspaper
page, offering numerous perspectives rather than a point of view.
Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker (1969) Counter-Blast
YY
Another "collage book" with avant-garde typography and graphics.
- p. 48
THE BOOK ARRIVES TOO LATE
About 1830 Lamartine pointed to the newspaper as the end of book culture:
At the same time Dickens used the press as base for a new impressionist
art which D. W. Griffiths and Sergei Eisenstein studied in 1920 as the
foundation of movie art.
Robert Browning took the newspaper as art model for his impressionist
epic, The Ring and the Book; Mallarmé did the same thing in Un
Coup de Dés.
Edgar Poe, a press man and, like Shelley, a science fictioneer, correctly
analyzed the poetic process. Conditions of newspaper serial publication
led both him and Dickens to the process of writing backwards. This means
simultaneity of all parts of a composition. Simultaneity compels sharp
focus on effect of thing made. The artist starts with the effect.
Simultaneity is the formula for the writing of both detective story
and symbolist poem. These are derivatives (one "low" and one "high")
of the new technological culture.
Joyce's Ulyssescompleted the cycle
of this technological
art form. |
- p. 59
%%
- p. 88
The careers of Yeats and Joyce were even more deeply involved in the qualities of the
spoken word as they met the literary tradition. And all three of these men were very
conscious of the 20th century advantages of having their cultural roots in a preliterate
world. That which in them might appear as mere romantic preference can, however,
be set in a perspective of advancing or unfolding technology.
- p. 97
%%
- pp. 110 - 111
The newspaper page upset book culture and the book page profoundly. The Romantic
poets took courage from this upset to revolt against book-culture. The format of the
book page offers a linear, not a picturesque perspective. It fosters a single tone and
attitude between a writer, reader, subject, whereas the newspaper breaks up this
lineality and singleness of tone and perspective, offering many book pages at the
same moment. The telegraph gave instantaneity to this picturesque news landscape,
turned the news-sheet into a global photograph or world snapshot.
The press became a daily experience of all the cultures of the globe. It became a
space-time landscape of many times, many places, given as a single experience.
With the arrival of photography this verbal landscape shifted to a pictorial one.
With radio it became verbal again, but not the printed word. With TV it becomes
both. But by 1870 when Rimbaud made his verbal landscapes (which he called
illuminations or colored plates) the newspaper format had revolutionized poetry.
Nobody so far as I know has commented on the relation of Richard Wagner to the
newspaper, but his esthetic program for including the whole of the mythic past in a
simultaneous musical present doesn't need much explaining. Electricity, in the
same way, creates musical politics.
The difficulty which most people experience with the poetry of Rimbaud,
Mallarmé, Eliot, Joyce, or the difficulty they imagine to be present in the
works of Picasso or abstract art, is exactly the difficulty a listener might
have in listening to a disc played at the wrong speed. Any newspaper, since
the telegraph, is a symbolist mosaic.
- p. 115
Finnegan's Wake of James Joyce is a verbal universe in which press, movie,
radio, TV merge with the languages of the world to form a Feenichts Playhouse
of metamorphoses.
- p. 119
... it was a long time before people got to be at home with print. And by that time
the newspaper page layout had begun to disturb the precarious equilibrium of 18th
century book culture. The format of the 19th century newspaper page was like a
dozen book pages set on a single sheet. The telegraph made this format the
instantaneous cross-section of a single day. This was no longer te book. Nor could
the book stand up to this new cultural form born out of technology. The book tried
to swallow this rival: Joyce in Ulysses, Eliot in The Waste Land — non-narrative
epics which incorporated the newspaper art form.
Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson (1970) From Cliché to Archetype
YY
This collection of essays is organized in alphabetical order by title; the Introduction is found with other
chapters that begin with I and the Table of Contents is in the Ts.
- p. 3
Absurd, Theater of the
. . .
Impoverment of the booble by the bauble for the bubble.
— James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
- pp. 8 - 9
Assimil-like phrase books for studying foregin languages were
also everyday resources for James Joyce (who taught in the Berlitz
School of Languages). His Wake raises the verbal stereotype
archetypal awareness, as does Eliot's Sweeney's "I've gotta use words
when I talk to you."
But O felicitous culpability, sweet bad cess to you for an archetype!
— Finnegans Wake
The fall or scrapping of a culture wolrd puts us all into the same
archetypal cesspool. As a precursor of the Theater of the Absurd,
Joyce exposes the archetypal unconscious as an absurd landscape of
one world burrowing on another.
. . .
Another question concerns the fondness of absurdist writers for
treating their characters in a situation of impasse like that of
the four people in Sartre's No Exit, or thosem in Beckett's
Waiting for Godot. Hugh Kenner has commented on this feature
of the absurd. In his study The Stoic Comedians, he has even
called Samuel Beckett, as a son of James Joyce, a dramatist of the
impasse.
Why are Becket, Joyce, Ionesco, Picasso, and many other absurdist
expatriates alienated from thier own countries? One might venture
the answer that the universal human condition today in a period of
rapid innovation is necessarily that of alienation. Every culture
now rides on the back of every other culture. Joyce's Exiles
is explicitly a drama of the absurd. This piggybacking of languages
and cultures appears in the verbal index of Finnegans Wake as
much as in the painting of Picasso. The absurd is not without its
high spirits, even in tragic farce, where the range goes from the
fun of Ionesco to the misérabilisme [miserabilism] of Bernard
Buffet.
Another question: What is the relation between the electrically
illuminated Ibscenist realism (Ibscenist nanscence, Finnegans
Wake) and absurdist theater? We can think of electricity in
the modern world as a form of retrieval which brings back the
dour realism of Ibsen in a comic overexaggeration in a comic life.
- pp. 27 - 28
Author as Cliché (Book as Probe)
. . .
Baudelaire's line from the envoy to the readers of Les Fleurs du Mal
[The Flowers of Evil], "Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frére,"
["Hypocrite reader, my equal, my brother,"] encapsulates all of Auden's
thoughts. The reader wears the mask of the poet's work even as the
author puts on the public as a mask. One is probe for the other. Both
are clichés. Joyce put it in a phrase: "My consumers are they not my
producers?"
- p. 49
Cliché as Breakdown
. . .
Zolla continues with a pathetic fallacy of misplaced concreteness that
exceeds Joyce himself...
- p. 53
Cliché as Probe
Slander, let it lie its flattest, has never been able to convict our good
and great and no ordinary Southron Earwicker, that homogenius man, as a
pious author called him . . .
— James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
- p. 77
Environment (as Cliché)
Those are mentally ill who, stricken by a serious disease, feel no pain.
— Hippocrates
It is dormition.
— James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
The city is the center of paralysis.
— James Joyce
- p. 78
It is not insignificant that the great epics from Homer's Iliad to James Joyce's
Ulysses have concerned the destruction a city, or the destruction which a
city has brought about.
- p. 89
Genres
. . .
... the narrative is scrambled in a detective story; it is deliberately interrupted
and lacking in important connectives that the psychological novel relies on to
reveal character. When character is pushed to a conventional extreme and
provided with an inclusive boundary line that contains all facets of the
character at once, the narrative function is displayed.
In his The Old Drama and the New, William Archer traces the opposite process
by which, in the history of drama, characterizations moved from the Elizabethan
stock types to nineteenth-century pictorial realism. His book appeared shortly
after Ulysses and The Wasteland, in which works there is a sudden return of
iconic stock characters. Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Blooom and Gerty McDowell
are flat, iconic forms, filled with and formed by age-old collective experiences.
It is a paradox explored in this book that the flat cliché is an enormously richer
and deeper form than anything that can be achieved by pictorial realism and the
most delicate shades of chiaroscuro.
- pp. 90 - 91
One of the most successful genres of this age is the book title itself as a "youdunit."
It involves the reader in such titles as: Time and Western Man; The Revolt of the
Masses; The Managerial Revolution; The Organization Man; The Affluent Society;
Time, Space and Architecture; The Impossible Theater; Management and Machiavelli;
Gods, Graves and Scholars; The Hidden Persuaders; Doctors and Drugs; The Death
of God; The Double Helix; The Biological Time Bomb. Replacing the encyclopedias
of earlier centuries, such books are all "guides to understanding". Jay's Management
and Machiavelli, for example, uses the same overall pattern as Joyce's Ulysses.
Retrieving the figure of Machiavelli, it uses this as a probe of modern management
techniques. Its relevance with respect to managerial practices is, however,
subordinated to its attack on the reader's ego...
- p. 96
The epyllion is a liturgical ceremonial ritual in origin, pastoral, seasonal, and collective
as indicated in the opening words of The Waste Land: "April is the cruelest month."
The meeting with Stetson which follows draws attention to the typical use of double
mask of the interface plot and subplot, of the putting on of two audiences. Eliot had
stressed the importance of this form in his essay, "Ulysses, Order and Myth," in which
he draws attention to use of this double form by both Yeats and Joyce. He also insists
that it is the only means of giving order to the anarchy of our time. The little epic, like
the cyclic epic before it, incorporated massive erudition. In our time it does this by
esoteric allusions and compression, retrieving folk clichés obscurely and ironically.
- p. 99
The interplay among masks of energy awakens our awareness of the earliest antecedents.
... Joyce employs the "magazine wall" for alerting us to this process: "by the butt of the
magazine wall / Where the maggies seen all." This wall is a burrow, or barrow, of vast
variety and accumulation. A magazine is a storehouse of ammunition as well. When the
pitch of this wall achieves a certain gradient, Humpty-Dumpty tumbles off the wall.
Humpty-Dumpty is the mask of the integral and ordered unity of tradition (and the
structured sensorium) that recurrently crashes with the advent of major technological
change. The fragments are reassembled through flowing energies of the "heroine" A.L.P.
Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from
cliché to archetype is "pastimes are past times." The dominant technologies of one age
become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of
pastimes that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When
all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the
elucidation of form takes on a new scope and a new urgency.
- p. 100
The familiar phrase "maskings and dumb shows" included a great range of verbal and
nonverbal genres. Today the Chinese poster-newspaper or enacting of daily events
nonverbally in the streets tends to merge with sit-ins and teach-ins and many other uses
of public spaces for dramatic action.
The writer and the actor both have to "put on" their audiences. The nighttown ("Circe")
episode in Ulysses as a virtuoso exhibition of contemporary masking makes multileveled
demands upon the attention of its readers.
- p. 108
Hendiadys: Cliché as Double Probe
Lead, kindly fowl! They always did: ask the ages. What bird
has done yesterday man may do next year, be it fly, be it moult,
be it hatch, be it agreement in the nest. For her socioscientific
sense is sound as a bell, sir, her volucrine automutativeness right
on normalcy: she knows, she just feels she was kind of born to
lay and love eggs....
— James Joyce Finnegans Wake
- p. 112
Identity — The Culture Hero
I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and
to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
— James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love my label like myself.
— James Joyce Finnegans Wake
- p. 115
When Mallarmé and Eliot and Pound and Joyce designated the poetic task as
cleansing and renewal of speech and language, they point to an enterprise of
even greater scope than that undertaken by Heracles. Language is be-fouled
and messed up by millions of people each day. It is only periodically restored by
poets who create new gaps or intervals in the central rhythms of the tongue. The
fissures so opened admit and direct the streams of speech in fresh new patterns
that release perceptual life from pestilential linguistic smog.
- pp. 118 - 119
Introduction
. . .
If we can consider form the reversing of archetype into cliché, as for example, the use
of an archetypal Ulysses in James Joyce's novel to explore contemporary consciousness
in the city of Dublin, then we may ask what would be the status of this pattern in
primordial times, in the medieval period, and today. The answer would seem to be
that in primordial times and today this archetype-into-cliché process is perfectly normal
but in the medieval period it is exceptional and unusual. The Balinese say, "We have no
art, we do everything as well as possible." The artist in the Middle Ages, Renaissance,
or the era up to the nineteenth century was regarded as a unique, exceptional person
because he used an exceptional, unusual process. In primordial times, as today, the artist
uses a familiar, ordinary technique and so he is looked upon as an ordinary, familiar
person. Every man today is in this sense an artist — the administrator, the scientist, the
doctor, as well as the man who uses paint or sculpts stone. Just as the archaic man had to
follow natural processes of rhythms in order to influence and to purge, cleanse them by
ricorso, so modern electric technologies require such timing and precision that only the
following of processes in nature can be tolerated. The immediately preceding centuries of
mechanization had been able to bypass these processes by fragmentation and strip-mining
kinds of procedures. The very word "cliché" derives from the mechanical processes of
printing, as we have noted. The Gutenberg technology of imposing and impressing by
means of fragmented and repeatable units was the cue for all succeeding mechanization
of the social and educational and political establishments. As various technologies have
succeeded print, it has become more and more the home of the archetype.
- pp. 121 - 126
... Our technological breakthroughs are on a superior human scale, re-creating total
new environments, gretly enlarging the Emperor's wardrobe, and making possible a
reprogramming of the totality of existence on the planet. It is these developmnents
that have restored cliché-as-probe and put invention in a position of dominance over
the archetype.
Since we have already raised the theme of printing as related to cliché and archetype,
the complexities of this innovation can be seen in Finnegan's Wake, where Joyce is
not only discussing the subject but illustrating the linguistic means for tackling it on
several levels at once.
1 When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an
2 allforabit. Here (please to stoop) are selveran cued peteet peas of
3 quite a pecuniar interest inaslittle as they are the pellets that make
4 the tomtummy's pay roll. Right rank ragnar rocks and with these
5 rox orangotangos rangled rough and rightgorong. Wisha, wisha,
6 whydidtha? Thik is for thorn that's thuck in its thoil like thum
7 fool's thraitor thrust for vengeance. What a mnice old mness it
8 all mnakes! A middenhide hoard of objects! Olives, beets, kim
9 mells, dollies, alfrids, beatties, cormacks and daltons. Owlets' eegs
10 (O stoop to please!) are here, creakish from age and all now
11 quite epsilene, and oldwolldy wobblewers, haudworth a wipe o
12 grass. Sss! See the snake wurrums everyside! Our durlbin is
13 sworming in sneaks. They came to our island from triangular
14 Toucheaterre beyond the wet prairie rared up in the midst of the
15 cargon of prohibitive pomefructs but along landed Paddy Wip
16 pingham and the his garbagecans cotched the creeps of them
17 pricker than our whosethere outofman could quick up her whats
18 thats. Somedivide and sumthelot but the tally turns round the
19 same balifuson. Racketeers and bottloggers.
20 Axe on thwacks on thracks, axenwise. One by one place one
21 be three dittoh and one before. Two nursus one make a plaus
22 ible free and idim behind. Starting off with a big boaboa and three-
23 legged calvers and ivargraine jadesses with a message in their
24 mouths. And a hundreadfilled unleavenweight of liberorumqueue
25 to con an we can till allhorrors eve. What a meanderthalltale to
26 unfurl and with what an end in view of squattor and anntisquattor
27 and postproneauntisquattor! To say too us to be every tim, nick
28 and larry of us, sons of the sod, sons, littlesons, yea and lealittle
29 sons, when usses not to be, every sue, siss and sally of us, dugters
30 of Nan! Accusative ahnsire! Damadam to infinities!
31. True there was in nillohs dieybos as yet no lumpend papeer
32 in the waste and mightmountain Penn still groaned for the micies
33 to let flee. All was of ancientry. You gave me a boot (signs on
34 it!) and I ate the wind. I quizzed you a quid (with for what?) and
35 you went to the quod. But the world, mind, is, was and will be
36 writing its own wrunes for ever, man, on all matters that fall
37 under the ban of our infrarational senses . . . |
Line 1 indicates that the process of creating a cliché for use or probe begins in
taking something petite or pretty as a means of extending its action to include
the holos. This is cliché in its sacro-archaic character and it is also cliché in the
sense of dull habituation. The part may be a tooth. In a sense, teeth are not only
the feature of the animal body where repitition and lineality occur, but when
followed by "an allforabit" (alphabet) as their issue, recall the fable of King
Cadmus and the "dragon's teeth which "sprang up armed men." The letters of the
alphabet in their early mode were pictograms that offered many relationships to the
holos, as the famous phrase "alpha and the plow." Letters permitted specialism in
human organization, which is inseperable from the military life. It also creates a social
order (as in line 2 — "please to stoop"). The use of an alphabet is a great drop in
dignity from the full power of the spoken word in archaic ritual. It is "stooping to
conquer" in many senses. "Stoop" is "step" and in cliché technology a step that can
be up or down. It is a means of control and power. Joyce is saying that no cliché
or technology can be accepted without great loss to the integral being of the holos,
and proceeds to a witty evocation of the psychic and social consequences of the
"allforabit" beginning with the effect on human identity.
"Selveran" (line 2) resonates with the modalities of the individual self in relation to
the little module bits ("peteet peas"). Throughout the Wake the theme of mass-man,
whether preliterate or postliterate, is alluded to many times via the "mush of porter
peas." The condition of the self as merged in tribe or society is like that of the individual
pea mashed. It is the mashing, of course, that creates (line 4) the pay roll. Money, as
a repetitive module, is only one of the many dise-effects of the allforabit. "Tomtummy's"
(line 4) recalls that an army of Tommies not only marches on its tummy, but is roused by
the roll of drums and tomtoms. "Wisha, wisha" (line 5) introduces the driving emotion in
all technological cliché development. It is alluded to under many forms in the Wake:
"a burning would is come to dance inane," and of course, "the willingdone musiroom"
— a masssive collection of human cliché and and weaponry by which "a burning would"
manifests in ever new environments and power.
"Wisha, wisha" alludes also to another theme that goes with "peteet peas" (line 2),
namely "mishe, mishe," the Celtic for "I am" and the tribal mishe of of the wild Irish,
or "a mush and a wish."
The query (line 6) "Whydidtha?" follows the chain of consequences of resulting
from a single bit, or bite (line 2) "allforabit." The "a" is for "apple," as it were.
The image of the "thorn that's thuck in its thoil" (line 6) is one of the punishments
— his toil in the garden that has now become a mess. The word "mness" (line 7)
mimes the mouthfull of apple, as it were. "A middenhide hoard of objects" (line 8)
recalls the impulse of fallen man to cover himself (hides, skins). Instead of plucking
the fruit as it grows, he now specializes in the horde of objects and diversityb of diets.
Man becomes a producer and a consumer, organizing trade and markets with ensuing
wars ("cormacks and daltons" [line 9] . . . "Racketeers and bottloggers" [line 19]).
It's the money economy, i.e., "allforabit" where "the tally turns round the same
balifusion" (lines 18-19).
The entire page is devoted to tracing the "meanderthalltale" (line 25), the labrynthine
ways of the alphabet technology as a kind of prototype of of all cliché or breakthroughs.
One of the principal effects of "allforabit" specialism is not only the production of a
"horde of objects" (line 8) but the endless tossing of same onto the middenheap. New
technology as an automatic means of scrapping or rejecting the preceding culture
creates the "liberorumqueue" (line 24), the endless production "to con as we can" (line 25).
Writing as a means of retrieving "ancientry" (line 33) led to a vast scrap heap of
retrieved data even before the advent of "lumpend paper" (line 31). The middenhide
grows mountainous with the castoffs of cultures and technologies. One theme in
"middenhide" is the popular invisible quality of environments created by new cliché
or techniques. The forms of these technologies are imprinted not only on human
language but on the outer world as well: "But the world, mind, is, was, and will be
writing its own wrunes forever, man, on all matters" (lines 35-36) gave us the "ruins,"
the deciphering and retrieval of which fascinates the literate humanist.
Vico, in his Scienza Nuova, which Joyce found so useful, stresses that all ancient
fables and tales are really records of moments of technical breakthrough to which the
ancients assigned the status and name of a god, but Vico also insisted that the effects
of such breakthroughs are recorded in new "wrunes" (line 36), writing into patterns of
human speech and sensibility (line 36). Vico, like Joyce, insinsts that new technology
is not added to culture, but it "ruins" whole societies, tossing them onto the
middenhide or heap, whence they are forever being retrieved and refurbished by
succeeding generations.
This page of the Wake, like many others, is an approach to Yeat's "rag-and-bone
shop of the heart." It is the tradition from which the individual talent must filch
the fragments that he will shore against his own ruins. For Joyce, as for Yeats, the
rag-and-bone shop is a collection of abandoned clichés.
It is the clichés that are the invented probes of artists and society, enabling them to
ascend or descend the ladder of human accomplishment: "please to stoop" (line 2) and
"O stoop to please" (line 10). The need of the poet for ever-new means of probing and
exploration of experience sends him back again and again to the rag-and-bone shop of
abandoned cliché. The testimony of artists in this matter is impressive. The stages by
which the literary archetype became substituted for the technical cliché as the means
of creation is one of the subjects for this book.
- p. 132
Jokes
"Funferall at Finnegans Wake"
It is naturally incongruous that a funeral could be an occasion of merryment. Have
with you to the anthropologists if you want to know further details. This is a universal
custom to fend off all ill forces and events attending death. Thus, the whole of the
Wake is a kind of jig. And it is so with Lawrence Sterne's Tristam Shandy. Of Sterne,
Joyce said that he should have been called Swift, and Swift should have been called Sterne.
The swift is a bird, a martin, and if the wit of Swift was grim ("Satire is a sort of glass,
wherein beholders generally discover everybody's face but their own"), the Sterne touch
was light.
- p. 136
Lovejoy and the Daisy Chain
. . .
Joyce sets up the chain of cognition and recognition itself:
In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds the
nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that
drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that
entails the ensuance of existentiality.
Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In's Lily Tomlin follows this path. No one has to make sense
out of Goldie Hawn. Goldie (to Jack Benny): "Don't read the idiot card, just keep it going."
- pp. 139 - 141
Matching Sense
. . .
In 1923, T. S. Eliot contributed to The Dial his essay on "Ulysses, Order and Myth."
It is here that Mr. Joyce's parallel use of the Odyssey has a great importance.
It has the importance of a scientific discovery. No one else has built a novel
upon such a foundation before: it has never before been necessary. I am not
begging the question in calling Ulysses a "novel"; and if you call it an epic it
will not matter. If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form
which will no longer serve; it is because the novel, instead of being a form,
was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form
to feel the need of something stricter. Mr. Joyce has written one novel — The
Portrait; Mr. Wyndham Lewis has written one novel — Tarr. I do not suppose
that either of them will ever write another "novel". The novel ended with
Flaubert and with James. It is, I think, because Mr. Joyce and Mr. Lewis, being
"in advance" of their time, felt a conscious or probably unconscious dissatisfaction
with the form, that their novels are more formless than those of a dozen clever
writers who are unaware of its obsolescence.
In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity
and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after
him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the
discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations.
It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance
to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.
It is a method already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe
Mr. Yeats to have been the first contemporary to be conscious. It is a method for
which the horoscope is auspicious. Psychology (such as it is, and whether our
reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have
concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead
of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously
believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art, toward that
order and form which Mr. Aldington so earnestly desires. And only those who
have won their own discipline in secret and without aid, in a world which offers
very little assistance to that end, can be of any use in furthering this advance.
- pp. 141 - 142
... [In] Political Systems of Highland Burma, E. R. Leach writes:
... Ritual action reflects the social structure, but it is also a dramatic recapitulation
of the myth . . . .
James Joyce carries similar insights much further by relating muyth and ritual to the
process of sensory cognition:
I pick up your reproof, the horsegift of a friend,
For the prize of your save is the price of my spend.
Can castwhores pulladeftkiss if oldpollocks forsake 'em
Or Culex feel etchy if Pulex don't wake him?
A locus to loue, a term it t'embarass,
These twain are the twins that tick Homo Vulgaris.
Joyce is carefully analyzing the naturem of the cognitive process as extended in our
technologies. Each extension creates a new environment that inflicts change and new
motivation upon the old one. The old and new environments are "twins" that perpetually
impel us onward in a nonstop process of transformation. Joyce and Eliot and Pound
never ceased to stress the importance of this complementary process for the understanding
of poetry and human experience.
- pp. 148 - 149
Mimesis, or Making Sense
. . .
One of the etymologies of "matching" is "making" (mac-ian). This polarity is inherent
in consciousness as such. Certainly in the cliché-to-archetype process, if cognition is
matching our our sensory experience with the outer world, re-cognition is a repeat of
that process. We have seen how dreaming involves a ricorso of this waking experience
of the day: "The unpurged images of daya recede" (Yeats). The whole of Finnegans
Wake is a ricorso, a scrubbing purgation or private and corporate experience in the
"dreaming back." "Making sense" is a phrase that indicates repitition of some experience
which yields a sudden truth or meaning.
... creativity is the parallel of cognition, a retracking of the labrynth of sensation. Ancient
mythology is packed with examples of this awareness. Daedalus, the mightiest maker or
engineer of antiquity, contrived the labrynth that enclosed the Minotaur. The first page of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man concerns the cognitive labyrinth as traversed by
Stephen, the artist hero, in his first encounter with the Minotaur and other scandals (cf.
Greek etymology).
Stephen's surname is not Daedalus but "Dedalus," i.e., "dead all us." Joyce's last story
in Dubliners, "The Dead," and the last lines of the Portrait explain the relation of the
young artist to the dead: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience
and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." This verbal
implication of ricorso, the millions of repetitions of the cognitive labyrinth, which is traced
on the first page of the Portrait, is the task of making sense, of waking the somnambulists
in the labyrinth of cognition.
. . .
Aristotelian mimesis confirms the James Joyce approach, since it is a kind of recap of natural
processes, whether of making sense via cognition or making a house by follwing the lines of
Nature. For example, in the Physics, Book II, Chapter VIII, Aristotle writes: "Thus, if a house
had been a thing made by Nature it would have been made in the same way as it is now by art;
and if things made by nature were made also by art, they would come to be in the same way as
by Nature." Aristotle thus confirms the sacral quality of the liché or artifact by aligning it with
the cosmic forces, justv as biologists say ontogeny recaps phylogeny, i.e., knowing and gowing
are one, which of course is the theme of The Portrait by Joyce.
- p. 152
The One and the Mini
In contrast to private awareness, social consciousness is a process of scrapping, retrieving,
and probing. The emphasis for the most part is upon retrieval and the accumulation of vast
residues. With the development in the nineteenth century of many new technologies (clichés),
the supremacy of unified print consciousness gave way to multiconsciousness. There was no
garbage heap, no middenheap, there was no unconscious large enough to contain all the
materials generated by the breakdown of so much probing and environing. Numerous works
of literature and art testify to the impact of the new multiconsciousness. Jarry's Ubu Roi, Eliot's
The Waste Land, the opening chapters of Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God, Joyce's Finnegans
Wake, the entire literature of the Theater of the Absurd all give evidence of this overwhelming
impact.
- pp. 162 - 163
Paradox
. . .
In cliché-archetype terms, the paradox is a major form of cliché-probe dependent upon an
encyclopedic retrieval of older clichés for its existence. No more extreme instance of this
process can be imagined than Joyce's discovery of the mirror as wheel:
I am glad you liked my punctuality as an engine driver. I have taken this up because I
am really one of the greatest engineers, if not the greatest, in the world besides being
a musicmaker, philosophist and heaps of other things. All the engines I know are wrong.
Simplicity. I am making an engine with only one wheel. No spokes of course. The wheel
is a perfect square. You see what I am driving at, don't you? I am awfully solemn about
it, mind you, so you must not think it is a silly story about the mouse and the grapes.
No, it's a wheel, I tell the world. And it's all square.
In order to be as modern as possible at all times, Joyce turned to the ancient and classical
modes of paradox, to learn both how to discover and how to instruct, enabling him to
teach his readers the same arts:
My remarks about the engine were not meant as a hint at the title. I meant that I wanted
to take up several other arts and crafts and teach everybody how to do everything properly
so as to be in fashion.
Like Alice, Joyce pushed all the way through the Narcissus looking-glass. He moved from
the private Stephen Dedalus to the Finnegan corporate image. The mirror, like the mind, by
taking in and feeding back the same image becomes a wheel, a cycle, able to retrieve all experience.
- pp. 169 - 170
Parody
. . .
Lewis Carroll presents his fake world as a realistic scale model. "Realism" implies
dominance of visual and other sensory detail. Sweeny Agonistes is a parody of a parody
based, on one hand, on Aristophanic comic mode and, on the other, on Victorian melodrama.
The whole classical parallel is in turn made parallel to the Frenzy of Suibhne. Michael
O'Brien noted that Sweeny, the Boston Irishman as caricature of caveman, afforded just
such a parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity as Eliot welcomed in Joyce's Ulysses.
The Frency of Suibhne was published in a translation from the Gaelic by the Irish Text
Society in 1913: "Many of the themes of the poem in which Sweeny appears are included
in capsule form in the two epigraphs to Sweeny Agonistes."
- p. 176
Public as Cliché
. . .
It should be clear ... that standards imposed from above have little value in relating
people to one another in environments that have never existed before. The creative
value of commercial stereotypes appears in the portrait of Gerty MacDowell in Joyce's
Ulysses. Gerty is a mosaic of banalities that reveals the effect of these forms in shaping
and extending our lives. Joyce ebnables the reader to exult and triumph over the trivia
by letting him in on the very process by which they dramatize our lives. In the same
way, in the newspaper, or "Aeolus," episode of Ulysses, Joyce deploys for us the world
of verbal gimmicks as well as the mechanical operations on which they depend. He
floods the entire newsmaking situation with an intelligibility that provides a catharsis
for the accumulated effects of the stereotypes in our lives.
- p. 182
Rag-and-Bone Shop
. . .
... Toronto Daily Star of March 15, 1969:
PHILADELPHIA SCHOOL USES
WHOLE CITY AS ITS CLASSROOMS
Stratton Holland, describing one of the most significant experiments in North America,
observes ... "The big saving is in the school building."
The Scandinavians long ago discovered the ideal playfield for children was a high heap
of old cars and discarded equipment. The city as a total environment is the ungraded and
unstructured school in excelsis. No wonder the Watts kids said, "Why should we go to
school and interrupt our education?"
Today, in the much greater junkyard of entertainment and advertising presented on radio
and television, the child has access to every corner of the cultures of the world, past and
present. Roaming this vast jungle as a "hunter," the child feels like a primitive native of a
totally new kind of environment. When he encounters older educational hardware (schools
and structured courses) he reacts exactly as natives have done to colonial and imperial
exploiters of their unstructured "thing." He says ... "The globe is my theater, I shall
not want for parts or pastures."
Recent archaeological discoveries show that the Trojans who inhabited some of the Troys
which were built on the site of Homeric Troy were accustomed to throwing away their
garbage, mostly bones, in their houses. When the debris became objectionably high, they
simply trampled it down and raised the roof of the dwelling place. There is some suggestion
that the Troy of Homer's Illiad dealt with its garbage in this barbaric way.
Joyce's Wake works on the pattern of "one world burrowing on another": "Toborrow and
toburrow and tobarrow! That's our crass, hairy and ever-grim life, till one finel howdiedow
Bouncer Naster raps on the bell with a bone and his stinkers stank behind him with the
sceptre and the hourglass."
The classification of "garbage" concerns a host of misconcenptions. The term itself
literally signifies clothing. The cultures of the world have been clad in and constituted
by retrieved castoffs: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." All the epic
poems of the world are ingeniously assembled fragments of script cultures.
- p. 184
The Gutenberg innovation scrapped the medieval world and dumped classical antiquity in
the Renaissance lap. Today electric retrieval systems scrap nineteenth-century mechanism
and dump the entire collection of archaic and preliterate cultures on the Western doorstep.
Electronic culture has created the multiprobe, and this probe results in vast amounts of garbage.
The new information environment scraps the university, returning it, as it were, to its primal
state. The large business corporations dissolve into connubiums and consortiums; just as large
empires become congeries of mini-states. The ABM systems are designed to junk the ICBM
systems of other powers. This pattern, in which a cliché-probe junks present environments,
is to be seen in other areas of modern culture. In literature, works like Eliot's The Waste
Land, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and Beckett's Waiting for Godot are concerned with the
destructive aspects of the enormous creativity of the elctronic age. All of Pop art, Funk art,
Op art, and the various other versions of mini-art reiterate the process by which the cliché-probe
destroys and creates. At the conclusion of "The Circus Animals' Desertion" Yeats perhaps
suggests the renewal which he doesn't actually specify:
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
How to elicit creativity from these middenheaps has become the problem of modern culture.
- p. 195
Theater
. . .
Feenichts Playhouse
— James Joyce Finnegans Wake
The seim anew.
— James Joyce Finnegans Wake
- p. 198
As an art form, the Happening does not so much address the audience as include the
audience. ... At various times in the history of the theater, the audience has been
included in the show to a considerable degree. In the newspaper it is decidedly the
audience that is the show. Such, in large degree, is the nature of language. It is a
Happening that includes all publics and and all past perceptions in a Donnybrook
of coincidences and adjustments. Once Joyce discovered language in this way, he
knew he had found out the means to tranform the entire human community into a
work-force for the artist. Gerd Stein and the other poest of the Happening are
delighted to discover that all human artefacts are avilable as dramatis personae
in their theater. It is the same discovery of the "world" that has created Camp.
- p. 200
The Expressionists had discovered that the creative process is a kind of repetition of the stages
of apprehension... In the same way there would seem to be an echo of the formative processes
consciousness in the entire content of the unconcsious. This, in turn, implies a close liaison
between private and corporate awareness, though which exerts the most effect on the other
may depend entirely on the degree of awareness achieved.
Miss Sontag observes:
The Happening operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or Consummation; this is the
alogic of dreams rather than the logic of most art. Dreams have no sense of time; neither do the Happenings. Lacking a
plot and continuous rational discourse, they have no past. As the name itself suggests, Happenings are always in the
present tense. The same words, if there ara any, are said over and over; speech is reduced to a stutter....
The night world of Finnegans Wake corresponds to this description of the Happening to a
considerable degree. For great stretches of cultural time the unconscious has been the
environment of consciousness. The roles of guest and host are tending to reverse at present.
A century of earnest probing into the unconscious has revealed much of its structure and
content, pushing them up into consciousness. Consciousness has increasingly become the
environment of the unconscious until we begin to "dream awake," as it were, losing the
boundaries between private and corporate. This is a revolution that has occured more than
once in the present century.
- pp. 204 - 205
Ionesco discovered that cliché, like the cartoon and the icon, is
charged with the accumulation of corporate energy and perception. A merely
private expression, or rhythm, is necessarily lacking the dimension of
corporate power. The banal, as such, is rich in energy for the artist
who has the skill to trigger it. To release energy in the cliché
needs the encounter of another cliché! Joyce never tired of using
this discovery even in its most limited verbal forms:
Loud, heap miseries upon us yet
entwine our arts with laughters low!
— Finnegans Wake
The Happening exploits not only the clash of one cliché against another, but also the much
more effective interface of a cliché from one medium with a cliché from other media.
Marshall McLuhan (1970) Culture Is Our Business
YY
- p. 20
"The West shall shake the East awake, while yet ye have the night for morn." — FW
[Across the page from a magazine ad: "Japan Airlines announces daily service to Europe."]
- p. 42
"Never opens me mouth but I put my feed in it." (FW)
- p. 68
"ALIS, ALAS, SHE BROKE THE GLASS" (FW)
- p. 76
"Willed, without witting, whorled without aimed." (FW)
- p. 110
Joyce devoted his tenth and last thunder in Finnegans Wake to TV,
"the charge of the light barricade." The viewer is the screen
(not the camera, as in a movie).
- p. 121
Jung and Easily Freudened
Patent leather shoes were verboten in 1900,
lest they mirror panties.
Sexually, man is the least priviledged of creatures,
the holder of an unposted letter "before the too late
box of the general postoffice of human life." (Ulysses)
- p. 122
LOWER THE AGE OF PUBERTY!
The epic of artificial aids for feminine allure is the Gerty
McDowell episode of Joyce's Ulysses. If nothing could
persuade the reader to scan the ad world as full of the figures
of classical rhetoric, this could: "Gert's Crowning Glory Was
Her Wealth of Wonderful Hair." The name of he Irish maid evokes
the Scottish composer of In an (English) Country Garden, creating
the subplots non-verbal cliches that complement the coruscation
of old verbal favorites.
Nature had not been kind to Gerty. She was lame.
She made up the difference, as the present ad counsels. "Gerty
Dressed Simply But with the Instinctive Taste of a Votary of Dame
Fashion."
"New Fatted Calf Is Out, Bosom Will Soon Follow" (Reuters, London,
June 12/65)
[Across the page from a magazine ad for a brassiere:
"IF NATURE DIDN'T, WARNERS WILL"]
- p. 158
"Gestapose to parry off cheekars or frankfurters on the odor." (FW)
- p. 172
"Flatchested fortyish, faintly flatulent and given to ratiocination
by syncopation..." (FW)
- p. 182
GOODNESS ONLY GNOSIS!
THE OSMIC COSMIC MAN
"...he was one of those lusty cocks for whom the audible-visible-
gnosible-edible world existed." (FW)
- p. 186
DÉJÀ VUE: FINN AGAIN
- p. 200
Thanks eversore much, Point Carrried! I can't say if it's
the weight you strike me to the quick or that red mass I was
looking at... Honours to you and may you be commended for our
exhibitiveness! (FW)
- p. 208
"TELEVISION KILLS TELEPHONY IN BROTHERS' BROIL." (FW)
- p. 214
"Assuary as there's a bonum in your ossthealogy!" (FW)
- p. 251
The West Shall Shake the East Awake
When you are riding an elephant, be sure not to say...
"The Amber Palace, and step on it."
- p. 251
"STOP KICKING SAND IN MY FACE"
"An Eastern humming sphere of myself." (FW)
- p. 280
"Finnegans Wake" owes much to a nineteenth century play by Sir Charles
Young, called "Jim the Penman." Jim was a counterfeiter who was able to
accommodate himself to all levels of society by his forgeries. Joyce saw
the artist as a forger who moved through all levels of experience. He
branded his own "Ulysses" as "an epical forged cheque on the public
for his own private profit."
Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt (1972) Take Today: The Executive As Dropout
YY
- p. 71
"Wearing number nine in Yangste hats."
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
- p. 75
"So sing they sequent the assent of man."
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
- p. 86
"Stand up to hardware and step into style."
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
- p. 103
"In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds
the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten
sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death
that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality."
Finnegans Wake
- p. 110
In The Social Impact of Cybernetics, Robert Theobald predicts that
"computer systems, not men, will first realize humanity's old dream of a
universal language, and the subtleties and nuances of human thought will
risk being mediated through the restricted and standardized symbols of
computer communication." While artists like James Joyce can make a
resonating universe with two words, computer programmers try to match
universe of human knowledge and perception to the two bit wit of their
machines.
- p. 116
When numbers take over, apathy sets in. Apathy is the strategy
of numbing against numbers. "Who gave you that numb?" As James Joyce
understood, to name or to number a thing is to classify and thus reduce
it below the threshold of human curiosity. Can the hot line replace
the hot number?
- p. 132
Funferall in a notshall.
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
- pp. 150 - 151
THE "NEW" SCIENCE IS PERCEPT NOT CONCEPT
The Abnihilisation of the Etym.
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
Here Joyce is referring not only to the splitting but the splintering
of all etymologies or the scrubbing of all human perceptions. The
Etymologiae of Isadore of Seville in the sixth century A.D.
was a compendium of the arts and sciences. Etymology was understood
to include the secret principles of all forms of being, physical and
spiritual. In the seventeenth century VIco's Scienza Nuova
reasserted those ancient principles of verbal resonance as comprising
the keys to all scientific and humanistic mysteries. James Joyce,
who incorporated not only Vico, but all the ancient traditions of
language as science, alludes to the principal feature of this kind
of "new science" in Finnegans Wake: "As for the viability of
the vicinals, when invisible they're invincible." The allusion to Vico
is environmental (vicus: Latin for neighborhood), indicating the
irresistible operation of causes in the new environments issuing from
new technologies. Since these environments are always invisible,
merely because they are environments, their transforming powers are
never heeded in time to be moderated or controlled.
- p. 181
... Following the nineteenth century obsession with the new "hardware" service
environment of road and rail, [Marx] saw the entire historical process as a
struggle between the "productive forces" of "hardware" technology and the
"production relations" or social hierarchy created through the ownership of
that "hardware" — the song of the "steal" men. His proposal to resolve
this conflict was for the production workers to take over the production
"hardware" instead of exploiting the new "software" environment and the
new knowledge industries created by mobility of the nineteenth-century
"hardware." The "Rose of Castile" (the Joycean pun in Ulysses) interrelated
the worlds of art and industry and the world of the press and the the book to
the world of the railway. Joyce asked: "My producers, are they not my
consumers?" IN THE ELECTRIC-INFORMATION AGE, EMPLOYER AND
EMPLOYEE MERGE AS AUDFIENCE.
- p. 209
The old order changeth and lasts like the first.
James Joyce
- p. 295
DO-IT-YOURSELF FATE
Everyman as Finn Awake
As all monopolies of knowledge break down in our world of information
speed-up, the role of executive opens up to Everyman. There are managers
galore for the global theater. By their deeds you will know them — the
instant catalysts.
Today, while efforts are intensifying to prop up the old hierarchical
structures, they are being eroded and transformed by new modular forms
of human organization. Based on dialog, these modules are where the
drop-out becomes the drop-in for remaking all cliches while retrieving
the archetypes — new treasures for all.
"To burrow, to borrow, to barrow,"
H.C.E. with keys to GIVEN
- p. 297
We may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we're presurely
destined to be odd's without ends.
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
Marshall McLuhan, Eric McLuhan, Kathryn Hutchon (1977) City As Classroom
Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers (1989) The Global Village:
Transformations In World Life and Media in the 21st Century
YY
- p. 11
The new video-related technologies promise to impose a new monopoly
of ground over figure. Whatever is left of mechanical age values
could be swallowed up by information overload. Media determinism,
the imposition willy-nilly of new cultural grounds by the action
of new technologies, is only possible when the users are well-adjusted,
i.e., sound asleep. The vortex of side-effects was penned by James
Joyce: "Willed without witting, whorled without aimed." There is no
inevitability, however, where there is a willingness to pay attention.
- p. 46
...since World War I and the advent of those technical wave-surfers
Marconi and Edison, the rumbles of aural-tactility, the power of
the spoken word, have been heard. James Joyce in Finnegans Wake,
celebrating the tearing apart of the ethos of print by radio, film
(television), and recording. He could easily see that Goebbels and
his radio loudspeakers were a new tribal echo. And you may be sure
that emerging mediums such as satellite, the computer, the data base,
teletext-videotext, and the international multi-carrier corporations,
such as ITT, GTE, and AT&T, will intensify the attack on the printed
word as the "sole" container of the public mentality, without being
aware of it of course. By the twenty-first century, most printed
matter will have been transferred to something like an ideographic
microfiche as only part of a number of data sources available in
acoustic and visual modes.
YY
"Marshall McLuhan
What are you doin'?"
— Henry Gibson
Last update
Fri Feb 2 20:18:29 PST 2018
by ABS.