Marshall McLuhan on James Joyce

Transcribed by Alan B. Scrivener. **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** YY
"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 **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** YY 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 **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** %% 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 **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** YY
    • 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 **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** 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 **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** 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 **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** %%
    • 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] **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** 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.

      SPICKSPOOKSPOKESMAN

      OF OUR

      SPECTURESQUE SILENTIOUSNESS!

      **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** %% **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** %%
    • 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. **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** YY
    • pp. 108 - 109
      "History as she is harped. Rite words in rote order."
    • p. 120 **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** 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 **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** 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!
      **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** %% **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** %%
    • 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 **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** 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
      **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** 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 **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** 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 Ulysses

      completed the cycle of this technological art form.

    • p. 59 **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** %%
    • 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 **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** %%
    • 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 **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** 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 **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** 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 **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** 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 **************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** 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.

**************** MISSING IMAGE! **************** YY
"Marshall McLuhan What are you doin'?" — Henry Gibson

Last update Fri Feb 2 20:18:29 PST 2018 by ABS.