Paper – D.B. Weiss, “Understanding the (Net) Wake”
- At October 16, 2022
- By Great Quail
- In Joyce
0
Understanding the Net (Wake)
By D.B. Weiss
Submitted as a partial fulfillment of the regular degree of Master of Philosophy in Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, 1995.
Acknowledgements
I thought about a dedication “To My own Soul” {35G}, but quickly realized I would not be fooling anyone. That soul is mine only through the good graces of my parents, along with everything else that is mine. Their refusal to lend anything less than 100% of their support to even the most ridiculous of my endeavors is often frightening. This is for them. I would also like to thank John Nash and Prof. Nicholas Grene, for allowing me the latitude to carry out this project as I saw fit. The freedom to crash and burn is a rare gift. Finally, I would offer these pages as a cattle-prod to my dear brother Richard the Poet, in the hopes that they might spur him forward and upward, to new poetic heights.
Preface
Before beginning this exploration of Finnegans Wake (among other things), two prefatory comments:
1) To dedicate a dissertation to your parents, and then write it in such a way that they can only read it with the aid of a Dictionary of Literary Criticism and an intensive course in Contemporary Critical Theory seems to me a particularly nasty practical joke to play on those who brought you into the world. Until someone can convince me otherwise, the Expulsion of the Triumphant Terminology in this dissertation will stand. It is my belief that most deployments of obfuscating jargonalia have more to do with displays of animal territoriality than the study of literature, anyway. If I do have to use words that fall outside the pale of common intelligent vocabulary (i.e. ‘lexeme’), I will try to define them.
2) I would have liked to transfer this dissertation to HyperCard, and hand it in on disk—but Mr. John Nash was intelligent enough to counsel against this, and I was intelligent enough to heed his warnings. To compensate for the paper presentation of what was originally intended as a hypertextual document, I have included an admittedly incomplete network of cross-references within the text itself. Wherever the reader sees a bracketed number and letter (i.e.—{38V}), he/she/it has the option to ignore it and keep reading, or to go to the chapter and paragraph indicated in the brackets.
Ignoring all of the bracketed ‘links’ will result in a straightforward, linear reading. Following all of them will result in an endless reading experience, one involving unbearable redundancy. I hope that most people will choose something in-between.
To the straight-ahead readers: I apologize for all those bracketed eyesores. You can’t please all the people….
To the hypertextual readers: I apologize for the traditional footnotes, and the frequent references to ‘the last section’, ‘the next section’, etc. You can’t please all the people….
Understanding the Net (Wake)
1
A.
“Perhaps it is insanity. One will be able to judge in a century.”
—James Joyce, regarding Finnegans Wake
Almost sixty years after its publication, the jury is still out on Finnegans Wake. When Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson asked in 1944, in light of the popular editions of Ulysses that were already being printed, “Is it too much to expect that Finnegans Wake will win its own audience with the years?”, they were clearly outstripping most of their contemporaries with their hopeful enthusiasm. Respect for the work which spanned nearly a third of Joyce’s life has no doubt increased in the past few decades, but it is still not uncommon to meet ‘Joyce Scholars’ who have never read more than a few pages of the Wake. Yet in 1931, Joyce was able to insist with a fortune-teller’s equipoise: “it may be outside literature now, but its future is inside literature.”
B. Joyce was right. Or, he deserves to have been right; no book has more contemporary relevance than Finnegans Wake, and as we roll over into the encroaching millennium, this relevance only grows. To demonstrate this is the motivation behind this intellectual exercise. In the eminently readable (if occasionally misguided) book, The Stoic Comedians, Hugh Kenner makes an incisive observation:
“Joyce’s techniques—it is one of his principal lessons—are without exception derived from his subject, of excerpted from his subject. They are not means of representing the subject, and imperfectly; they are the subject’s very members laid on the page…”
In Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s subject is the universe, the super-set of All That Is. To capture this totality as he understood it {11A}, it was necessary for Joyce to incorporate contemporary scientific paradigms and cultural assumptions concerning the nature of things. If we take into account the hyper-extended versions of reality which have come about in the past 90 or so years (though in many cases the coming about is a coming around, a recasting of old conceptual iron), it is fair to consider the Wake a ‘realistic novel’. The proclamation of Dr. Ramon Mendoza that Giordano Bruno is “the real founder of contemporary cosmology” may mask the flavor of truth with liberal handfuls of hyperbole, but Joyce certainly saw the connection. Indeed, almost all the words that are most useful in discussing the Wake have their origins in scientific or quasi-scientific, not literary vocabularies. A partial list:
Uncertainty {31C}, Simultaneity, Field, Incompleteness {31B}, Open Work (exception) {20A}, Hypertextual {23A}, Cool {13A}, Implicate {34C}, Isomorphism {10A}, Complexity {32C}, Order/Chaos {32D}, Nodes, Links, Combinations, Permutations {9A}, Probability {31D}, Nonlinearity {23E}, Nonlocality {33D}, Globality {33B}, Hologrammatic {33A}, NETWORK {4A}.
All these are flagship words for “trends in 20th century thought concerning the transitory and multiple nature of human experience.” They are all words that will appear again in these pages, especially the last one (NETWORK).
C. If we set aside the endless arguments over the legitimacy of the notion of a central literary canon, Finnegans Wake’s place in the following bifurcation by canon-ite Harold Bloom seems obvious:
“One mark of an originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is a strangeness that we can either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.”
The idea of ‘assimilating’ Finnegans Wake may not be appetizing to all, carrying as it does overtones of indigestion. But we have all been cultivating the cognitive tools needed to apprehend Finnegans Wake without knowing it {19A}. Another apposite quotation, this time from Walter Benjamin:
“…the history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form.”
The effects to which the Wake aspires are effects that have strong analogues in the sphere of electric media and communications. {13A} As our lives become further permeated by these media, we become unwitting Wakeans; one of the tasks at hand in these pages is to detail the means by which comparatively new forms of communication pull us Wake-ward.
D. Keeping all this in mind, it is important to remember that the mindsets and ‘sensory ratios’ of past generations are not swept away by the shock-wave of the new; in many ways, the Wake is about the ineluctable persistence of the past as much as the impending reconfigurations of the future {10D}. It was my original intention to limit this discussion to Finnegans Wake and modern computer network structures, but any true engagement of Joyce’s last effort is bound to jump whatever fences one raises to hem it in. In looking backward, Joyce finds not inscrutability, but a mirror. The ‘new’ and ‘unheard of’ never is; to forget this is to reinvent the wheel, over and over again. The ‘new’ and ‘unheard of’ critic is a modern-day incarnation of Sisyphus—only Sisyphus never asked for applause. {35D}
E. That no direct quotations from the Wake have yet appeared in these lines, many may find troublesome. They will appear, soon enough. But a warning is in order: this is an examination of How more than a stockpiling of What, an exploration of the way the Wake works, the way it transmits its stores of knowledge and information. “For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind,” says Marshall McLuhan, one of the point men in this operation. Umberto Eco (point man #2), is equally suspicious of Joyce’s faith in his building supplies: “Joyce accumulates materials whose form captivates him but whose substance does not elicit his belief.”
Not a simple choosing a side in the form/content duality—Joyce impishly resists anything so easy. In the Wake (as Beckett, Joyce’s scribe-made-good, knew), “form is content, content is form….His writing is not about something, it is that something itself.” The structure and method of the Wake is ’what it’s about’; its medium is its message. The search here is for what Douglas Hofstadter (third and final point man) would call “Procedural Knowledge”, knowledge that is a “global consequence of how the program [or system] works”. Not file-able, manageable ‘facts’ to be picked out of the text, not details; the ‘meaning’ of Finnegans Wake is an epiphenomenon of its total network. {21E}
F. Other people have attempted to examine the Wake under the quantum lights of modernity, but they all seem to balk at the idea of addressing it as a unified formal innovation. In the on-line journal Hypermedia Joyce Studies, Darren Tofts is happy to stack technological references and present the Wake as “as index of telecommunicative change”. Tofts shows great familiarity with Derrida and computers, but contrary to the assertion of many wise and learned individuals, the world did not begin in 1973. In the same forum, Donald Theall invokes McLuhan, but forsakes the medium while scrambling after the message.
To be fair, even the most seasoned Wake exegetes make similar mistakes. Though Tofts’ and Theall’s overall contributions to general Joyce understanding may pale in comparison to James Atherton’s, their misunderstandings also seem minor in the face of Atherton’s insistence that “there are too many real—or rather, fully realized—characters taking part in the action for the book to be anything except a novel of the naturalistic type.” When Hugh Kenner argues that “Joyce belongs to the age of the printed book”, I am compelled to listen, but still conclude: No more than Moses belonged to the Age of the Pharaohs. By the time he reaches Finnegans Wake, Joyce could be said to ‘belong’ to every age including those to come, but one senses he would allow his membership to the Gutenbergian Authorial Association to expire if they would only let him go. {12A}
2
A.
“Wipe your glosses with what you know.”
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
Harold Bloom, in a characteristically dour pronouncement, envisions a future where Finnegans Wake is relegated to “only a small band of enthusiastic specialists.” I will not write him off and I will not back his horse, but such would be a sad fate for a thoroughly generalist work. Like nonspecialist electric technologies, like the ‘total field’ of sound described by McLuhan {34B}, the Wake eliminates “fragmented specialties of form and function that we have long accepted as the heritage of alphabet, printing, and mechanization.” {12B} Bloom admits that his Shakespearocentric reading of the Wake”is only one perspective on a book whose readers need absolutely every perspective they can get.”
Roland McHugh agrees: “The conviction that Finnegans Wake is exclusively dominated by a particular discipline is very common amongst explicators today….perusal of the notebooks is a good antidote.” It is not surprising that McHugh is one of the most (possibly the most) useful writer on the Wake; an M.D. as well as a literary critic, he is a card-carrying generalist. Like Joyce, McLuhan “was interested in anything and everything. He was a polymaniac.” Tim Ahern, whose Finnegans Wake, chapter one: The Illnesstraited Colossick Idition shows true insight into the comic nature of its source {7A}, holds degrees in Slavic Languages and Literature, Oceanography, Molecular Biology, and Natural Products Chemistry. The Wake has attracted many other syncretists: Umberto Eco, Terrence McKenna, John Cage, Robert Anton Wilson. The more you know, the better.
B. But the converse is also true: a book for those who know everything is a book for those who know anything. Jim McCabe, who lectures on Finnegans Wake at University College, Dublin, has called it “the most democratic work in literature”. The Wake presents immense initial cognitive and imaginative difficulties, but it does so for everyone, democratically, giving the ‘unskilled’ rare equal footing with ‘professionals’—a quality it shares with the some of the music of figures like Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, John Cage, and Charles Ives. Joyce wanted to let people in; in a book about everything, everyone plays a part: “He had begun his writing by asserting his difference from other men, and now increasingly he recognized his similarity to them.”
C. As I write these words after completing the protracted task of organizing one huge pile of notecards into successively smaller piles of notecards, I cannot avoid the relevance of the above image in describing the task at hand. However, like the brain and like the Wake, and like the microchip with its mask layers upon mask layers of silicon dioxide, I would like to give the present inquiry an accretionary flavor. The piling of incommensurates upon incommensurates that stuffs these pages, the attempted shotgun wedding of many disparate sources, is intentional. Adhering to the principle of sympathetic magic which states that ‘Like Follows Like’ is the only means that I can fathom to begin to come to grips with the Wake’s vast complexity. Each new ‘angle’ provides an increase in the resolution of the overall picture. {33A}
3
A. For those who are reading straight through in an orderly fashion, and having arrived here from 2B are wondering when this thing is going to ‘get to the point’, I will now present a brief digression on getting to the point, and why the method of construction by which Finnegans Wake was assembled makes such a thing difficult, if not impossible.
In chapter five of the Wake, the Great Letter motif that is woven through every chapter is given its fullest treatment. We read that the Letter “has acquired accretions of terricious matter whilst loitering in the past”(114) The Letter is a stand-in for the Wake itself (among other things), and this is an apt description of the way Joyce wrote the book. Staying with chapter five—in the 1925 version, the list of heroine/female archetype/key nodal point Anna Livia Plurabelle’s names is twelve lines long. In the final version that appears in the 1939 edition and all subsequent editions, it spans 3 full pages (104-107). In similar fashion, Joyce expanded ALP’s final monologue from two-and-a-half pages to ten.
B. Like Einstein’s expanding universe {28B}, the pages of the Wake expanded in development—but they also got more dense and difficult, in contrast to the red-shift dissipation of receding galaxies. Joyce piled words upon words and layers upon layers, increasing the often contradictory condensation of his puns {32A}, until he had produced a work inscrutable enough to compete with the world {11E}. And herein lies the difficulty with bright-eyed attempts to ‘understand’ the Wake; the act of understanding runs counter to the act of creating. It is not an act of accretion, but an act of unraveling.
The human brain provides a useful example. In its initial development, the brain is grown as an ever-increasing conglomeration of interconnected neurons. From the very moment it starts to interact with the world and develop a heuristic for dealing with the world, it begins to operate through “chunking”, pruning down the giant tree of infinite possibility, sacrificing completeness for comprehensibility. As usual, a picture clarifies tremendously:
[missing pic]
4
A. As his daughter Lucia’s schizophrenia worsened, Joyce alone had the ability to follow her giant-steps of thought that baffled others completely. His ability to traverse the flux of her wild metaphoric “correspondance”(452) is evident in his masterwork. If we imagine hero/male archetype/key nodal point H.C. Earwicker’s “seven dams….and every dam had her seven crutches. And every crutch had its seven hues. And every hue had a differing cry”(215), we will have a good picture of the branching tree pathways that Joyce knew how to walk with Lucia {20C}. If we then imagine connecting every dam, crutch, hue and cry with every other dam, crutch, hue and cry, we will “translace”(233) that branching tree into the kind of network into which the reader of Finnegans Wake is dropped.
B. Any sufficiently complex and well-constructed conceptual network is far closer to ‘reality’ and the way our own minds function than a one-way train-track linear system. The idea of the network is behind all ideas about anything, inasmuch as the brains which traffic in these ideas are themselves networks of billions of neurons, each one of which can receive the input of up to 200,000 other neurons through its dendrites, and in turn send its electrochemical pulse to myriad other neurons along the branching tree of its axon. {3B} The dreams which served as the inspiration for the techniques in the Wake can be seen as random meanderings around the symbolic networks of our brains.
C. The network is far from being a modern invention; it has made many past appearances. We have medieval manuscripts {5A} which carry different layers of meaning in images which demand to be read in a number of different ways simultaneously. “Free association of ideas is taken to be part of the intellectual baggage of the monks” who created them, prefiguring Freud by a mere eleven centuries.
In the hermetic magical tradition {10A}, the ‘good magic’ of Pico della Mirandola is governed by the principle of simpatia, the understanding of the mutual rapports running through nature, and the secret charms through which things are drawn to one another. This tradition reached Joyce through the pipeline of Giordano Bruno, whose more practical magic spoke of drawing spirits or demons through ‘links’ of words, songs, incantations, images, seals, characters, etc. ‘Demons’ and ‘spirits’ were elemental forces, coaxed by the magical operator through the network of nature in ways that would cause them to do the operator’s bidding—after the fashion of a computer programmer, for those amenable to ‘correspondances’.
Lexicographers eventually came to understand that organizing knowledge in interconnected semantic ‘fields made more sense than linear alphabetic organization in many cases (which was itself a revolutionary concept in its time, suggested by the printer’s cast-lead letters, organized alphabetically in drawers for easy access). The most striking example we have in the late 20th century is that of hypertext {23A}, the interwoven web of connected documents that can span across the memory of one computer, or across the collective contents of millions of computers around the globe, the ‘links’ accessible through nodal ‘keywords’, often highlighted in boldface.
The godfather of hypertext, Vannevar Bush, realized as Director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development in 1945 that “the human mind…operates by association”, and postulated a device called the Memex which would operate along the same lines. Ted Nelson, who coined the term ‘‘hypertext’, spoke of the “docuverse”, and said that “literature is an ongoing system of interconnecting documents.” Joyce had many predecessors, and has many successors.
D. As far as I know, Umberto Eco was the first to examine the concept of Wake-as-network in any depth. The ‘Open Work’ as explicated by Eco will be discussed in more detail later on {20A}; briefly, he speaks of open works as creative endeavors which place the reader (or performer) “at the focal point of a network of limitless interrelations.” Referring to Finnegans Wake specifically:
“We should….be able to show that each metaphor produced in Finnegans Wake is, in the last analysis, comprehensible because the entire book, read in different directions, actually furnishes the metonymic chains that justify it.”
It is a picture of Finnegans Wake as geodesic dome, supporting itself by the combined strength of its own massive metaphoric edifice. Eco also postulates that apparent ‘giant-steps’ of metaphor within the Wake’s system (or within any linguistic system) are really no more than short circuits of preestablished paths already ‘hardwired’ into the code of the system. This is true as far as it goes; but hacking a path through the undergrowth to Grandma’s House is creating a new path, even if you have been to Grandma’s House before along a longer route.
In this network structure, “it is enough to find the means of rendering two terms phonetically contiguous for the [conceptual] resemblance to impose itself.” {8A} In Vico’s New Science, the beastly descendants of Noah’s sons are frightened in the midst of copulating by the sound of thunder, sending them fleeing into caves and bringing about the introduction of moral virtue, and the introduction of marriage. For the reader of the Wake and for bestial man, it is random juxtaposition that creates meaning.
In practice, one of many places where this principle of contiguity comes out in the Wake is in a phenomenon noted by Matthew Hodgart in which the appearance of a certain ‘type’ of character in the Wake triggers allusions to a character in Shakespeare who is of the same ‘type’. Thus, “quotations from Macbeth appear wherever Earwicker endures enormous emotional stress….and when his self-destructive drive emerges most visibly.” And so in chapter four, the chapter of HCE’s demise and resurrection, he tries “to get outside his own length of rainbow trout and taerts atta tarn as no man of woman born”(79).
The picture on the next page illustrates the small segment of the Wake’s total semantic network associated with the portmanteau “meandertale”(18). Connections between two ‘lexemes’ (words) through ‘contiguity of signifiers’ (phonetic likeness) and ‘contiguity of signifieds’ (conceptual relatedness) can be identified therein. {21A}
[missing pic]
E. The elaborate tangle that would result from an attempt to expand the abovementioned picture to include the entire Wake can only be dimly imagined. Still, the question presents itself: How can a limited network, even one of daunting complexity like Finnegans Wake, purport to represent everything, especially when it is included in that everything? {11D} {4G}
This is a question that will be answered globally, in bits and pieces all across these pages. One of the ways is through ‘chunking’ {3B}—Atherton suggests that Joyce distilled many books to axiomatic formulations, simplifications which stand in for the whole in the Wake. The New Science is boiled down to cyclical historical periodicity and a handful of other memetic seed concepts, which then go out and replicate themselves over the whole of the book: “vicocyclometer”(614), “rolywholyover”(597), “cycloannalism”(254), “Cycloptically”(54). This is ‘Compression’, in computerese, the way a piece of text which occupies 100 kilobytes of computer memory can be squeezed into 35 kilobytes. {12D}
In addition, the idea of something smaller representing something larger is problematic only if we insist on one-to-one correspondences. In Interpretation of Dreams, Freud remarked that “A word, being a point of junction for a number of conceptions, possesses, so to speak, a predestined ambiguity.” According to the Freudian principle of condensation, any word (Wake words being extreme cases-in-point) is linked to many concepts or symbols. Each of these symbols, when activated, sends out further ‘signals’ along further ‘links’ to other symbols, in an exponential explosion of meaning. Discussing the brain again, Hofstadter notes:
“….overlapping and completely tangled symbols are probably the rule, so that each neuron, far from being a member of a unique symbol, is probably a functioning part of hundreds of symbols.”
And:
“….it may be that in order to distinguish one symbol’s activation from that of another symbol, a process must be carried out which involves not only locating the neurons which are firing, but also identifying very precise details of the timing of the firing of those neurons.”
Many of the more ‘entangled’ words found in Finnegans Wake – “hierarchitectitiptitoploftical”(5), for example – are linked through metonymic association to numerous other concepts. {21B} Which ones it triggers depends upon the order in which you read the book, or how many times you have read the book. As it will be demonstrated later on, the Wakeinvites a potentially infinite number of different reading strategies. {23F} It is in this way that the potential for signification within the Wake becomes limitless, bursting the literalist chains of logical positivism.
On the next page, note the similitude showing symbol simultaneity in the same synaptic substructure.
F. The word ‘limitless’ is not intended to suggest randomness or a complete lack of control, in either books or brains; in general mathematics, an infinitely repeating decimal need not be completely chaotic. Heinz Pagels may be right in saying that “a network has no ‘top’ or ‘bottom’“, but it does have a functional hierarchy of structures. That hierarchy may not be a simple linear pyramid, and may fluctuate in time, but there are definite principles of organization, even if they are not deterministic and reducible. Derridian notions of networks and ‘free play’ have free-for-all connotations that do not lend to accurate interpretations. {35B}
The word ‘obvious’ does not often spring to mind regarding either brains or Finnegans Wake—but it should not be too difficult to demonstrate that ‘I’ is a more important substructure than ‘tapioca pudding’ in the former, and ‘HCE’ a more central and pervasive figure than ‘Popeye’ in the later. {7B}
G. This is as good a place as any to first (for the implacably horizontal reader) bring up the concept of self-reference in Finnegans Wake. For any network which would represent the larger network in which it is embedded (generally called ‘reality’) with any degree of faithfulness and accuracy, it is crucial that it be able to represent itself also, and its place in that network. {11A} A photograph of Everything must include the camera that took it.
There are numerous places in the Wake where the book discusses itself, either to give the reader instructions on how to read it, or to chide him for being unable to read it, or to give an account of how it was received in initial stages by those who tried to read it. This only seems strange if we do not pause to consider that our brains—which like the Wake, attempt to model the world in which they exist—have rather significant ways of referring to themselves: the concept of ‘I’, or ‘Self’. Without these concepts, neither the brains nor the creatures they were making decisions for, would get very far in the process of world simulation.
For Vico, according to his translators, “the new science must inquire when, where, and how it itself began” if it is to be of any use. Joyce saw this self-reference in his predecessor, saw it in himself, and worked it into his book.
H. Continuing with the assumption that brains are the Material Cause of ideas, I will assume that they are important enough to merit one more section. There is another way in which the brain analogy and the idea of ‘chunking’ {3B} can be helpful in understanding the Wake. Again, Hofstadter’s wonderfully jargon-free prose, as he ventures an explanation of how you recognize your grandmother:
“People have looked for evidence of the ‘funneling’ of many low-level neural responses into fewer and fewer high-level ones…[there might be] a fixed set of neurons, say a few dozen, which all fire when Granny comes into view.”
It is possible to envision the major characters or sigla of the Wake (HCE, ALP, Shem, Shaun, Issy, etc.), and the major myths and stories of the Wake (the fall, the resurrection, the creation of the Letter) as the thin ends of a system of funnels into which the entire book is poured. King Arthur, Adam, Nebuchadnezzar, and a host of other archetypal figures all appear and disappear, but taking the book as a whole, they all funnel into the figure of HCE.
It is on this higher-level that the Wake is best understood. For all its flaws, Campbell and Robinson’s Skeleton Key is probably the single best introduction to the Wake, and a masterpiece of chunking. And as it would be unwieldy to process every piece of information in the visual cortex before saying ‘Hi, Granny!’, so is a meticulous pouring-over of MacHugh’s Annotations be an unlikely way to generate anything but mass confusion regarding Finnegans Wake on the first go-round.
5
A. From brains (again, for those who insist on strict sequentiality), it is time to move on to something completely different, yet not entirely dissimilar all the same. Joyce had a fondness for the illuminated manuscripts of Golden Age Ireland, created from the sixth century to the ninth century AD, before the Viking invasions made such work impossible. Speaking of his favorite, the magnificent Book of Kells, Joyce said:
“….you can compare much of my work to the intricate illuminations. I would like it to be possible to pick up any page of my book and know at once what book it is.”
Kenner presents “visual display” {6A} as one of the “resources of the book as book”, but precious few works in the history of the novel or the printed book in general take advantage of this resource to even a fraction of the extent that illuminated manuscripts like the Book of Kells or the Book of Durrow do (which Kenner also recognizes).
Within the limits presented by typography {12B}, and sometimes beyond them, Joyce sought to “arabesque the page”(115) with a supererogatory piling of verbal “whiplooplashes” upon “whiplooplashes”(119), and “prudently bolted or blocked rounds”(119), after the manner of the Kells monks.
B. Many similarities between the Book of Kells and the Book of “Doublends Jined”(20) present themselves, one being the time required to produce both works. Bernard Meehan cites craftsmen’s estimates that one of the elaborate pages of the Kells manuscript would have taken a month or more to complete. Joyce purported to have spent a thousand hours on chapter 8 (the ‘ALP’ chapter) alone.
There is also the presence of self-referentiality {4G} in both books. All of chapter five of the Wake is about the Wake, and the rest of the work is littered with references to itself (many of which are uncovered in other parts of this exposition). As for the earlier book, “The book itself is a constant motif in Kells, depicted over thirty times”, in Christ’s hands on folio 32v, and in other places. The necessity of self-reference in any network claiming powerful representational abilities will be treated on a page with a higher number than this one. {11D}
And of course, there is the first thunder – “bababadalgharagh takamminarronn konnbronntonnerronn tuonnthenn trovarrhounawnskawn toohoohoordenenthurnuk!”(3; broken up here into segments so Web browsers may wrap text correctly.) Clearly, “it showed no signs of punctuation of any sort”(123), a quality it shares with ancient and medieval texts: Contemporary readers of Plato, Vergil, or Augustine read without the assistance of interword spacing, capitalization, or punctuation. Reading aloud was necessary if one wanted to decipher the text at hand. The orality both Kells and the Wake is of great significance. {12A}
C. The ‘compression’ mentioned earlier {4E}, whereby a great deal of information is packed into a small informational ‘space’ by economizing on details which the reader can be expected to fill in with the store of details in her own brain, can be seen in the Kells manuscript. McLuhan noted the allegorical, aphoristic methods of presentation in the illuminated manuscripts, requiring the participation of the viewer to tease out the “three score and ten toptypsical readings”(20) folded into their pages. With the coming of mass-produced texts, print culture moved in the direction of standardization, ‘decompressing’ the compressed manuscript into simpler, spelled-out fragments.
This decompression largely obviated the need for personal memory in textual interpretation, moving away from the interactivity that characterized the medieval relationship with the individually crafted page, towards the book-as-storehouse-of-memory approach that became necessary with the exponential increase of information. Joyce’s recompression, his stuffing of word after word into the same ‘lexeme’(word) to the point of overflowing, represents a twisting of the frontlines of typography back towards its distant past, like the world-snake biting its own tail.
D. The medieval manuscript casts its likeness even beyond Joyce; the coexistence of gospels, Hebrew etymologies, concordances of Gospel passages, summaries of gospel narratives, and characterizations of the evangelists within the same book-space prefigures the internal inter-reference of a hypertextual document {23A}, in which clicking on one term in a document stored on a server in Tulsa, Oklahoma can shoot your attentions straight to another document centered in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.
With their varying letter sizes, margin details, inserted illustrations and numerous embellishments to picture and text (often to the point of confusing the two), illuminated manuscripts created effects that were not seen again until the advent of desktop publishing and digital computers – effects that Joyce strove for as well, stretching the limits of his medium. Whether his achievements in that area are “greater THAN or less THAN”(298) those who came before him was of great concern to him.
Larry Gonick, one of the master-illuminators of the present day who is often written-off as ‘only drawing comics’ by many who mistakenly consider themselves learned {7A}, calls the monk illuminators the “first multimedia artists in the west”. In relation to the endless journeys that a single ‘open’ book like Finnegans Wake or a ‘single’ hypertextual document can support, it is appropriate that the Kells manuscript is unfinished.
E. When Joyce, in his mock-scholar persona, sees the Great Letter that is Finnegans Wake as “plainly inspiring the tenebrous Tunc page of the Book of Kells”(122), it comes across as comic reversal. Beneath the comedy, however, there lie issues of influence that Joyce as an author took very seriously. {25A} The influence of the Kells manuscript on the Wake was remarked upon often enough to be worrying to someone who aspired to the status of Creator. Creators want to bring networks into being, while somehow escaping the web of any network that precedes them. ‘But who made God?’—case in point. {35G}
In assuming authorship of the Book of Kells, Joyce exercises the last ‘revisionary ratio’ described by Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence, the tricky maneuver Bloom calls Apophrades: the creator holds his work open to his predecessors….but the key word is holding. The later creator maintains control of the transaction, giving the impression that the Son has created the Father. What the early Christian authors of the “vast and complex literature ascribed to Hermes Trismegisthus” {10A} did by attributing their works to the ancient Egyptians, Joyce does by moving the date of the Wake’s composition back a thousand years. By assuming pre-authorship, Joyce vampirically tries to drain the authority of the Book of Kells into his own book.
F. The illuminator monks of Kells, Durrow, Lindsfarne and elsewhere were responsible for perpetuating much of classical Western culture, allowing many of the Greek and the Roman authors to survive the Germanic invasions. The Wake may well have a survival advantage compared to most other books in the face of the oncoming Electric invasions that again promise to tear apart and reconfigure established empires {26A}. Given that the convoluted whimsical fantasias of the Irish monks had the drastic effect they did, is it possible that many works which once seemed certain to outlive Finnegans Wake will only live on through it? {36C}
6
A. Child psychologist Jerome Brunner has outlined three stages in the mental development of children:
1) Kinesthetic: learning by doing; tactile involvement and manipulation of objects; leading to the ability to mentally rotate objects
2) Iconic: experience begins to reveal similarities, generalizations, analogies, first realized as icons; visual proximity and similarity = relatedness
3) Symbolic: higher level abstractions, icons networking with other icons to form symbols.
In an interesting correspondence, Brunner’s individual ontogeny recapitulates Vico’s historical phylogeny, whereby he saw language developing from the hieroglyphic/sacred/ divine through the symbolic/sign-oriented/heroic to the epistolary/transmission-at-a-distance/human. Vico’s original languages and letters which “expressed themselves by means of gestures or physical objects which had natural relations with the ideas” could correspond to either the kinesthetic or the iconic stage of mental development.
B. Trying to achieve a balance, Joyce tends to give special preference to the first two of the three categories in the above scheme, to compensate for centuries of neglect {12B}. The importance of ‘natural proximity and relation in the metaphoric/ metonymic network of the Wake is unquestionable.{4B} Bringing kinesthetic and iconic modes of interpretation back to center stage is a part of a necessary readjustment that Wake readers have to make if they are to interact with its associational latticework in a meaningful way, if they are to be able to “rede….its world”(18) of meaning-through-juxtaposition. Persistently shoving iconicism into the foreground, Joyce nudges us in the right direction.
The phrase “semper as oxhousehumper!”(107) resurrects the iconic origins of the simple ABC’s, unearthing their original, ancient Hebrew associations:
[missing Hebrew]
ALEPHBETHGIMEL
OXHOUSE CAMEL (‘humper’)
They are ideograms as Pound envisioned them, with their own histories riding on their backs, a “fitting mode for an age that no longer could decipher a past it carried with it nonetheless” (and their Hebrew origins an ironically fitting choice to illustrate the ideas of raving anti-Semite Pound). Reminding us of the metaphoric relationships hiding in the very building blocks of our language, Joyce unmasks them as Vico’s “poetic characters” in disguise. The “middenhide hoard of objects! Olives, beets, kimmells, dollies….”(19) are not empty letters, but things to be touched and tasted. {36B}
Through his decorative alphabet (probably almost as dear to him as the decorative alphabet of his daughter Lucia), Joyce is “capturing the language of the gods” (Bruno), emulating “the savage economy of hieroglyphics” (Beckett) in printer’s ink. His acceptance of the formal framework of his Jesuit education is as complete as his rejection of its religious contents. Like Bruno before him (a Catholic in style only), and like Jesuit-priest-turned-media-theorist Walter Ong and Catholic convert Marshall McLuhan after him, Joyce is an iconolater, rejecting Protestant word-only iconoclasm.
C. Rejecting word-only iconoclasm—or subverting it, half-accepting it. George Landow notes that “print…employs more information than people usually take into account” Joyce makes full use of the kinesthetic and visual potential of the alphabet, playing with them, teasing out their possibilities. Take the letter ‘F’ alone—through rotations and reversals, it visually represents the War of the Twins, Shem and Shaun: “F**, (at gaze, respecting….)” (266) In another place, ‘F’ can be the casualties of war, lying “**ace to **ace!”(18) Somewhere else again, it is a fidgeting child being toyed with by another fidgeting child, meandering “all over the page, broods***sensationseeking an idea….stands dejectedly in the diapered window margin….returns inhibited, with some half-baked suggestion,***…..” (121)
Other letters are dealt with in a similarly capricious manner. One of the Four Old Men, Johnny MacDougal, takes Shaun on a backwards journey through time by rotating a ‘T’. Upright it the ‘T’ of a crusading “templar”, but a 90° clockwise turns it into the “serpe with ramshead” of Celtic ornamentation. A further twist sets it on end, where it is a prehistoric phallic monolith.
“In the topographic city of text, shape itself signifies”, for numbers as well as letters. The number ‘1132 that appears as a date in a medieval annal on page 13 has no real historical significance. Hidden in its form, however, is a meaning couched in icon and code: ‘11’ is a double phallic rising, and 32 is the rate of falling bodies (as Leopold Bloom recalls repeatedly). They reappear again, reversed, as “Subsec. 32, section 11 of the C.L.A. act 1885” (61), and in many other places (119, 310, 391, 420, etc) Rise and Fall, Fall and Rise—two simple numbers, repeated often, containing the thematic crux of the most daunting book in literature. Compression at its finest. {4E}
D. The ‘sigla’ in the Wake are the marks Joyce used in his notebooks as abbreviations for the most important character types or thematic nodes upon which the book is constructed. All the major sigla can be seen in footnote four on page 299. Discussing them all would take up too much space; suffice it to say that the three prongs of the letter ‘E’ correspond to the three prongs of HCE, and can thereby serve to represent him in various states of uprightness, downrightness, or unconsciousness. The ‘Æ’ of ALP is her pubic delta, from which the whole world is born. And McHugh notes that the minor sigla ‘P’, meant to stand for the ‘Bishop/High Priest’ archetype, was meant to be interpreted as an upright figure carrying a holy book in both hands.
E. In a discussion about advertisements {27A}, McLuhan says:
“….icons are not specialist fragments or aspects but unified and compressed images of a complex kind. They focus a large region of experience in tiny compass.”
We have one example of iconic compression in the rise-and-fall number, 1132. ALP, with her proto-iconic, quasi-obscene “cunniform letters”(198), provides the occasion for another. Her sigla, the female delta, is depicted typographically in the beginning of chapter eight:
“O
tell me all about
Anna Livia! I want to hear all”
(196)
It appears again, as Shem tries to initiate Shaun into the secrets of the Mother over the course of a seemingly harmless geometry lesson with the following diagram (293):
[missing pic]
When Shaun realizes he is being shown the “sixuous parts” and the “safety vulve”(297) of ALP, he decks his brother for crossing the bounds of propriety. But Shem’s use of diagrams is an example of Bruno’s ‘mathesis’—what Bruno saw as a way to “insinuate profound and difficult things by mathematical means.” Bruno’s diagram from De monade numero et figurais strikingly similar to Shem’s, in form as well as hidden significance. Yates postulates that its “curious looking curly things” are links to Bruno’s ‘demons’ {4C}. That they also strongly resemble the sperm of which Bruno could have had no knowledge is what we could call a meaningful coincidence, if we are the kind of people who believe in such things:
[missing pic]
A wide range of human experience can be extrapolated from both pictures. They are a form of advertisement for hermetic, forbidden knowledge. As with today’s advertisements, what they are truly striving to sell us is not what they are ostensibly trying to tell us. The latter is only attractive by virtue of its juxtaposition with the former. {27B}
F.
“The Mod needs a rebus.” (523)
Why do we moderns need the rebus (a riddle representing syllables with pictures) to deal with Finnegans Wake? Regressing to an iconic mode of visualizing language in terms of rudimentary associations and similarities, and back further to the kinesthetic stage where we recover the joy of playing with language for its own sake, are vital for our ability to navigate the netWake. {6B}
Another reason involves the complexity of the Wake. Standardized phonetic alphabets and symbolic language and mass-production of texts made possible the explosion of knowledge that built our world of televisions and hard drives. Now, the complexity of that world—and this book that most fully represents that world—has advanced to such a degree that the only way to deal with it is to execute a reverse, to reimpose a simpler order over the vast landscape of information across which we move. A nice explanation by William Gibson, whose net worth would exceed the wealth of the known universe if he’d copyrighted the term ‘cyberspace’ in 1984:
“All the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn’t, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to the particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry called that.”
To find your way around Finnegans Wake, the iconic simplifications of the sigla are often needed. Chunking, Hofstadter called that.
7
A. An iconic diversion: Comics. Eco rightly blames Atherton’s inability to decode “Minucius Mandrake”(486) on his highbrow oversight of comic books, and his resulting unfamiliarity with the character of Mandrake the Magician. No one specialty will do. The iconic, ‘cool’ nature of comics {13A} has been pointed out by critics like McLuhan, and comic artists like Gonick, Will Eisner and Scott McCloud. Their popularity is a function of their incompleteness, and the extent to which the reader is drawn into play to fill in the details. Comics are participatory, which is why most adults found the first comic books of 1935 “as difficult to decipher as the Book of Kells.” Tim Ahern understands the demands of iconic interaction that comics and the Wake both press upon their readers, and this is why Illnesstraited Collosick Idition of the first chapter of the Wake is the most engaging and painless way for a Wake novice to first make contact with the actual material of the book.
B. A digression from a diversion: in the context of Finnegans Wake, Popeye has never gotten his due. Elzie Segar’s balloon-forearmed character, appearing first in the “Thimble Theater” strip 1929, and later brought to life by the Fleischer Brothers cartoons in the 1930’s, appears all over Finnegans Wake, but is rarely mentioned. In Glasheen’s Census he is only given one or two references.
In tribute to my boyhood hero, the only person—real or otherwise—who could coax me into tasting spinach, I now present what I believe to be a complete list of Popeye references in Finnegans Wake. This satisfies my quota of literary bookkeeping activity, a prerequisite for any Wake commentator who is to be taken seriously:
— “….as innocens with anaclete play popeye antipop…”(13)
— “I appop pie oath”(67)
— “thereby adding to the already unhappiness of this our popeyed world”(189)
— “Olive d’Oyly….a salt sailor….”(279)
— “poopive” (282)
— “I am yam” (481)
— “D’Oyly Owens” (574)
— “I yam as I yam” (604)
This is where I am expected to present several pages of jargonalia relating ‘I yam what I yam’ to Hamlet and the Hindu ‘Tat Tvam Asi’. Not wanting to stuff this particular butterfly into the killing jar, I will leave the list at that.
8
A. The only relationship between comics and Kabbalah that immediately presents itself is that both begin with a hard ‘C’ sound, producing an alliteration when read aloud together. But as we all know, “it is enough to find the means of rendering two terms phonetically contiguous for the [conceptual] resemblance to impose itself.” Onward, then, to Jewish mysticism.
To provide a history of Jewish mystical thought from the time of the destruction of the second temple to the present day is far beyond my abilities; it will suffice to note that, in pre-Hasidic mystical systems, there are two main branches of practice, both of which are have the potential to illuminate Finnegans Wake (among other things). Both have their origins in the Sefer Yetsirah, The Book of Creation, composed in Palestine sometime between the third and sixth centuries C.E.
B. The first of these branches contains the ideas associated with the ten Sefirot, which are the emanations through with the infinite Ein Sof (“Ainsoph”(261)) extends itself downward, culminating in Malkhut, the six-dimensional physical creation that our bodies occupy. The Sefirot—the Kabbalistic Tree of Life—represent a network conception which Joyce himself found worthwhile enough to plant at the center of his book.
The diagram of the ten Sefirot on the next page, taken from Daniel C. Matt’s The Essential Kabbalah, can be used as a template on which to map out the ‘C.O.D.’ principle of the universe which Joyce presents in chapter ten of the Wake, teasing us as early as chapter four with the question:”Hoo was the C.O.D.?”(102) Ironic postal and consumer implications of a cosmology centered around the principle of Cash On Delivery aside, each of the three letters of the acronym are further subdivided into three, in the right hand margins of pages 270-271: “CONCOMITANCE OF COURAGE, COUNSEL AND CONSTANCY, ORDINATION OF OMEN, ONUS AND OBIT, DISTRIBUTION OF DANGER, DUTY AND DESTINY.”
[missing picture]
This trinitarianism is not only an imposition of Joyce’s remnant Catholicism; a glance at the Sefirot diagram makes it clear that the Kabbalah was present in the Wake’s original conception. At the end of chapter ten, a list is given which completes the Sefirot tree by including “Geg”, the womb from which revealed reality emanates:
“Aun
Do
Tri
Car
Cush
Shay
Shockt
Ockt
Ni
Geg
Their feed begins.”(308)
The vertical layout of these principles does not do them justice, however; they are ‘translaced’, networked {4A}, and the paths along which the Ein Sof can travel are numerous—more so if one considers the many levels of correspondences to which the diagram can be said to relate. For example—the fifth Sefirot, Gevurah, can stand for power, judgment, rigor, red, and the left arm (among other things). It is possible to imagine a three-dimensional network of associations, through which one could trace the way the divine effluence pours from the love of Hesed down into the phallus of Yesod. The likeness to Eco’s metonymic chains is there, for anyone willing to take the isomorphic leap of faith.
The Kabbalistc Sefirot are the true precursor to Bruno’s system of links through which demons and spirits came down to earth to do his bidding, whatever he may say about the Egyptian origins of his ideas {4C}. As in Bruno’s cosmology, energy can travel in both directions along this divine web:
“Human righteous action stimulates Yesod, the Righteous One, and brings about the union of the divine couple. Human marriage symbolizes and actualizes divine marriage.” {10B}
It is the oneness, the wholeness of Ein Sof that makes this communication possible. Beneath the ten-fold divisions of the Sefirotic Kabbalah is the powerful inscrutable monism of the Ein Sof, the energy that powers this system (which happens to be The System, in Kabbalah). It is all ultimately reducible to Ein Sof, like the ‘E’ side of the pithy general relativity equation—which would be reductionistic except for the fact that Ein Sof, like HCE, is not reducible to anything less than Everything.
It is this HCE Identity Principle (‘Everyone and everything ultimately flow back into HCE’) {4H} that holds the Heraclitan confusion of the Waketogether. He is the electricity into which things and actions and data and instructions are translated, so they may flow through the network. Without him Shem would not be able to take on the persona of Lucifer, and Above would not be able to influence Below {10A} any more than a computer could inscribe some of its memory magnetically and some of it on clay tablets. An ultimate medium of exchange is necessary. {34B}
C. The myth of creation via Sefirot received many elaborations over the years, and was brought to a peak by the formulations of Isaac Luria, a mystic in the town of Safed in Palestine, and a student of Moses Cordovero. Luria understood the networked nature of reality as well as anyone; when asked why he wrote almost nothing, he told one of his disciples:
“It is impossible, because all things are interrelated. I can hardly open my mouth to speak without feeling as though the sea burst its dams and overflowed. How then shall I express what my soul has received? How can I set it down in a book?”
According to the Luria handed down to us through his students, Ein Sof’s first action was withdrawal. In the Shefa Tal, Shabbetai Sheftel Horowitz (16th-17th c) explains:
“Before the creation of the world, Ein Sof withdrew itself into its essence, from itself to itself within itself. It left an empty space within its essence, in which it could emanate and create.”
Echoes of the Author, refining himself out of existence to make room on the page for his Great Work. Joyce does not impose a direction upon his readers; he drops them into his creation and lets them go. But like Ein Sof (a comparison he would approve of), he is always there in the margins, ‘overstanding’. {35E}
After the withdrawal, or tsimtsum, Ein Sof began to emanate into the vessels, the Sefirot. As the creation proceeded, some of the later vessels were not strong enough to withstand the power of Ein Sof’s light, and they shattered—eventually resulting in the entrapment of divine sparks in the material world. There is a shattering of the vessels in Finnegans Wake as well, but it is an implosion, a compression into semantic singularities.
The purpose behind a life of holiness, according to Luria, is tikkun, or the mending of the vessels. Each holy act furthers the process of cosmic healing. Giordano Bruno’s aim, “in his eternal efforts to find the images, signs, characters in living contact with reality” was to “unify the whole contents of the universe” by establishing them in his memory. In putting his isomorphism of the universe on paper, Joyce’s aim was the same. {36B}
D. The other major branch of Kabbalistic practice involves numerology and meditation upon the alphabet (these have more in common in Hebrew than in English, as both numbers and phonemes are represented by the same 22 characters of the Hebrew alphabet). Hebrew letters are seen not as mundane symbols of human communication, but as the holy forms that God chose to communicate His word to men. By manipulating them, the mystic can gain insight into the nature of God’s creation. This line of mysticism also has its roots in the Sefer Yetsirah:
“Twenty-two elemental letters….How did God permute them? Alef with them all, all of them with alef; betwith them all, all of them with bet; and so with all the letters, turning round and round, within 231 gates. Thus all that is formed, all that is spoken emerges from one name.”
The name most often associated with the combinatorial meditation techniques of the Kabbalah is Abraham Abulafia, the thirteenth century author of the Hayyei ha-Olam ha-Ba, and persistent presence in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. As the codifier of many of the combinatorial letter meditation techniques that are the ‘Applied Kabbalah’ to the Sefirot’s ‘Theoretical Kabbalah’, he had these practical instructions for those delving into the art of letter combination:
“….take hold of ink, pen, and tablet. Realize that you are about to serve your God in joy. Begin to combine letters, a few or many, permuting and revolving them rapidly until your mind warms up. Delight in how they move, and in what you generate by revolving them.”
In the beginning was the Word, in all of its permutations. {11E} Like a Richard Strauss simultaneous 12-note hit, creation is the infinite coexisting variations on the Name of God. The versions of the Name “become innumerable, according to the innumerable species of things.” Joyce uses a different number/letter equivalency to name ALP: “…if you can spot fifty I spy four more.”(10) 54 = LIV = Anna Livia. For the possible readings of the world born from her womb after HCE’s divine (ins)emanation, there is “no print equivalent, nor even a mathematical possibility of printing their variations.”
An anonymous student of Abraham Abulafia said of the Names that were born in acts of letter combination: “Their intrinsic value is proportional to their degree of incomprehensibility. The less comprehensible, the higher.” Meaning is married to confusion {32F} in a technique whose ultimate aim is an epiphany which, in the words of twentieth century mystic Abraham Isaac Kook (an extremely lucid man, despite his name):
“…enables you to sense creation not as something completed, but as constantly becoming, evolving, ascending. This transports you, from a place where nothing is new to a place where there is nothing old, where everything reveals itself, where heaven and earth rejoice as at the moment of Creation.”
Extreme difficulty can be trying, but the rewards for engaging the complex and incomprehensible are rewards commensurate with the scale of Creation, not the scale of the stuffed and mounted plot line.
9
“[Finnegans Wake will be written] to suit the esthetic of the dream, where forms prolong and multiply themselves, where the visions pass from the trivial to the apocalyptic, where the brain uses the roots of vocables to make others from them which will be capable of naming its phantasms, its allegories, its allusions.”
— Joyce to Edmond Jaloux
“Between drinks, I deeply painfully repeat it.”(511)
A. Variation, repetition, permutation, combination of a limited number of relatively simple elements—these are the ways that complex systems such as computers (billions of transistors) and brains (billions of neurons) and geometries (countless applications of a small number of axioms) are constructed. They are also some of the fundamental techniques through which much of the raw material in the Wake is built up into the final product. Joyce saw his book as a “wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer” which “receives through a portal vein the dialytically separated elements of precedent decomposition for the verypetpurpose of subsequent recombination…” (614)
He drew inspiration from Kabbalah {8D}, most likely the ‘cabala’ of Bruno, who in Cabala del Cavallo Pegaseo called his system “a cabala of theological philosophy, a philosophy of cabalistic theology, a theology of philosophical cabala.” It is worth looking into, this attempt to see “how minney combinaisies and permutandies can be played on the international surd!” (284)
B. On the most basic level, there are the acronymic variations, the countless repetitions of all the possible combinations of the initials ‘HCE’ and ‘ALP’. They are far too numerous and far to obvious to catalogue; beginning with “Howth Castle and Environs”(3) and “He addle liddle phifie Annie”(4), they firmly establish the presence of the cosmic couple on nearly every page of the Wake.
We are not allowed to forget Dublin, either, Joyce’s particular manifestation of the Universal Place. I do not think that ‘Dear Dirty Dublin’ ever makes a straight appearance, but the ‘D3’ motif comes at us from all angles: “dear dutchy deeplinns”(76), “Drinkbattle’s Dingy Dwellings”(93), “dire dreary darkness”(136), “dun dartin dullemitter”(317), “dour dorty dompling”(333).
C. More involved than these initial repetitions are the variations on central ‘template’ phrases which drift through the Wake in forms farther and farther from the original seed phrase. This may be Joyce’s riff on the textual drift which inevitably accompanied the copying of manuscripts before the coming of the printing press. I believe it has another compelling motive as well, one which explains all of the various forms of variation and repetition that appear in the Wake{9E}….but first, a brief foray into Joyce’s ‘theme and variations’ approach to template phrases.
One of the more prominent template phrases is the Prankquean’s riddle, which ALP-as-Grace O’Malley/Moses asks HCE-as-the Lord of Howth Castle/Ramses II in chapter one: “Mark the Wans, why do I am alook alike a poss of porterpease?”(21) It is repeated almost identically two more times on page 22, and seems to be a question about the identity of the Twins in relation to the Mother—possibly an initial delving into the mystery of the mother that is carried out in more depth by Shem in chapter ten. {6E}
As we go through the book, however, we get numerous echoes of this initial question which touch off a remembrance of the template phrase more through rhythmic similarity than any extractable connection of sense: “How do you do that lack a lock and pass the poker, please?”(224); “And howelse do we hook our hike to find that pint of porter place?”(260); “Nohow did he kersse or hoot alike the suit and solder skins”(317); “For why do you lack a link of luck to poise a pont of perfect, peace?”(493) Whether they ‘mean’ what the original ‘meant’ is irrelevant; they recall the contents of their predecessor in their sound-structure. {12A}
Another crucial riddle is “the first riddle of the universe: asking, when is a man not a man?” The answer, “when he is a—yours till the rending of the rocks,— Sham”(170), touches on issues of authenticity, authorship, and plagiarism which are important to all literary works and doubly so to Finnegans Wake.{24A} It is transformed into the “first rattle of his juniverse”(231), and the “first and last rittlerattle of the anniverse”(607), to note a few later sightings. In the latter case on page 607, it receives no answer (“whanas it is a.”(607))—for here it is being considered by Kevin, an amalgamation of Shem and Shaun, a melting of the originator and the thief/plagiarist into one being.
There is also the ‘grace’, appearing in chapter one, which reverberates down the Wake’s many paths:
“For what we are, gifs à gross if we are, about to believe. So pob the begg and pass the kish for crawsake. Omen. So sigh us.”(7)
And the often repeated ‘ALP’ theme, from the end of her chapter (#8):
“Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering water of…Beside the rivering water of, hitherandthithering waters of.”(215)
The reader could doubtless track down reoccurrences of the above two phrases, and find new ones that Joyce thought worth repeating.
D. There are other species of textual variations, sub-versions of the kind of Kabbalistic games that tickled Joyce’s “jazztfancy” (292). There is the systematic shifting of vowels within a constant consonant frame: “Tok….Tik….Tuk….Tek…Tak…”(141) The ‘T-k’ form is like an empty fifth, transformed into different chords by the addition of different notes to its middle.
Joyce was also an author with an apposite addiction to ancillary alliterations. The following passage gives evidence of both this, and the vowel-play mentioned above:
“caius counting in the scale of pin puff pive piff, piff puff pive poo, poo puff pive pree, pree puff pive pfoor, pfoor puff pive pippive poopive….”(282)
There is some prefiguring of the concern with rigorous working out of possible variations later evinced by Beckett, with biscuit-eating in Murphy, and with stone-sucking in Molloy. But Beckett was playing gallows games to keep the hangman at bay; in the Wake, there is a playful exuberance in alliterative phrases such as this one, a jazz bounce that could have been lifted from “Oo Bop Sh’Bam” if it had not preceded it. But anything that looks forward also looks backward; McLuhan sees “endless alliterations” as “the necessary norm of oral prose and poetry alike”, and the following medieval sentence by Adhelm of Malmesbury may well have been the prototype for the Joyce riff above:
“Primitus pantorum procerum poematorum pio potissimunn paternoque praesertim priviegio panegiricum poemataque passim prosatori sub polo promulgatus…”
E. After these litanies of repetition, the eternal ‘Why?’ naturally presents itself. That variations and combinations of limited smaller elements is often the process behind larger organic networks has been mentioned elsewhere {9A}. But more important is what Eco has to say about any artist who wants maximum disorder and information:
“[He] will sacrifice some of his freedom and introduce a few modules of order into his work, which will help [readers] find their way through the noise….”
Repetition is necessary transmission insurance in extremely complex textual landscapes—as it is in the genetic landscape where each person possesses trillions of copies of their own DNA, and in the beach landscape of the Galápagos Islands, where sea-turtles lay hundreds of eggs so a small handful of their offspring can make it to the sea. And the media landscape is no different:
“Ads seem to work on the very advanced principle that a small pellet or pattern in a noisy, redundant barrage of repetition will gradually assert itself.” {27B}
HCE’s stuttering is not only about guilt; it is about syllabic redundancy to insure transmission. Hieroglyphics can enlighten; a similar technique was utilized by the Egyptians, who represented each syllable with a number of different common hieroglyphs to reduce the possibility of misunderstanding. Colin Cherry notes that “The effect when literally transcribed into English is one of stuttering.”
The repetitions in Finnegans Wake appear both as orientation points, rising from the din to guide readers onward like the strains of “Hello My Baby” that surface in Charles Ives’ “Central Park in the Dark”, and as multiple plantings of the most crucial thematic seeds of the book. All of them may not grow large enough to capture the your attention—but when one is noticed, backtracking or rereading will uncover many of the others {21D}, insuring the intersection of Joyce’s semantic network with your own.
F. Beyond the individual instances of combination, variation, and repetition, we have the instance of the Wake as a whole. It is often noted that ‘any fragment of the Wake contains the whole Wake’, and while this statement is not strictly true, it spends enough time on the outskirts of truth to be worth mentioning. There are indeed sections of the Wake—the first four pages, the ‘ALP’ chapter, and others—in which the full thematic material of the whole book exists in toto, for most intents and many purposes {21D}. Each time they reappear again, they are recast in a different context or perspective, shown from a different angle—Much like a hologram. Those who don’t mind a bent argument can continue along these lines {33A}; the straight-ahead will just have to wait.
10
“The tasks above are as the flasks below, saith the emerald canticle of Hermes….”(263)
A. Joyce once told an aspiring author to “write what is in your blood and not what is in your brain…In the particular is contained the universal.” The correlation and interaction between the microcosm and the macrocosm so central to the belief systems of the alchemists was also central to Joyce. It precedes Finnegans Wake by years, as the following passage from Portrait of the Artist shows:
“His life seemed to have drawn near to eternity; every thought, word and deed, every instance of consciousness could be made to revibrate radiantly in heaven.”
The Linati schema that serves as the skeleton of Ulysses also shows Joyce ruminating on the ‘‘isomorphic’ relationships between higher and lower. His deep belief in coincidence and correspondence is not only reflected in the manifest content of Finnegans Wake; it is one of the facilitating devices that makes the book possible.
Starting with a definition of ‘isomorphism’ would be a good idea. To return to Hofstadter:
“The word ‘isomorphism’ applies when two complex structures can be mapped onto each other, in such a way that to each part of one structure there is a corresponding part in the other structure, where ‘corresponding’ means that the two parts play similar roles in their respective structures.”
That isomorphisms are not only crucial to the Wake, but to any conception of ‘meaning’ at all, will be clear to the quick-witted. Isomorphism is the rope that lashes together the jeweled net of concepts that is the Wake, and the mental world we all occupy—and the similarity between the two is in itself an isomorphism.
B. The Smaragdine Table, a kind of ‘Ten Commandments’ of alchemy, was attributed to Hermes Trismegisthus along with everything else that was thought to be profound or important.{5E} In it appears the formulation:
“What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is like that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of one thing.”
This was eventually shortened to ‘As Above, So Below’. I will eventually shorten it further, to ‘AASB’. In Lisa DiBernard’s view:
“The alchemical theory that the macrocosm and the microcosm reflect each other becomes the basis for a literary technique in Finnegans Wake…by which everyday words, characters, and events vaporize into mythic archetypes and cosmic significance and then condense back into jingles, a Chapelizod family, and a not-so-special night in their lives.”
DiBernard’s observation is sound, even if she does attempt to force Joyce into bed with many obscure alchemical works. Joyce was probably led to thoughts of isomorphisms between above and below by the Nolan. Bruno himself probably latched onto the notion in Cornelius Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia (1533) of a three-fold division of the universe into elemental, celestial, and intellectual spheres, each sphere receiving influence from the one above.
Bruno states in L’Asino Cillenico del Nolano that “It is not possible to understand supernatural things, except through their shining in natural things”, evoking both the 18th century ‘invisible worlds’ of Cotton Mather and the 20th century hermeticism of MacGregor Mathers. In DiBernard’s defense, Bruno was also heavily influenced by Paracelsus, creating a strong line of communication between Joyce and the alchemical practitioners.
C. Sharing in the alchemical belief in As Above, So Below might be Joyce’s single most important networking tool; it allows him to wire every sphere of knowledge and every level of known existence into an electric whole. HCE is a man, and a feature of geography: “O, as he lays dormont from the macroborg of Holdhard to the microbirg of Pied de Poudre.”(12) ALP also has authentic landscape potential: “to find a locus for an alp get a howlth on her bayrings”.(287) The ego is first and foremost a body-ego, says Freud {36B}; “the greater part of the expressions relating to inanimate things are formed by metaphor from the human body and its parts”, says Vico. Man is the measure of all things because man is where the perception of all things begins, the starting point for the farthest-reaching metonymic chains of association.
In the ‘Ondt and the Gracehoper’ tale told by Shaun in chapter thirteen (414-419), Shem, Shaun, Issy and her friends become various types of arthropods and arachnids as the sociological is mapped onto the entomological. In chapter ten, sublime mysticism is mapped onto mundane schoolwork. A thousand thousand other instances of conceptual crosstalk pervade the Wake on every page and on every level.
D. One permutation of As Above So Below is especially important—AASB becomes ABSA (As Before So Again), and the “IMAGINABLE ITINERARY THROUGH THE PARTICULAR UNIVERSAL”(260) becomes the “FUTURE PRESENTATION OF THE PAST”(272). Isomorphism is also “isochronism”(515), and the latter allows Joyce to stretch his connections back over all the living and the dead as well as across the continuum of existence on every scale. The staggering number of isomorphisms between the characters of Finnegans Wake and figures from history, myth and legend have been too-well mined in Adaline Glasheen’s Census to need repeating here. ABSA is the Viconian version of AASB, the recognition of “the marvelous correspondence between the first and the returned barbarian times” that was only one of many examples of such a recurrence.
“Once it happened, so it may again”(625) is what turns a manageable little essay on Finnegans Wake and computer networks into what you are now reading. The ‘new and improved’ connotations of the original idea are blinkered and incomplete {1D}; to focus on man the information-gatherer without noting his connection as a fellow nomad to man the food-gatherer is to stick your head in the sand of Now.
Finnegans Wake is a lens to bring the future and the past into focus, depending on which way you look through it. It is skewered by the old orality on one side, and the new orality on the other {12A}. For Joyce, Today is re-cycled Yesterday; he looked at modern Dublin and saw “Edenborough”(29), as Baudrillard would later look at America and see “the primitive city of the future”.
F. It is important to remember though, that AASB and ABSA are statements of metaphoric relationship, not equivalence. The statement that “for Nietzsche the key symbol of his metaphysics is the ring; whereas for Bruno it has to be the spiral” holds true for Joyce as well. Eternal recurrence as Nietzsche envisioned it implies strict determinism, which neither Bruno, Vico nor Joyce accepted. The quantum physics of which Joyce was somewhat aware did not allow for absolute pronouncements. {31B}
When Brancusi drew his Portrait of the Artist as an Abstract Spiral, he captured his subject well. The blindness that makes history a recurring nightmare need not be eternal, in Joyce’s view; the spirals that were begun five thousand years ago on the Newgrange burial mounds could just as easily be moving inward as outward, thereby coming to a point. {35A}
G. Bruno believed “in every man…there is a world, a universe.” This is a great truth—and with Niels Bohr, Joyce believed that the opposite of a great truth is also true. Stuart Gilbert, in his introduction to Joyce’s letters, noted:
“On more than one occasion, Joyce told me that certain incidents in his writings had proved to be premonitions of incidents that subsequently took place.”
This is the ultimate hubris, evidence of a desire to swallow not just all literature, but all creation. {35G} Interestingly, it is also true, in many cases. Reality sometimes humored Joyce and mirrored his art, although he was not alive to see the most stunning examples. {29A}
11
“Why, then, should we not permit ourselves a universal image, that is an image of the universe itself? From which it might be hoped to obtain much benefit from the universe.”
—Marsilio Ficino, 15th-16th century hermeticist
A. The attempt to create a universal isomorphism—a mental or written ‘map’ of the world or the universe which is an accurate representation of totality—precedes Finnegans Wake by millennia. The sympathetic magic whereby one of great power can gain control over the world by gaining control over a microcosmic model lies at the preliterate core of the literary enterprise. We have already heard of Bruno’s desire to “unify the whole contents of the universe” by establishing them in his memory. {8C} More modest than Bruno, Vico limits himself to “this world of nations” which “has surely been made by men, and its guise must therefore be found within the modifications of our own human mind.”
On the printed page as well as in the mind, there were encyclopedists long before Diderot, writers whose aim was to compress the world as they knew it between the covers of a book, with all of its spheres of knowledge present in miniature. Critics like Edward Mendelsohn with his ‘encyclopedic narratives’, and Khachig Tololyan with his ‘cosmographic narratives’ have examined the notion of universal isomorphism (though they did not use the term) in their examinations of The Divine Comedy, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Don Quixote, Faust, Moby Dick, Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, and other works.
The works above are largely synchronic, dealing with the world as it exists at a fixed point in time, usually the generation before they were written. Finnegans Wake is diachronic, standing apart from these works qualitatively as well as quantitatively with its project of presenting all that ever was, is, or shall be {10D}. “Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be”(215)—Joyce’s four-dimensional portrait of the Mother of Creation is a conscious endeavor to effect Martha Clifford’s Freudian slip in Ulysses: “I called you naughty boy because I do not like that other world.” The sleight-of-hand swap of ‘world’ for ‘word’ leaves the door separating the two unlatched, so it can be kicked wide open by Finnegans Wake.
B.
“Locomotion should be slow, the slower the better, and be often interrupted by leisurely halts to sit on vantage points and stop at question marks….I know no prescription of method; avoid whatever increases routine and fatigue and decreases alertness.”
—Carl Sauer, famous geographer
Finnegans Wake is a bid to disprove Count Korzybski and somehow create a Map that is the Territory, General Semantics be damned. Before we discount this as impossible, we might at least note how well statements like Carl Sauer’s fit the Wake as well as the land. As with the mapping of the world, when first getting the lay of the Wake-scape, we must proceed slowly, rigorously, sequentially (if we are going to try and give directions to another, in any case).
A map may not provide the best analogy; maps are relatively explicit, while much of the information in the Wake is implicit. It might be more accurate to say that Finnegans Wake provides a ‘genotype’ of the world’s ‘phenotype’—that it contains enough information so that a person or creature with enough intelligence can infer the form of the world from the word alone.
Coded into Finnegans Wake are exhaustive compendiums from all major semantic categories. The great Irish writers (40-41), encapsulated lists of the great composers (360), all the great figures of ancient history (306-308, left margin), all the stories in Joyce’s own collection Dubliners (186-187)…The Wake is suffused with lists, and following the principle of redundancy {9E}, it is rare that any item off any list appears only once in the Wake. Popeye proves a good case in point. {7B}
C. In chapter five, the Great Letter that ALP (in her manifestation as Belinda the Hen) finds in the middenheap can be construed as the archetypal written communication (“proteiform graph”(107)), the archetypal communication in any medium (“this radiooscillating epiepistle”(108)), or the archetypal reflection on the world and the universe, containing “every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle”(118). At any level, the intricacy of the metaphor holds our attention, like the fractal geometries created by a Mandelbrot set. As Above, So Below. {10A} {21D}
D. The obsessive desire to capture the wide world on paper is enough to send any literary Ahab down with the ship. Aside from the sheer logistical scope of such an enterprise, it presents numerous other problems. Twentieth century physics poses one, by institutionalizing imperfection in measurement, making uncertainty not just a byproduct of human lack of refinement, but an ineradicable feature of the system called Reality.{31C} As envisioned by Niels Bohr, quantum mechanics cannot describe ontology (‘What Is’), only epistemology (‘What We Know About What Is’).
Along with Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem {31B}, the Heisenberg Uncertainty in quantum mechanics severely bruises the concept of isomorphism, highlighting the necessary imperfection in any metaphoric correspondence. Joyce was aware of the problem this necessary uncertainty posed for his project; knowing that the narratives of sciences are among the most important stories humanity tells itself about the universe of which it occupies a very small corner, Joyce dutifully worked their latest anti-ontological revelations into his book. {31E}
Another problem with the concept of universal isomorphism is that it implies the creation of a mirror that is not only large enough to reflect All That Is, but that somehow manages to reflect itself as well. Of the brains that attempt to collate as comprehensive a report on reality as they can manage, Hofstadter says:
“It would be quite a glaring hole in a brain’s symbolic structure not to have a symbol for the physical object in which it is housed, and which plays a lager role in the events it mirrors than any other object.”
Gödel found a way to make mathematics talk about itself, with the idea of Gödel numbering. In this regard, Joyce’s task was easier, as language has been talking about itself for millennia, probably since its inception. The self-referentiality of the Wake stands out, as it brazenly challenges us to “rede….its world”(18). This idea, too, reappears on other pages of this very discussion. {4G}
E.
“Henceforth it is the map that precedes the territory…it is the map that engenders the territory…”
—Jean Baudrillard
In giving birth to the world’s twin through his pen, Joyce had in mind a doppelgänger’s fate for his creation; he would send “one world burrowing on another”(275), until it prefigured, predated, preempted the original. {5E} His tribute to ALP, “the Bringer of Plurabilities”(104) is a like a Roman tribute to Periclean Athens. He honors what he would conquer, by establishing with John that “In the buginning is the woid”(378), in his best Brooklyn accent. {8D}
Gotama Buddha makes a similar claim for language when he says:
“I have said that on name and form depends contact [with the world]….Suppose, Ananda, there were not these different traits, peculiarities, signs, and indications by which are made manifest the multitude of elements of being constituting name;—if there were not these different traits…[etc., repetition insures transmission]…pray, would there be any designative contact appearing in form?”
[Ananda]”Nay, verily, Revered Sir.”
True to form, the Buddha next turns around as says the exact opposite, that contact depends on name and form, working his way back to his starting point. Joyce makes no such retraction. {35G}
12
A.
“Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour?”
—James Joyce, Portrait
The careful attention paid to the cat’s “Mrkrgnao!”, the paper-folding machine’s “Sllt”, Dave Byrne’s tired “Iiiiiichaaaaaaach!” in Ulysses; Joyce’s statement concerning the Wake that “the words the reader sees are not the words that he will hear”; the consternation he caused his contemporary Wake translators by “caring more for sound and rhythm than sense”; Pater may not have been right about all literature, but the Wakeaspires to the state of music, without question. “Sing the Wake!” poet/teacher/Kerryman Brendan Kennelly urges his students with a deranged grin. Perhaps it is not as ludicrous as it seems.
B. It is the opinion of many historians of the written word that the development of the 22-sign alphabet in Byblos (Phoenicia) in 1000 BC put Western man on the linear fast-track, narrowing and focusing his methods of perception by means of the phonetic writing. “Gutenmorg with his cromagnom charter”(20) accelerated the process exponentially, allowing for the ‘speech of nations’ which Vico recognized as the most important enabling factor of the modern nation state, long before McLuhan.
Unfortunately for the readers of Finnegans Wake, the linear techniques of the ‘abecedarium’ (an early Renaissance name for a ‘dictionary’ that never made it into the modern era) are often all but useless. Joyce knows this, and taunts us:
“(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world?”(18)
C. The serial, focused progression of thought along the lengths of neatly-aligned sequences is what causes most readers to put down the Wake after the first ten minutes of effort and never pick it up again. Fooled by its front and back covers, they approach it as they have approached the hundreds of other books they’ve encountered in their lives, and this approach is doomed to failure.
Speaking for myself: the first time I made it past the first page of the Wake was a time when I was tired, unable to focus, and about to go to bed. My brain was most likely preparing itself to switch into the ‘network-jumping’ mode that is necessary for the Dream Work {4B}. Upon grabbing the Wake off my nightstand and encountering the “riverrun” again, I made the shift prematurely, allowing the full field of associations that the Wake triggers to coexist simultaneously in my mind. I was even happier than I would later be when I first made out the 3-D image in one of those gimmick posters they sell in shopping malls, and:
“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.” (482)
A shift in modes of cognition, from typographic straight-line marching to aural omnidirectional floating, is necessary before the ears can grasp what the eyes can never see. To appreciate Joyce’s “sound seemetry”(17), to catch the nuances of his “poetographies”(242) and his “auradrama”(517), the reader has no choice but to grant his own semantic network the uncomfortable freedom to be fired at will by the Wake’s trigger finger.
D. There is one way of writing ‘Hello’; there are probably a hundred ways to say it; Stanlislavisky’s students probably had to come up with a hundred and thirty. Joyce did not hit upon such a maddeningly difficult technique to perturb and discourage (or not primarily to perturb and discourage). His punning and riffing and variation were the only way he could compress the expressiveness and multiform connations of oral communication into the thin pipeline of type {4E}. Like a phone sex operator trying to cram all the multi-sensory aspects of a sexual experience into the low-fidelity funnel of a phone receiver, Joyce was “Putting Allspace in a Notshall”(455), collapsing the world’s network into a prohibitively small space in a greatly restricted medium.
The reason he went through all the trouble was his faithfulness to the idea of the network:
“The notion of moving steadily along on single planes of narrative awareness is totally alien to the nature of language and of consciousness. But it is highly consistent with the nature of the printed word.”
To go McLuhan one further, the straight line and the flat plane are not only alien to language and consciousnes, but to anyattempt to adequately represent a reality that is lived in at least four dimensions, and more for some mediums, mystics and physicists. Joyce’s includes orality in the framework of the Wake because any universal isomorphism has to put a premium on inclusiveness—something that straight use of accepted typographic practice renders impossible.
E. One of many caveats: inclusiveness does not mean choosing sides. Donald Theall perceptively notes that Joyce is “sensitive to the inseparable involvement of speech, script, and print with the visual, the auditory, the kinesthetic, and other modes of expression”, before trying to stuff this entire sensorium into the word ‘gesture’, thus staking his claim on the dark side of Joyce criticism. ‘Inclusive’ is not the same thing as ‘including the things we like’. Similar notions of ‘toleration’ cause many problems.
I may not agree with Kenner’s relegation of Joyce to the age of the printed book {1F}, but Kenner knows his Joyce, and is well aware of Joyce’s deep love for great swaths of the literary landscape. Reductive efforts to staple partisan ‘Orality’ tags to Joyce because of his chronic eye trouble are not worth discussing. Neither the bushy-tailed, uncritical, Brave New World convert to the New Orality {35D}, nor the “fierce advocate of writing as against orality”(if that is truly what Derrida is) will ever be of much use when it comes to Finnegans Wake. Each is a blind man who refuses to let go of his own favorite chunk of the elephant.
It is possible that “hypertext represents a shift in human consciousness comparable to the shift from orality to print”, although like tequila, I wouldn’t want to drink it straight. Maybe there is even a splash of prophecy in Harold Bloom’s glum consideration that “Perhaps the ages of reading—Aristocratic, Democratic, Chaotic—now reach terminus, and the reborn Theocratic era will be almost wholly an oral and visual culture.” But our reptilian medullas continue to happily hiss subconscious commands to our cerebrums; print did not obliterate all traces of orality; and the ‘second orality’ of the computer age, should it come, will not clean the slate, either, for the world or the Wake. Literature will always pulsate beneath its surfaces. {1D} {35C}
13
A.
“….peeking into the focus and pecking at thumbnail reveries, pricking up ears to my phono on the ground and picking up airs from th’other of th’ether.”(452)
In his 1964 book Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan devised the terms ‘Hot’ and ‘Cool’ to discuss the ways people communicate with one another in the modern world. A brief examination of these terms as McLuhan uses them will serve as a segue from the world of books to the story electric—the wide array of electronic and electromechanical communications which Joyce saw explode from novelty items to the new agents of human communication in the course of his lifetime.
Like Joyce, McLuhan confounds surface dichotomies through intentional strategies of confusion, covering the coexistence of contraries with an ad-man’s glib turns-of-phrase. The basic distinction between Hot and Cool media is one made up of many smaller distinctions: specialist/ generalist, high-definition/low-definition, one-way/two-way, exclusionary/inclusionary. “A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition’. High definition is a state of being well filled with data.” “Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one….the hot form excludes, and the cool one includes.”
Among the Hot media, McLuhan places the radio, the movie, the photograph, the phonetic alphabet, and the book. In the Cool category, he puts the telephone, the television, the cartoon, hieroglyphics, and speech. One does not have to agree with every point McLuhan makes about every form of communication (I would imagine few people do) to grant that his cardinal insight is sound. Regarding literature specifically:
“The hot literary medium excludes the practical and participant aspect of the joke….To literary people, the practical joke with its total physical involvement is as distasteful as the pun that derails us from the smooth and uniform progress that is typographic order.”
Joyce loved the physical comedy of Chaplin as much as the puns which became the building blocks for the Wake, and was given to ‘distasteful’ physical displays himself, when his personality had been sufficiently lubricated with alcohol. Finnegans Wake is a Cooling down of the Hot book, opening it to participation—and not just the participation of a small group of ‘specialists’. {2A} To create his Cool magnum opus, Joyce emulated the electronic media that had sprung up around him to the greatest extent possible in type. Other media in the past had achieved analogous effects, but none so pervasively, and none so quickly.
14
A.
“Christ in our irish times! Christ on the airs independence! Christ hold the freedman’s chareman! Christ light the dully expressed!”(500)
The linotype machine was invented in 1878, and the mass-produced daily edition of the newspaper was already a fixture of European and American life by the time Joyce was born in 1882. The newspaper is an interesting mixture of Hot and Cool. {13A} It allows for the same detachment as other typography, possibly greater detachment; as in Joyce’s story “A Painful Case”, with its emotionally flatlined “No blame attached to anyone.”
However, newspapers are hardly laid out in a linear fashion, and the eye rarely follows an orderly progression in its dance around a front page. Only the most gripping story can temporarily block out the informational ambush from all sides. McLuhan’s own visual style is heavily cribbed from the newspaper format.
It is this ‘field of information’ effect that Joyce borrowed from “Tass, Patt, Staff, Woff, Navv, Bluvv, and Rutter”(593), whatever he may have thought of its content {27B}. From chapter seven of Ulysses, we might surmise that Joyce felt newspapers said nothing with great skill; and the command by Shaun as moralizing Don Juan in chapter fourteen to “Perousse instate your Weekly Standerd, our verile organ”(439) presents the press as an agent of entrenched orthodoxies, a newspaper penis to joust with William S. Burroughs’ newspaper spoon. But the newspaper rides the rail; it mixes Hot content with Cool layout. Finnegans Wake acknowledges both presences; one through wary mention, the other through frequent deviance from accepted ‘literary’ print formats, and a subtle borrowing of the newspaper’s simultaneous array of information.{23E}
15
A. For Joyce, the telegraph and the telephone speed up Shaun the Post’s Great Letter route to the speed of light, pulling all the wired world into his reach. “Now we’re gettin it. Tune in and pick up the forain counties! Hello!…Am I thru’ Iss? Miss? True!….Clear the line, priority call!”(500-1). As a two-way network that connects vast numbers of distinct and varied persons around the globe, the international phone system (even in its inchoate state in the thirties) shares a fundamental design principle with the Wake. There is no passive way to use the phone—you plug into the network, and when it talks, you have to talk back to keep the communication going. {26A}
16
A. Joyce made a phonograph recording of a section of chapter eight of the Wake. McLuhan seems to think that the Wakecould not have been conceived in a non-phonographic age. This may be so, or it may not be so. Consider the medium itself for a moment, the now-outdated phonograph disc: a circle, which is actually an inwardly-winding spiral {10F}; along which is contained a line, divided into two distinct Twin channels; from which an engulfing field of sound emerges making possible an endless spectrum of sound placement because of complex interference patterns. Cool field contained in Hot line contained in Cool spiral. {13A} Possibly Joyce had similar thoughts when “pricking up ears to [his] phono on the ground”(452). Possibly not.
17
A. The radio is more important to Finnegans Wake than the newspaper, the phonograph, or even the telephone; when Shaun steals the Great Letter of human communication, he is more concerned with transmitting it outward than with making it the subject of a two-way phone conversation. {35B} Numerous terms are borrowed in part from radio: “ulvertones”, “spectrem”, “Ampsterdampster”, “dyode”(318-319), “dielectrick”, “ham”(322). But there are numerous terms in the Wake borrowed in part from everything Joyce ever knew, knew about, or heard that someone else had heard of. This alone reveals nothing about the book; it merely shines a small penlight in a corner of its vast warehouse.
But the radio has the “doomed crack of the old damn ukonnen power insound in it”(323), and plays “The mujic of the footure on the babarihams of the bashed”(518). As Before, So Again {9D}, with a variation—the crackling radio brings out the transfigured static thunder that heralds the new barbaric Divine Age. Its heavy presence towards the end of Book III and in Book IV trumpets the ABSA principle, and points out an important feature of that principle—the future will be the past, with a difference. {10F}
The radio announces the “Giant crash in Aden”(324), it brings the “static babel”(499), and kicks off the recorso of Book IV with the call: “calling all downs. Calling all downs to dayne. Array! Surrection!”(593) Its advent marked the return to a new theocracy, a new tribalism, with concomitant new variations on the themes of Genesis, and all other creation myths.
B. Radio does all this in Finnegans Wake because radio collapses the world into a village and history into Now with its “unified implosion and resonance”, to borrow a phrase. {26A} To borrow another—McLuhan’s definition of tradition as “the sense of the total past as now”, and his attribution of its awakening to the impact of radio, bring Finnegans Wake into close proximity with the airwaves. Numerous historical channels from every corner of the globe permeate the ‘ether’ of the book constantly, simultaneously; it is up to the operator of the Wake’s radio dial to determine which ones to tune in.
The connection of everywhere with here and of every time with now was the task at hand in writing Finnegans Wake. He had the alchemists to provide him with the soldiering irons of AASB and ABSA—but one has to wonder whether their voices spoke to him as loudly as the radio voices that spoke in every parlor.
C. The radio is the “harmonic condenser enginium”(309) over which Shaun will broadcast the condensed letter he has stolen from Shem, “as softly as the loftly marconimasts”(407) into the “two millium to humbered and eighty thausig nine humbered and sixty radiolumin lines to the wustworts of a Finntown’s generous poet’s office.”(265) It is the way his “hundred thousand welcome stewed letters, relayed wand postchased” will “multiply, a faith, and plultiply”(404-405). That radio is not the voice of nationalism (that is the printed word, and the newspaper) but the voice of tribalism does not matter; Shaun is the principle of order and hierarchy {32D}, and he will use each radio set as a node around which to grow the crystals of his society.
But he has disorder to contend with, as always. With radio signal comes the static Babel of Shem’s radio noise {32E}. ALP’s fading into the sea at the end of the book is foreshadowed in chapter fifteen: “I’m fading!….I’m fay! Your crackling out of your turn…”(528) The waves of the radio spectrum are of ALP as surely as the waves of the flowing river. On those waves the seed of civilization is carried through time and space, the condensed version of the whole {33B}—but in any such voyage, one is bound to run into turbulence. The radio medium is marred by unpredictable imperfections, like any medium—making it perfect for the transmission of the Great Letter of Doublends Jined, the Master of Those Who Do Not Know.
18
A. One day Nora Joyce mentioned to her husband what a shame it was that Dublin had no cinemas like Trieste’s, sparking the “birth of an otion”(309) in Joyce’s mind which led to the opening of the Volta Theater in Dublin on December 20, 1909. The Volta failed, due to bad management on the part of Joyce’s partners, their emphasis on Italian films in monolingual Dublin, and Joyce’s reputation as a heretic, but Joyce did not lose his fascination with the moving picture. In 1917, he had visions of becoming a filmmaker, and went as far as having stationery made up which read “New York Film Studio”. He read Boy’s Cinema magazine in preparation for Finnegans Wake, and was kind enough to mention the “filmacoulored featured at the Mothrapurl skrene”(443)—the Motropol Cinema in Dublin, which had more success than the Volta.
B. Film references grow thick as the straight-ahead reader moves into the Human Age of Book III, but gathering them all up and dumping them in a pile on the page will tell us nothing. It is worth noting, however, that many of the ‘mock-plays’ in the Wake cited by Campbell and Robinson, Atherton, and others are films more than plays. The Mime of Mick, Nick, and the Maggies in chapter nine features “Longshots, upcloses, outblacks”(221) that are not to be found in plays. The Butt and Taff story in chapter eleven appears on either a screen or a television set, with its “photoslope” and “double focus”(349).
The Gospel ‘dumbshows’ at the end of Book III are all spiced-up film remakes of the old stories. I sense that Joyce had come across some screenplays at some point in his endeavors to break into the business, and picked up some of their format and terminology: “Interior”(558), “Closeup”(559), the “Blackout” to a “Shifting scene”(560) which would not be possible in a play, and the screenplay-shorthand present-participle “Man looking round”(559). The placement and phrasing of the line “Circus. Corridor.”(560) suggests a screen play ‘slug line’, denoting a shift of scene. Like the Wake, the ‘style’ of a screenplay is to be found more in its formal qualities than in its use of language {1D}. Perhaps Joyce had given up on the Nobel Committee, and was setting his sights on the “Oscur Camerad”(602) instead.
C. Joyce’s attempt to entangle himself in “the celluloid art”(534) is a recognition of the ascendancy of film as the premier story-telling medium in the New Divine Age: “It looks like someone other bearing my burdens. I cannot let it. Kane’s nought.”(536) It is understandable that Joyce would want in, as Beckett did. The “stock of eisen”(536) has built the “sailalloyd donggie” (373) on which new generations of Don Quixotes sally forth into new pre-scripted adventures.
Film’s ability to absorb and transform the archetypes of literature, to carry close isomorphisms of character types and plot structures, is a testament to the power of ABSA. The Wake records this transformation; the aptness of its invented connections is what allows its network to be continuous across time as well as space. {33D}
In Finnegans Wake, Napoleon’s wife becomes jazz-siren “Josephine Brewster”(71); Don Juan (Jaun) becomes a “linenhall valentino”(458); Shakespeare’s Richard III is swallowed by Disney’s Seven Dwarfs: “Heigh hohse, heigh hohse, our kindom from an orse!”(373) And Chopin is absorbed into “Chorney Choplain”(351)—the forced contiguity is both lyrical and ironic, like Chaplin himself. McLuhan saw this tightrope balance of lyricism and ironicism in Leopold Bloom. Once pointed out, Bloom-as-Petit-Bourgeois-Little-Tramp seems so obvious that we are amazed we didn’t think of it ourselves.
D. Like the chivalric romances that drove Don Quixote to courageous lunacy, film paints an incomplete sight-and-sound picture: “And roll away the reel world, The reel world, the reel world! And call all your smoke blushes, Snowwhite and Rosered, if you will have the real cream!” Joyce would uncover movies as maya, a smokescreen of illusion that are revealed as such by the more complete representation that is Finnegans Wake. After a movie digression featuring film stars such as “Noah Beery” and “Charley Chance”(65), we hear the “reel world” go “Ack, ack ack!” as it flips through a projector in the ‘real’ world of Finnegans Wake. It is the same effect used in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, or Bergman’s Persona, but to a different end; Joyce would point the finger of un-reality at someone else. His Creation is the Real Thing. {10A}
E. Yet he milked the movie medium for all it was worth. McLuhan says that a writer has “no means of holding a mass of detail before his reader in a large bloc or gesalt” the way a film does. It was this gestalt that Joyce took from film—both the hi-definition, information rich spatial field of each individual frame, and the synergy that those frames create when they move through the projector. The condensation effects that he pioneered to achieve this are precursors to cinematic experiments like those of Grahame Weibren, who like Joyce draws his inspiration from the Dream Work that is “not a narrative that unfolds in time—all the elements are simultaneously present”. Whether interactive cinema will ever amount to anything is a separate question. {35D}
The simultaneity of the movie frame, its ability to hold vast quantities of mise-en-scene detail, was what made Joyce think that Ulysses would be better translated into film than into French in 1924. Warner Brothers wrote to him about the film rights, he talked to Eisenstein about it, and had Stuart Gilbert try his hand at some film scenarios; but the film was not made until 1967, in a version directed by Joseph Strick, featuring Milo O’Shea as Bloom and Barbara Jefford as Molly. It was successful enough that, when asked what Bloom looks like, most people will inadvertently describe Milo O’Shea.
A 1965 film version of Finnegans Wake was made by Mary Ellen Bute, but I cannot claim to have seen it. Jim McCabe at University College, Dublin {2B}, has suggested a photo-montage of place and landscape over a reading of the Wake would help to unfold aspects of the book, and allow more people to connect with it. In my opinion, the Wake, or fragments of it, are a film waiting to happen—an animated film. Animation is the only way that I can envision capturing the sense of protean dream-transformations that the Wake engenders. However, I am not holding my breath; traditional animation techniques are painstakingly time and labor intensive, and at the moment the audience for a Finnegans Wakemovie could probably fit in a large broom closet and still leave room for the brooms. Only when the computer graphic imaging (CGI) equipment that created Pixar’s Toy Story can be bought for a couple thousand dollars will I start scanning the cinema horizon for The Animated Adventures of ALP.
19
A.
“Television kills telephony in brothers’ broil. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen!”(52)
Joyce missed the television explosion for the most part, but he saw enough in his life time to predict the devotions which millions would pay to the cathode ray deity: “We want Bud. We want Bud Budderly. We want Bud Budderly boddily.”(337)
B. It is the perceptual influence of television that has prepared a younger generation of potential readers to apprehend the Wake far more easily and more comprehensively than their elders. “TV will not work as background. It engages you. You have to be with it,” says McLuhan of TV’s “nonvisual mosaic structure”—a structure it shares with modern art, modern physics and computer networks. Like the Wake, television demands involvement and participation {24C} to fill in the phenomenological void left by a resolution far lower than that of film. Of “the faroscope of television”, the Wake says, “this nightlife instrument still needs some subtractional betterment in the readjustment of the more refrangible angles….” Along with illuminated manuscripts {5A} and cartoons {7A}, television is Cool {13A} and iconic, even kinesthetic, pulling the viewer in to put the finishing touches on incomplete images, inviting him to push its buttons. {6A}
C. Television (more specifically, the remote control) gave birth to the ‘channel surfing’ from one narrative wave to another and back again, the precursor of the ‘net surfing’ that at the time of this writing is already a tired cliché. The other Joyce in this discussion, Michael, says in his book Of Two Minds:
“Already with remote control channel zapper in hand, most of us can track multiple narrative, headline loops, and touchdown drives simultaneously across cable transmissions and stratified time. In the network we know that what is of value is what can be used and that we can shift values everywhere, instantly, individually, as we will.”
This is the cognitive mode we have to switch into if we are to ride the Wake instead of being drowned under an overload of information, which we mistakenly try to absorb in orderly accountant’s fashion. Like the director of a live TV news broadcast, the Wake reader has to put together a narrative (or many alternate narratives) from a dizzying influx of events, perspectives, information. The jarring dislocations we often feel when the Wake abruptly shifts gears from prehistoric hunter-gatherers to ham-radio operators is perfectly encapsulated by the TV phrase that is the best three word summary of ‘postmodernism’ that I know: And Now This.
20
A. And now this: Before launching on an examination of the ‘hypertextual’ computer-networked documents that were originally the sole co-occupants of this study along with Finnegans Wake, it might be useful to flesh out the ideas of Umberto Eco on the Open Work structure that distinguishes net-works from their linear counterparts.
Before launching on an examination of the Open Work, I thought I might briefly explain, for the benefit of those already jeering from the bleachers, why I am paying so much attention to what Eco has to say on the subject of openness and networks, and so little attention to Derrida, Barthes, and other New French theorists.
It is not that I deny these men and women their valid insights—but the Rimbaudian Necessity of being Absolutely Modern which exudes from their work is distasteful to me, and not conducive to an understanding of the ‘isochronic’ material at hand. Coming from a nation which has had about sixty governments since World War Two, Eco understands that verily, there is no new thing under the sun, no matter what unheard-of revolutions the moment might appear to bring. {1D}
More importantly, Eco simply came first. He started his work on the Open Work in 1959, years before similar notions began to surface in the work of Derrida, Barthes and others. As with opera, so with this cornerstone critical concept: the Italians invented it, and the French followed fast on their heels and added lots of ornaments and trills. It is difficult to say with certainty whether contemporary French theory has produced a Bizet, or simply turned out many Jean Baptiste Lullys. Back to our scheduled program—
B. There are, says Eco, “latent possibilities of a certain type of experience in every artistic product”, a degree of openness to interaction, to the unearthing of buried treasures. At the end of each sentence of a book, there is a potential disjunction where the reader can stop to wonder what is going to happen next, thus creating a tree of possibilities.
But an Open Work, as such, represents a divergent evolution away from ‘every artistic product’, one in which the ‘mutation’ of openness develops to the point of making the Open Work a different species all together; in Open Works, there is an “invitation to confront”. The optical disk on the Voyager spacecraft, with its obviously ‘unnatural’ and ‘intelligent’ design, creates a context in which the disk will be perceived by an alien civilization as an object to be decoded (or that is the idea). Similarly, in our civilization, with its rules about what a book is ‘supposed’ to be, Finnegans Wake sets up a new ‘cognitive relationship’ between the reader and the text from the first line. The reader knows to widen her interpretive scope. Actually, she is given no choice—the ropes on the back-and-forth trapeze are cut, and she falls into the net of interconnections and simultaneity {4D}. As soon as we begin reading the Wake, “We are once amore as babes awondering in a wold made fresh where with the hen in the storyaboot we start from scratch.”(336)
C. The Open Work is not read for the pleasure of formal resolution and dramatic catharsis, but for the joy in the constant, organic unfolding of possibility. The following diagrams represent the ‘branching tree’ of Open narrative {4A}, as against the one-dimensional, ‘tree of collapsing possibilities’ which could represent, say, a detective story:
[missing picture]
To be sure, we can read any book in any way we like; we can read Curious George as a crypto-anarchist manifesto, or The Firm as Nazi propaganda. Such random wanderings through the woods of interpretation do not always go unrewarded in undergraduate literary study. But a true open work validates the freedom applied to its interpretation by a carefully ‘plotted’ flexibility that saturates it to its foundations:
“….in a ‘well-made’ literary work….there is no openness at a given level which is not sustained and improved by analogous operations at all other levels.”
AASB.
D. By pushing the reader into potentially endless chains of association and meaning at every juncture, and thus forcing him to draw heavily on his own stores of experience to inform his understanding of the book, the Wake sets a process in motion that inevitably extends beyond its own pages:
“Many of the allusions, in fact, escape the author himself, who has prepared a machinery of suggestion which, like any complex machine, is capable of operating beyond the original intention of its builder.”
A reference to Bugs Bunny does not have to be intended to be contextually meaningful {19A}. Neither does a reference to the atomic bomb {29A}. The Wake is a system—it is not intended as a completed production, but as a thing constantly becoming, evolving. {8B} Perhaps this a mark of the influence of Vico’s New Science, which also has the potential for endless application (according to Bergin and Fisch):
“….just as Euclid’s Elements as a system is susceptible of indefinite further development without addition to or change in the definitions, axioms, or postulates, so Vico’s new science is susceptible of indefinite further development without change in its principles, whether in the narrower or wider sense.”
The Wake’s capacity for transformation and adaptation to new historical and literary circumstances is a product of its complexity; it has attained the critical mass of complexity necessary for evolution {32C} without ever leaving the page (though it may have to, sooner or later). Constant becoming is also vital for a work trying to mimic a universe that exhibits the same restless behavior. {11A}
21
A. The Uncertainty Principle and Relativity are rarely invoked in practical physics situations, and Openness is rarely called upon in the reading of most literature; often principles such as these only complicate things, causing needless confusion. In Finnegans Wake, however, Openness is the only option, as ‘normal’ reading is impossible. To understand why this is so, we must spend some time on the lower levels of the Wake, figuring out how its underlying semantics and codes function.
B.
“(who meanwhile, with increasing lack of interest in his semantics, allowed various subconscious smickers to drivel slowly across their flickers)…”(173)
Using parentheses to mark one of many guides to deciphering the Wake coded into the Wake itself, Joyce locates the source of his book’s Openness for us: it orginates from the most basic semantic level. The term ‘lexeme’ (derived from cognitive anthropology and structural semantics) is used to denote the currency of exchange on this level, being the “elementary unit of ‘content’ meaning that may or may not be regarded as a distinct ‘word’ in a language.”
Heeding Pound’s dictum that “Every word must be charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree”, Joyce hit upon the notion of making a significant proportion of his lexemes extremely dense puns, often so dense that they cannot be said to have any ‘primary’ signification, or even share two primary significations. Like Humpty Dumpty’s portmanteaus in Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”, many Joycean ‘words’ are not carriers of ordinary meaning, but ‘exciters’ or catalysts of nearby words and concepts.
Joyce’s ‘words’ exist in-between our words, at some interstitial point in our multidimensional semantic networks; “this backblocks boor bruskly put out his langwedge and quite quit the paleologic scene.”(72-73) Joyce stormed the linguistic sub-basement and hammered a wedge into the machinery. The words to which we are so addicted for expression and interpretation are suddenly no longer there for us. We have no choice but to follow him down into the dark, and do our own rewiring until things start moving well enough to pump some raw material up to the higher floors. Portrait of the Author as Linguistic Luddite.
C. H.G. Wells, an ardent admirer and supporter of Joyce, got off the train as soon as he realized that the Wake was derailing it:
“You have turned your back on common men, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence and you have elaborated.”
This is not a criticism to be brushed aside simply because one is lucky enough to have the leisure time to explore and re-explore Joyce’s palace of human memory. The question, ‘How much do you concede to the common reader?’ was one of the major wedges that separated Plato from Aristotle, and has been a point of contention ever since. This is not the place to open up the argument; but to what extent the ‘elementary needs’ of common men are fixed, and to what extent those needs change with the cognitive shifts brought about by the advent of new standards of communication, is an open question. {19B}
The Wake’s bottom-level manipulation of the code certainly makes things difficult for the common man, and for the not-so-common man {2B}; but is the aim of this difficulty exclusion, or liberation? Joyce himself said:
“I’d like a language which is above all languages, a language to which we all will do service. I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition.” {22A}
Whether or not the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter of Ulysses represented the “futility of all the English styles” as Eliot believed, none of them came to fruition for Joyce. The desire to “Herenow chuck english and learn to pray plain”(579) springs from the desire to turn back the clock—or push it forward—until we are all woven together the way we were before Babel. The semantic confusion is not divisible from the act of reintegration that is one of the Wake’s ultimate goals. {36A}
D. Back to the Wake’s lexemes. Or ‘superlexemes’, or ‘hyperlexemes’, or ‘metalexemes’, for the neologismically minded. These polygonal words are the lowest level of ‘code’ in the book, and as in any book, they are thus organized into higher levels of order; sentences, paragraphs, sections, chapters, books; phrases, themes, variations upon themes; specific figures, melting up into more general figures, melting into blanketing archetypes who in turn are absorbed into more inclusive archetypes until all find shelter in HCE.
The difference between the Wake and other books, of course, is that the elementary building blocks are themselves open and ambiguous, and this openness and ambiguity thus radiate upwards into all the levels of Finnegans Wake’s organization, as the shape of the initial molecule determines the shape of a crystal. AASB—or in scientific terminology, the Wake exhibits the property of self-similarity, the manifesting of a motif within a motif within a motif, on every scale. To borrow and tamper with a term from H.A. Simon, the Wake is a “partly decomposable system”—one in which the basic parts of the system, discrete enough on their own, are altered once they enter into the system, opened to the combined influences of the other basic parts, and made to contribute to the cohesive behavior of the whole system.
This is an idea which can be applied to language as a whole—although Simon’s original idea of a ‘nearly decomposable system’ better applies to everyday language. In everyday language, even every day literary language, there is usually ‘closure’ enough for us not to worry whether the “ceramic pig salt-shaker” our friend is telling us about now is somehow integrally connected to the “human sacrifices to Baal” he was describing for us about an hour ago.
With the Wake, however, it is not only fair for us to assume the kind of interconnectedness that would bring “goddinpotty” on page 59 into a relationship with “cultic twalette” on page 344—it is crucial, if we are to gain anything from the book. Our understanding of a word or phrase can totally revise our understanding (or overlooking) of a word or phrase on an earlier page. We might not notice “La arboro, lo petrusu” on page 53, but when the washerwomen at the river start to change into a tree and a rock on page 213, the earlier phrase takes on a new cast. The same can be said of the way “by way of final mocks for his grapes” on page 72 foreshadows the Mookse and the Gripes story that starts on page 152. From the center of any lexeme, the center of any other can (and should) be reached.
E.
“All the world’s in want and is writing a letters. A letters from a person to a place about a thing. And all the world’s on wish to be carrying a letters. A letters to a kind about a treasure from a cat.”(278)
The [square] sigla in Joyce’s Wake notebooks {6D}, according to McHugh, can represent any document, and the container of that document, not to mention the house or coffin of HCE. This is a concatenation of ‘message’ and ‘carrier’ that is worth looking at.
For our immediate purposes, let us assume with Hofstadter that any message carries three fundamental levels of information:
1) The Frame Message: this is the physical feature of the message that says, “I am a message! Decode me!” In the case of Finnegans Wake, the frame message is the fact that it is printed on pages between two cardboard covers, and not in microscopically in peppermint ink on the back of a postage stamp.
2) The Outer Message: This is the information implicit in the symbol patterns and structures which tell us how to decode the message. The Wake’s top-level symbol pattern is the ambiguity and openness it inherits from its bottom-level semantic constituents {21D}. The Wake’s outer message is the overarching form of its indeterminate crystal.
3) The Inner Message: What is to be transmitted. ‘But what is the Wake about, really?’ So if we can understand the outer message, then we can get to the meat of the thing….
But that meat is only a distraction. What the Wake has to transmit is information that is inherent in the nature of the outer message, and its relation to the world it purports to mirror in tangled microcosm. Our true burden is to understand the nature of the outer message, of the form, of the ‘something itself’; “if one truly understood all the finesses of the outer message, the inner message would be reconstructible…if you could ever plumb a style to its very bottom, you could dispense with the creations in that style.” {1E}
This is not possible, of course—it would involve a complete mapping of Joyce’s mind onto our own brains, a strain that I for one would not want to put on that organ. It does tell us where we should be looking in any search for the Wake’s ‘meaning’, though. If the Postman and the Penman are really the same person, then the medium really does contain the message, and we should step back and focus on the whole network before concentrating on the various interesting sparks that travel its many paths.
22
A. Diversions, diversions. Actually, beginning a (brief) discussion of Joyce’s Irishness in close physical proximity to a discussion of his semantic subversions is not submitting entirely to stochastic processes. Joyce told one of his Berlitz English classes in Trieste:
“The Irish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilised nations. This is then called English literature….”
The dichotomy cut to the quick, all the more since he could not bring himself to sit through more than one of Padraig Pearse’s classes on the language that was his own. Rather than abandoning the language of the invader for one of the others he spoke fluently, Joyce understood the centrality of English to contemporary European culture and world culture (a state of affairs that continues to this day), and set about Cooling it off {13A}. He breathed into it the aural intelligence that was his birthright, and turned it into “noirse-made-earsy”(314).
Ireland was in a similar position relative to England in the early twentieth century as America was a hundred and fifty years previous; they were the margin while England was the center, the consumers of the culture ‘published’ in England. The fact of Joyce’s Irishness coupled with his speaking English and his acting an English ‘cultural script’ were a source of great inner tension for Joyce. They led to a kind of split personality, which he resolved in his own way (as all Irish men and women must).
In Joyce’s case, the dialectic led to a synthesis, a resolution on a higher level. When someone is at home in their deep-pile chair, they do not need to go outside and search for somewhere comfortable. Joyce did not feel at home in a country which appeared to offer him only the high-chair of the subject or the crooked stool of hard-line Catholicism. So he left. The initial exit was a journey taken by his body with Nora Barnacle, but he kept on leaving until he finally jettisoned the very language of the Irish subject—or subverted it, twisted and distorted it beyond all recognition.
In doing so, he inadvertently became a mediator between the old order and the new. This fits a general historical pattern; as the intelligentsia among the Greek slaves saw to the education of the new Roman arbiters of law and culture, so the English subject James Joyce codified, indexed, and to an extent helped create the new paradigm under whose sails the locus of world power would eventually float from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
B. To fall prey to a post-colonialist reductionism, however, by positing the mechanistic emergence of Finnegans Wake from the cogs and gears of the British colonial apparatus is to do a grave disservice to James Joyce and to the culture from which he emerged. The Irish were possessing of considerable Coolness long before it became a countertheme to the Hotness of Industrializing England. From the very introduction of large-scale literacy with the Christianization of Ireland, “The Irish received literacy in their own way, as something to play with….They began to make up languages.” When Latin was the lingua franca of the intelligentsia, they made up new patterns of Latin called Hisperica Famina, indecipherable to anyone but themselves—prefiguring both the ‘little language’ of Swift’s Journal to Stella, and Finnegans Wake.
There was also an extra-literary Coolness and fluidity to the Irish tribal culture before the modern British came. When the Elizabethan colonizers did make it over, they could not harbor the lack of fixity in the Irish system of land transmission, or tanistry, whereby a chieftain’s land was divided by means of election among his kindred, without rules of lineal ‘inheritance’. A young man could also give his allegiance to whatever chieftain he wished. “‘Gaelicism itself was a spectrum, not a clear demarcation.” The English saw these wrinkles and fluctuations as anarchy, and proceeded to iron them out.
The Irish resisted, of course, but in the face of overwhelming English military superiority, language was one of the last bastions for such resistance. If English was to be forced upon them, they would twist it with “exaggerations, strange uses of words, deliberate pleasure in paradox.” And with their ‘wild shamrock manners’, they would refuse (passively or actively) established English formality, as Joyce would later refuse established English literary form in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. {21C}
C. Gaelicism began to become inextricably identified with Catholicism after the failure of the last ‘interfaith’ revolution under Wolfe Tone in 1798. By the early twentieth century, the statement of hardline Nationalist D.P. Moran that “the Irish nation is de facto a Catholic nation” to which no Protestant (much less anyone else) could ever truly belong was generally accepted as an admirable patriotic credo. This concentric, uncatholic Catholicism was no more amenable to Joyce’s eccentric mind than the monolithic English influence.
In one of the biting ironic reversals intrinsic to cyclical history, the established guardians of the Gaelic culture which helped endow Joyce with his remarkable ear and polymaniac sensibility had become more repugnant to him than those who had burdened him with the yoke of their language and occupation. So in 1904, like Giordano Bruno in 1576, Joyce left them both church and country behind, and went to the continent to seek a heretic’s fortunes. Possibly recalling what happened to the Nolan when he made the mistake of returning to Italy, Joyce returned to Ireland only a few times, and never for very long.
23
A. Anyone who has plugged into the growing web of telecom-linked computers around the world generally known as the Internet has had some practical experience with hypertext {4C}. Hypertext is the form of document organization whereby one document is connected to a number of other documents (within the same computer or on other distant computers) by way of ‘links’ through boldfaced ‘keywords’, or nodes. When my modem finally settled down after a long history of misbehaving and allowed me access to the high-tech procrastinations of the internet, it was not long before the hypertextual nature of the Wake began to suggest itself to me.
B. The brainchild of Vannevar Bush, the contemporary concept of hypertext was introduced to the world in a 1945 article to the Atlantic Monthly magazine, wherein Bush postulated a device called the Memex to deal with the information overload that comes with an ongoing written history. The Memex would allow two or more texts to be displayed at once, and the mutual participation of one piece of information in numerous documents. It would also allow the Memex user to add her own margin notes and comments, which would become permanently incorporated to the document itself.
The technology of 1945 was not equal to the task of creating the Memex; like Babbage’s Difference Engine, it remained an idea. By the time Ted Nelson coined the term ‘hypertext’ in the mid 1960’s, however, it was already becoming a practical possibility, and the burgeoning of the personal computer market in the 1980’s and 90’s has brought hypertext into tens of millions of homes, universities and businesses. Programs like Intermedia, Hypercard, and Storyspace have been developed to speed up the usual connection-making process that has always been a part of literary study; they have also fostered experimentation with non-linear, interactive forms of story-telling.
C. The concept of “non-sequential writing with reader controlled links” is revolutionary—and like any revolutionary idea, it is fueled by numerous past sources. One need go back no further than the late 1970’s to find a number of interactive children’s adventure books published in the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ series, in which the reader reads a block of text, makes a choice concerning the action of the characters in the story, and flips back and forth through the book until he comes to one of the endings. Before computer modems were de rigeur, text adventure computer games like Zork, published by Infocom, provided ongoing surrealistic fantasy worlds which devoured the hours of many, young and old. Prosaic as they are, examples like these have as much bearing (probably more) on the immediate pre-history of interactive story-telling than more often critically-cited works such as S/Z by Roland Barthes, and Glas by Jacques Derrida.
D. Another relatively prosaic source, an article on “Cinema Theory, Video Games, and Multimedia Production” by J. Christopher Westland from the University of Southern California, hits upon a version of As Before, So Again {10D} that is frequently overlooked in more erudite circles: “The concepts and capabilities offered by multimedia technology have existed in one form or another for centuries.” Intratextual reference—moving non-sequentially through a single text—began when the Pergamon sheet book replaced the unwieldy 30-foot papyrus roll, and spread with the spread of Christianity. Marginal criticism encumbered the Alexandrian manuscripts of Homeric texts. The “bored scribblings of Irish scribes” who copied out Irish lyrics in the margins of their books “left for our enjoyment a whole literature that would otherwise be unknown.” {5A}
Many other literary works, from Tristram Shandy to Tale of a Tub to Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”, have been cited as hypertextual precursors, which is not surprising. As McLuhan says:
“….every innovation must pass through a primary phase in which the new effect is secured by the old method, amplified or modified by some new feature.” {1C}
And the Wake, of course, is the primary example at hand. Each word we look at is a ‘link’ to many other conceptual ‘sites’. In the palimpsests of the earliest versions of the Wake, “Revisions are written on top of revisions, additions are squeezed in wherever room can be found for them”. Joyce was conducting a never-ending hypertextual conversation while writing Finnegans Wake—with his predecessors, with his contemporaries, with himself. {25A}
E.
“For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies. Filstup. So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined….” (20)
In the above encapsulation of the history of the written word, we move from papyrus to calf-hide books to the printed word until we end up with Joyce’s intuition of the zig-zagging journeys that will be possible through hypertextual narratives such as his own. One of the most liberating—and the most problematic—features of hypertextual narratives is their nonlinearity, their abandonment of the beginning-to-end method of exploring a text. With each word standing in a potential relationship to all the other words, the reader of the Wake moves through the text sequentially like a computer’s CPU, until he comes upon a ‘cue’ to jump to a different part of the ‘memory’ of the text {21D} Each time one of the variations on the Prankquean’s riddle comes along, for example,{9C} the option of returning to that section presents itself.
McHugh notices that “Some of the events in book III proceed forwards, others backwards.” Even if he is reading straight-through, the linear-minded reader will find to his chagrin that the events in the text have reversed themselves, when St. Kevin metaphorically reenters the water/his mother on pages 605-606. With the footnotes, double margin notes, diagrams, and typographical chimeras of chapter ten, it is all but impossible to maintain a sequential approach; the reader is caught in the middle of a four-voice fugue, an array of meaning, a macrocosmic version of the microcosmic ‘caught between the words’ effect that the Wake achieves with each of its portmanteaus {21B}. Clearly, Joyce “disliked anything anyway approaching a plain straightforward standup or knockdown row.”(174)
F.
“Of the persins sin this Eyrawyggla saga….no one end is known.”(48)
The most obvious and perturbing result of a non-linear narrative is that it is a never-ending narrative; even for the reader reading from page 3 to page 628, the Wake does not stop, but rolls over and starts again. This implies a perpetual reading, as well as a reading that can effectively begin from any point in the text. “This is not the end of this by no manners means”(373)—or as Ted Nelson says about hypertext, “There Is No Final Word”. If the ‘sense of an ending’ is a necessary component of successful narrative, we must either forget about the possibility of non-linear storytelling, or reconsider what it is that makes a narrative ‘successful’. {35D}
G. Like Vannevar Bush’s Memex, the Wake incorporates preliminary criticism of itself into its very structure; but not with footnotes. The only footnotes are satirical. As in a hypertext document, the ‘links’ to other sources are incorporated into the body of the text itself, not relegated to an inferior position on the bottom of the page. The mention of the “exagmination”(497) of Beckett and others; the inclusion of Wyndham Lewis’ Time and Western Man (“Spice and Westend Woman”(292)), which panned Joyce’s experimental techniques; a reference to Ezra Pound’s ‘only a new cure for the clap could be worth so much trouble’ remark about Joyce’s new difficult style (“A New Cure For An Old Clap”(104)); and a lampooning of psychoanalytical and Marxist readings of the Wake before they happened (115-116) are all to be found within the Wake.
Electric documents gather sections of texts from outside writings and entwine them in their own structures until the notions of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ become suspect, and the text begins to follow Flann O’Brien’s advice that “The modern novel should be largely a work of reference.” Finnegans Wake does this as well—“murmurrandoms of distend renations from ficsimilar phases” can be “dugout in the behindscenes of our earthwork”(358), bringing its identity into question. Joyce could not ignore the ‘docuverse’ network in which he was a part, a node; but like any creator with completely unlimited aspirations for his own achievement, he was not happy about owing anything to anyone {24D} Before exploring this point further, a quick mention of electronic prospects for the Wake.
H. It is my opinion that Finnegans Wake is a book that was written about sixty years too soon. A hypertext adaptation of the Wake, exhaustively cross-indexed, with added visual and audio files in the appropriate places, would pull the book wide open, and allow us a level of understanding not possible at the current time.
There have been Apple HyperCard translations of Joseph Andrews, and some Kipling and Lawrence stories have been done at Brown University…but Finnegans Wake is in a different class altogether. The hypertext translation of the Wake is a task which will separate the wymyn from the girls. There are rumors about Gerrit Schroder and Tim Murphy putting together a hypertext version of the Wake with links to files based on the Census, the Gazeteer and other Wakereference books. Fritz Senn is supposed to be working on a hypermedia version of one paragraph of the Wake (6.13-28) which will contain voices, translation, development history, and annotations. Soon enough, someone will harness the power of electronic hyperfictions to bring the premiere non-electronic hyperfiction to life, to get the riverrun running.
Before we get too excited about the New and Improved literature, though, we ought to remember: on the most fundamental level, the reading of a ‘normal’ hypertext fiction is still sequential. Our eyes pass over the words in a straight line, and then go on to the words after them, experiencing only occasional disjunctions at crucial points. With the Wake—even the paper Wake—the non-linearity permeates the book right down to the words themselves, each one sending us on several ‘links’ simultaneously, often without prioritizing. I have not yet seen a hypertext novel which produces anything approaching such wonderful confusion.
24
A.
“Its importance in establishing the identities in the writer complexus….will be best appreciated by never forgetting that both before and after the Battle of the Boyne it was a habit not to sign letters always.”(114)
Joyce shows an understanding of the problems that an intertextual book like the Wake poses for the notion of authorship. The uncertainty which accompanies the authorship of hypertext documents (many of which have multiple authors), has a predecessor in the Wake, which itself has a predecessor in the illuminated manuscript. E.P. Goldschmidt’s Medieval Texts and Their First Appearance in Print is worth quoting at length:
“….the Middle ages…did not possess the concept of ‘authorship’ in exactly the same significance as we have it now….The indifference of medieval scholars to the precise identity of the authors whose books they studied is undeniable…The writers themselves, on the other hand, did not always trouble to ‘quote’ what they took from other books or to indicate where they took it from….”
The medieval author belonged to a ‘partly decomposable system’ of authors {21D}; once he entered the network of literature, his individual identity was not as fixed as it was for the headstrong Romantic author. The Book of Kells, for example, had four major authors, and was later embellished further by artists such as Gerald Plunket in the 16th century (folio 76V). Joyce saw this disregard for individual contribution coming again in the New Theocracy—perhaps epitomized by the group effort behind every movie {18A}—and duly noted it.
On the cover of my copy of Finnegans Wake, however, the author’s name is far larger than the title of the book. There is a double-meaning behind the question: “So why, pray, sign anything as long as every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace is a perfect signature of its own?”(115) The author can be nowhere in sight, as long as his footsteps echo through every line. The New Theocratic Age is at hand, in which single egos will unite under a larger enterprise—but a Divine Age needs a God. {35G}
B. In a way, Joyce’s works had one primary author, and many lesser authors. He used his friends as research assistants; they became what Stuart Gilbert called “Joyce’s runabout men.” When his eyesight began to worsen, his most trusted research assistants became his scribes, introducing the effects of textual drift and plain chance into his works. Robert McAlmon typed some of Molly Bloom’s thoughts out of place in the “Penelope” chapter, and Samuel Beckett included Joyce’s “Come in” response to a knock on the door in a transcription of Finnegans Wake—in both cases, Joyce let the alterations stand.
When Joyce said to a friend in a cafe, “It is not I who am writing this crazy book. It is you, and you, and you, and that man over there, and that girl at the next table”, he acknowledged the Wake’s implication and indebtedness to everything and everyone around him. But again, there is another side to this acknowledgment; they are writing it, but he is writing them. Who can write others without being written by them? {25A}
C.
“His producers are they not his consumers?”(497)
The sfumato that the Wake casts over the line between authorship and readership makes it particularly applicable to hypertext, in which the reader chooses his own path through the text, each reading becoming a de facto re-authorship of the material {23E}. As all readers of the Wake have no choice but to ‘wipe their glosses with what they know’, so anyone who uses hypertext organizes the text around her own interests and decisions. With the new version of internet browser Netscape 3.0 (due out in June ‘96), “Employees will be able to communicate with one another as they work on the same document simultaneously.” From boardroom to writer’s drawing-board is only a matter of time.
Indeed, someone has even done a partial rewriting of Finnegans Wake. Lawrence Garfield’s “Jams Jaws: Funnygames Work” is a parodic tribute to the original, truly ‘reauthorizing’ Joyce while throwing Yippies, Nirvana, intifada and thousands of other post-1939 concepts into the mix:
“snakeslide, through Byanu and Mabones, from mesh of diamond to coil of back, schwings us by a conjunctus insidiosus of intifagga down to High Civilization and Entertainment……………… …………………………… ………………….. Heapunto me, heapus three. ET. The Biggy too. Giddeup. Let tick the tock, a bloom at cook o’clock…..[back to beginning]”
D. And so with Finnegans Wake literature becomes less like a sermon, and more like a conversation, open, a two-way communication {15A}. The sunnier democratic implications of this are always the first to surface. But we ought not forget what lies beneath the surface of many (most?) conversational pleasantries. With “a multiplicity of personalities inflicted upon the documents or document and some prevision of virtual crime or crimes”(107), we should not be surprised if Joyce does not take kindly to the ‘team effort’ of writing from inside the network.
25
A.
“Joyce waged literature like a battle.”
—Richard Ellmann
The problem with existing inside the vast, transhistorical network of interconnected documents that is literature is summed up in Shem’s “first riddle of the universe: asking, when is a man not a man?” The answer, “when he is a—yours till the rending of the rocks,- Sham”(170). If every work is a channeling of other works, then every author is a plagiarist. I think Joyce’s problem with plagiarism had more to do with metaphysical dilemmas than moral scruples; Joyce asked, with Harold Bloom, “what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself?”
Joyce wants to be “The Man That Made His Mother”(105)—and his Father. The double-entendre connecting incest and self-creation echoes Otto Rank’s insight that the Oedipus complex is actually about self-begetting. To go into a detailed study of the Anxiety of Influence in Finnegans Wake would lead too far afield for even this discussion; but it will not do too much damage to give it a few paragraphs.
B. Bloom’s basic insight, that “strong poets [and writers] make poetic history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves” is hard for a writer to argue with; any heated denial of the Anxiety of Influence tends to backfire and make the denier seem more in thrall to that anxiety than most. Aside from that, it is a sound observation. The Kabbalists knew that creation first required a clearing out{8C}, and Joyce knew it too. From his youth, he set about making room for himself. Getting Shakespeare out of the way was important, as Bloom rightly observes; to his brother Stanlislaus he disparaged Shakespeare in favor of Ibsen.
According to Ellmann, Joyce felt that “Relations between men…must inevitably have this coloration of uncertainty, jealousy, hostility, and affection; the usual name for this hodgepodge was friendship.” The ‘men’ in question include the long-dead authors whose wake he was trying to wash over with his own. The Wake is a conversation with all the living and the dead; but it is a conversation as laced with tension as Gabriel Conroy’s ‘conversation’ wtih Michael Furey in “The Dead”. Linguist Roman Jakobson posits that all linguistic expressions can be broken down into six categories—and the ‘conative’, an expression seeking to produce behavior in another, is among the most ubiquitous. Like conversations between living men, Joyce’s conversations with the dead have strong overtones of dominance and submission.
Joyce swallows his predecessors through an act of sympathetic magic {3C}—by naming them, by including them in his work. The truth of their continued existence lies in their names and their words, and those are free for the taking. If, as has been claimed, all of the major monologues of Shakespeare appear scattered throughout the Wake, then what do we need the originals for? Joyce wants a book that stands on its own, like the Koran (which may prove to be the new holy book for the New Divine Age, if Islam ever fully opens up to the electronic medium which will dominate it). He opens his work to the dead, but he is “anacheronistic”(202)—he ferries dead forms, dead authors, dead modalities in his own boat, across the riverrun to his own book where they will reside forever in stony silence.
C. I disagree with Bloom, however, that Joyce’s primary manifestation of the Anxiety of Influence was an agon with Shakespeare. I will grant that Shakespeare was—and is—the dominating literary figure for Joyce, the Father that continues to write even those who write about him. But Joyce’s struggle was a struggle against literature. As long as he existed within a tradition, all of his works would be “piously forged palimpsests slipped…from his pelagiarist pen”(182) {21C}. Literature made him see and hear ghosts, and Joyce would not have a litany of dead fathers screaming commands at the porches of his ear.
In writing Finnegans Wake, Joyce would pull off the ultimate feat of prestidigitation; he would create a tangled web to rival that of literature and the world itself, and when he was finished he would be found standing outside of it, in the margins, unencumbered by centuries of governing connections. He refuses to accept the hierarchy of the Great Chain of Literary Being as it stands, so he creates his own, and subsumes the original. My choice for the best microcosmic statement of the Wake’s intentions to be found inside the Wake is: “How to Pull a Good Horus-coup even when Oldsire is Dead to the World”(105).
The author who has achieved this, or is well on his way to achieving this, can afford to sit back and make magnanimous statements about the Wake that is written by everyone everywhere {24C}. At that point, he will be Horus Rising, the Lord of the New Divine Age, and the entire cosmos will be floating in the bubbles of his coffee.
But everybody knows that the dragon in the M.C. Escher etching does not really escape the page, however he may maintain that illusion through skillful contortions. The Osiris of Stratford, and the other emanations of Osiris spanning the history of narrative art, they all weigh heavy on Joyce’s shoulders like the Old Man of the Sea. Joyce is an epic hero {35G}, trying to fight the old-boys network the way Achilles fought the river Scamander; but without Gods to intervene, his “epical forged cheque” will remain just that. Whether he can cash it or not is another matter.
26
A.
“….through all Livania’s volted empire, from anodes to cathodes….”(549)
The New Divine Age of Finnegans Wake is not the product of a mind given to neo-primitivist longings; Joyce was a product of the modern city. He got allergic smelling hay, and could not relate well to the idealization of the rural that ran through the works of the Celtic Twilight. The theocracy to come is mythical like the one that preceded it—but with a difference.{10F} The new Kingdom of Heaven will be an Electric Empire. Joyce understood implicitly what McLuhan stated explicitly:
“Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, and the instant speed of electricity confers the mythic dimension on ordinary industrial and social action today. We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes.”
Shaun’s new technological post office abolishes space and time, turning Dublin into the Eternal City of the Eternal Now {17B}. The electric cross-linking of everywhere with everywhere else blends out differences between East and West: “In that earopean end meet Ind.” (598) Recently, an article in the International Herald Tribune commented detailed how “Netmyths explode instantly around the globe, duplicated word for word with the click of a mouse.” It does not matter that the stories are about microwaved poodles, or rocket-fueled cars, or Neil Armstrong’s off-color murmurings on the moon; at 186,000 miles-per-second, gossip becomes myth, and the prattle of two washerwomen at the ford becomes Divine History.
B. The Gods, too, have changed. Richard Rorty sees the wired web of hypertextual communications as an instantiation of what he calls “edifying philosophy”, the point of which “is to keep the conversation going rather than to find objective truth.” A more succinct statement of consumerist ideology is not to be found. HCE has returned to preside over the Electric Empire, and he is “fortiffed by my right as a man of capitol.”(548) Money is the new Divine Right of Kings, proffering unlimited license, as evinced by the O.J. Simpson trial.
“O, I adore the profeen music! Dollarmighty!”(562) Only the impish Joyce or the world itself could produce a profane theocracy in which money teams up with electricity to knock down the walls of nation-states in the name of the multinational corporation. The prophecy was there all along, hidden in the ‘phonetic connection of signifiers’—Hermes, the messenger and carrier of Hermetic secrets and unified of microcosm with macrocosm {10B}, is also Mercury, god of commerce and merchandise. The Wake is intersected by trade routes as well as concepts, like the Book of Kells with its costly pigments from the Mediterranean. The Great Letter even has a “serial number”(188). Naming is claiming is commodity.
27
A. Lulled by their ubiquity, entranced by their promises or revolted by their baseness, it is easy to forget that commercials are the speech of Joyce’s Electric Empire, as the printed word was the speech of the nation-state. {12B} Joyce was not one to overlook such things; the advertisement of Araby’s bazaar could not but help stir its boy protagonist to fantasy, and “Plumtree’s Potted Meat” refuses to leave Bloom’s head in Ulysses.
In the Wake, commercials and advertisements are everywhere, from the “Kommerzial….from Osterich”(69-70), to the advert for HCE’s inn at “Lucalised”(565), and the word from our sponsors: “This eeridreme has been effered you by Bett and Tipp”(342). Shaun throws a plug for himself in the middle of his telling of the tale of Shem: “[John’s is a different butcher’s. Next place you are up town pay him a visit. Or better still, come tobuy…]”(172) A few pages later, Joyce inserts a similar piece of self “ABORTISEMENT”, associating himself with Shaun: “[Jymes wishes to hear from wearers of abandoned female costumes….]”(181) {32E} {35B} He knows the new language.
B. Finnegans Wake is one of the few artifacts that rivals the collected power of advertisements as “the richest and most faithful daily reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.” Like illuminated manuscripts, they do this through iconic techniques {6A}; more effort probably goes into designing the fonts of many ads then is spent on the articles on the opposing pages. Appropriately, they can convey subtleties which mass-produced prose cannot, a quality they share with the Wake.
Joyce is guilty of successful sleight-of-hand in his use of advertisements. Again prefiguring McLuhan, he knows that “Any ad put into a new setting is funny. This is a way of saying that any ad consciously attended to is comical. Ads are not meant for conscious consumption.” Those scouring the Wake for ‘content’ will find many advertisements and immediately pronounce them ridiculous and satirical—which they are, when looked at with the careful scrutiny of literary interpretation.
But as Bloom the Little Tramp {18C} rides the rail between ironic and lyric, so Bloom the Ad Man is poised between satire and appropriation. Joyce shows us the ads themselves and invites us to call them ridiculous, while behind his back he is hiding the effective ad techniques of iconicism and repetition which the Wake uses to the fullest—a trick he also pulls with newspapers {14A}. Like Swift in “The Battle of the Books” and A Tale of a Tub, he insults modernity’s content while adopting (and creating) its form.
28
A. Modern physics provides the ontological backbone for Finnegans Wake, as Olympian-sponsored rules of kleos and time did for Homer, and the universe of medieval cosmology did for Dante {1B}. They’re “Not Here Yet (Maxwell, Clark)”(130) in Book I, but by the time the Human Age comes around, James Clerk Maxwell will have penned the equations which describe the unified field of electricity and magnetism—an enveloping domain like that of sound, one that makes the Wake a possibility {34C}. Maxwell’s electric field provides the Divine Sparks which flow through the Wake’s many vessels, {8C} uniting them all and providing a standard of exchange between them.{8B} {27B} From the way “their ulstravoliance led them infroraids”(316) to the electric insects with their “langtennas” and “elytrical wormcasket”(316), EM waves are more pervasive than sound waves can ever be.
B.
“….in reality only a done by chance ridiculisation of the whoo-whoo and where’s hairs theorics of Winestain.”(149)
It was Lewis Carroll who first gave the Victorian contemporaries of James Clerk Maxwell a taste of a twisted relativistic universe which might replace the ordered regularity of the one described by Newton. Only at the beginning of the next century, though, did Einstein translate this universe into mathematics, and show that contrary to intuition, it was the one in which we lived.
Of all the signatures on his letter protesting Roth’s piracy of Ulysses, Joyce was most proud of Einstein’s; the universe described by the latter was in many ways a precursor to the one created by the former. Einstein’s cosmology was one which merged incommensurates {32B}, putting time and space on the same footing, revealing the potential one had to replace the other: “Eins within a space and a wearywide space it wast ere wohned a Mookse.”(152) Clerk-Maxwell’s electromagnetic energy was itself ‘chunked’ {3B} into a larger whole, drawn into the exchange of E=mc2. The flux of Heraclitus was married to the changelessness of Parmenides—there were constant exchanges between the two mediums, but as Joyce said, “Rein ne se crée, rien ne se perd” (nothing is changed, nothing is lost). And as it is with time and space and energy and matter, so it is with Shem and Shaun. Eternal opposites come together: “BUTT [Shem/time] and TAFF [Shaun/space]… now one and the same person….”(354) {36A}
The notion of an expanding space-time continuum that curves back upon itself, one of the many difficult implications of General Relativity, provided the impetus for the circularity of Joyce’s own model of the universe, which bends back upon itself to end where it began.{23F} And what relativity did to the notion of the objective observer is also imitated by the Wake’s acentric network: “Here are no privileged points of view, and all available perspectives are equally valid and rich in potential.”{2B}
Another twentieth century scientific revolution, less well known because more difficult to encapsulate than Einstein’s, has even more impact upon the structure of Finnegans Wake {31A}. But of course, Einstein made one more reluctant contribution to science which provided inadvertent material for Joyce. It will appear more intentionally in the next chapter.
29
A. Try as we will, it is difficult to forget Einstein’s unwilling role in paving the theoretical ground on which the Manhattan Project scientists could build the Enola Gay’s terrible cargo. That the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima six years after the publication of Finnegans Wake does not prevent many uncanny references to atomic explosions in its pages. When we read of “hriosmas, whereas take notice be the relics of the bones”(91), and when “he is consistently blown to Adams”(313) appears only two pages from “Whatthough for all appentices it had a mushroom on it….nogeysokey first”(315), we experience the kind of frission usually reserved for the end of a Poe or Lovecraft story.
When Joyce describes ALP’s “birthright pang that would split an atam”(333), or “the abnihilization of the etym”(353), he is not quite anticipating “a future scientific and conceptual discovery” as Eco suggests. In a rare display of non-omnipotence, Eco forgets that Lord Rutherford’s atom splitting experiment took place in 1919. The division of the Democritan indivisible was already an established scientific possibility.
What Joyce’s ‘prediction’ of atomic warfare does is to demonstrate the ability of a system with a ‘critical mass’ of complexity to produce novel forms independently of the creator of that system (more important than freak demonstrations of clairvoyance).{20D} Eco gets back on track when he reminds us that any discovery represents “an excess of disorder in respect to existing codes”. Joyce sets loose his original organization of disorder, and lets the “flash from a future of maybe mahamayability”(597) take care of itself. {32C}
30
A.
“Sankya Moondy played his mango tricks under the mysttetry.” (60)
At the risk of being flogged for impertinence—and without constructing a ridiculous transition sentence to link the subject to atomic explosions—I will move on to a compact discussion of Buddhism. Those who do not like it can move on to the next chapter, which once again takes up the sober threads of science.{31A} In truth, Buddhism is not irrelevant to Finnegans Wake, not at all. An expert in Buddhist epistemology could come to a far deeper understanding of the Wake’s gestalt than all but the most rarefied of literary critics.
The lure of the East “cast an Eastern enchantment over” Joyce as it did over the Dublin Theosophical set, and he inundated Book IV of the Wake with Sanskrit. The comparison here is meant to facilitate understanding, not establish the historicity of influence, but that influence is real nevertheless.
The question-and-answer format of chapter six echoes not only Catholic catechism, Joyce’s own “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses, and a school quiz, but the form of most of the Buddhist sutras as well. One passage in that chapter is a direct lifting of a Buddhist concept:
“They war loving, they love laughing, they laugh weeping, they weep smelling, they smell smiling, they smile hating, they hate thinking, they think feeling, they feel tempting, they tempt darling, they dare waiting, they wait taking, they take thanking, they thank seeing….”(142)
Moving non-sequentially {23E}, another earlier Wake passage is even closer to the original:
“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.” (18)
This is Pratityasamutpada, the twelvefold chain of Dependent Origination. In Daily Buddhist Devotions, K. Sri Dhammanandai lists the twelve stages of Dependent Origination (Paticca Samuppada in his original Pali): Ignorance produces voltional acts produce consciousness produces mental and physical phenomena produce the six faculties (five senses and mind) produce sensorial/mental conduct produces sensation produces desire produces clinging produces the process of becoming produces birth produces decay, sorrow, death, pain, etc.
In the sutras, the Buddha enumerates the net of Dependent Origination slightly differently, but the basic idea is the same: all the aspects of maya, the illusory physical world, spring from one another in an endless chain of becoming (endless to those who have not achieved Nirvana) {36A}. What the Buddha himself has to say about Dependent Origination, and the language he uses (with the help of Henry Clarke Warren, his translator) are instructive in light of the present enquiry:
“Profound, Ananda, is Dependent Origination, and profound of appearance. It is through not understanding this doctrine, Ananda, through not penetrating it, that thus mankind is like to an entangled warp, or to an ensnarled web…and fails to extricate itself from punishment, suffering, perdition, rebirth….”
….namely, history. What the Buddha has to say to “anander”(581) shows a profound understanding of the interrelatedness of all things, of the network nature which lies beneath the illusory surface of our lived lives. That Joyce saw fit to recreate (and thus, of course, absorb) this insight with his own isomorphism of Pratityasamutpada not once but twice gives evidence of a similar understanding—as does the Wake’s entire structure {4A}, which is what this essay has been all about showing.
Even the Buddha was not unprecedented in his insight, though. The idea recalls Indra’s Net, an earlier Hindu mythological representation of the universe. Indra’s net is a net with a jewel at each nodal knot, and each jewel reflects the whole of the net. Indra’s Net, Buddha’s Dependent Origination, Joyce’s Wake, InterNet. As Before, So Again. {10D}
B. The view reflected by the Wake’s Dependent Origination concerning “atman”(596), the metaphysical concept of the absolute existence of an unchanging Self, is the same view held by Vico, “the negative view that there is no human essence to be found in individuals as such.” Non-existence, or anatman, is a direct implication of Dependent Origination, and it is a form that appears and reappears in any examination of reality on any scale:
“Is it possible that one single symbol could be awakened in isolation from all others? Probably not. Just as objects in the world always exist in a context of other objects, so symbols are always connection to a constellation of other symbols.”
In the metaphor-chains of Eco, each word derives its meaning from its position in the global semantic network; the divine permutations of Kabbalah brought about All That Is by connecting every letter to every other letter in an infinitely expanding web of creation. Like the quality of semantic openness (indistinguishable from it, in fact), the interrelatedness starts at the lowest level of the Wake and shines up through every tier of the work’s organization {21D}, until the Wakeand the world are ever-mutable anatman wherever you look.
Nagarjuna was an Indian Buddhist philosopher in the second century A.D. His Mahyadmikarika was the first true work of deconstruction, setting about to dismantle all manner of ‘wrong views’ on the nature of things, expanding the initial notions of the Buddha in a precise and systematic way to cover all existence, or lack thereof (if you think Derrida is difficult reading, try getting your head around Nagarjuna). His views were more soberly expressed, but his underlying assertion that the absolute being (svabhava) of any ‘existent’ is not evident (na vidjate) is whimsically mongrelized by the following ‘mutto’ from the Wake. Without presuming to have anything but the vaguest map of Nagarjuna’s semantic system in my own brain, I have a feeling he would approve:
“….for if we look at it verbally perhaps there is no true noun in active nature where every bally being—please read this mutto—is becoming in its owntown eyeballs.”(523)
31
A.
“Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude, the evidencegivers by legpoll too untrustworthy irreperible…”(57)
For someone looking forward to returning to the calm and rational worlds of science and mathematics after trying to simultaneously consider the twin inscrutabilities of Buddhism and Finnegans Wake, great disappointment is imminent. We have reached the point in the history of these disciplines where the fortresses of orderly quantification are stormed by the barbarian hordes of Incompleteness and Uncertainty, who are cast out time and time again only to bounce back in an inevitable return of the repressed.
B. I will mention logician Kurt Gödel first; pure mathematics is even more abstruse to my layman’s eyes than theoretical physics, and he will accordingly take up less space. In 1931, Gödel’s paper “On Formally Undecidable Propositions” proved beyond a doubt the impossibility of reducing mathematics to a finite set of axioms and rules. In any mathematical or logical system, there mustbe statements whose validity cannot be determined one way or another without stepping out of the system in question, and ‘looking at it from a higher level’. To give a more terse formulation of Gödel’s Mathematics in Hofstadter’s English:
“All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions.”
The inability of any system to completely describe itself from within itself {4G} poses a problem for those who, like Joyce, are trying to assemble a universal isomorphism {11A}. No matter how many steps one takes up the Ladder of Being, it is impossible to get a total and consistent view of reality, with “the infinisissimals of her facts becoming manier and manier” (298) the way they do. There is always a hole in the center; the model remains incomplete, like the Book of Kells. Either Totality or Consistency has to go.
C. Four years before Gödel gummed up the machinery of perfection in mathematics, physicist Werner Heisenberg did the same for physics. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, as summarized by Nobel physicist Richard Feynman in his Six Easy Pieces, states: If you make a measurement on any object and are able to determine the x-component of its momentum (a function of time) with an uncertainty of ÆP, you cannot at the same time know its x-position (a function of space) more accurately than Æx=h/Æp, with ‘h’ denoting Planck’s constant. The uncertainties in position and momentum at any instant must have a product that is greater than Planck’s constant.
Physicists David Bohm and B.J. Hiley try to prevent the possible misinterpretation of Heisenberg’s ontological pronouncement as an epistemological pronouncement:
“Relationships of this kind [ÆpÆx3h] implied, for Heisenberg and Bohr, that the basic properties of the particle, i.e. its position and momentum, are not merely uncertain to us, but rather that there is no way to give them a meaning beyond the limit set by Heisenberg’s principle. They inferred from this that there is…an inherent ambiguity in the state of being of that particle.”
The twin qualities of space and time (momentum) cannot be entirely divided and separately quantified; they bleed into one another in the almost infinitely small space of ‘h’, Dependently Originating, a non-decomposable system like Time-Shem and Space-Shaun in the Wake {34A}. When Vico implies that he has “thereby proved to the Epicureans that their chance cannot wander foolishly about and everywhere find a way out” he is right about the ‘everywhere’; but the Epicureans have found unassailable sanctuary in Planck’s constant.
D. Joyce was well aware of “the planckton at play about him”(477); HCE’s whole family is “mentally strained from reading work on German physics….following correspondence courses”(543) between the German theories and themselves. HCE himself—Joyce’s stand in for All That Is {8B}—is most obscure in chapters two through four, the chapters dedicated to investigating him most closely, on the most microscopic ‘quantum’ level. He has done something wrong, but it is impossible to pin down his crime with certainty, even by book II: “Auspicably suspectable but in expectancy of respectableness”(362). HCE’s “sameold gamebold adomic structure” is “highly charged with electrons”(615), and like those electrons he can only be described in terms of a probability wave—who he probably was, where he probably was, what he probably did, “in the best authenticated version”(30).
The whole Wake is washed over by a universal probability wave:
“…in this madh vaal of tares…where the possible was the improbable and the improbable the inevitable…we are in for a sequentiality of improbable possibles….for utterly impossible as are all these events they are probably as like those which may have taken place as any others which never took person at all are ever likely to be.” (110)
From the individual words up through the characters they create and the stories those characters act out, the Wake is best looked at in terms of ambiguity and probability. It does not allow for dogmatic pronouncements and ‘right answers’ stamped with the seal of Certainty. One senses that the Jesuit Scholastic hiding in Joyce’s backbrain bridled at this lack of rigorous completion in the act of categorization, but that part of him was overridden by larger concerns.
E. For Vico, according to Bergin and Fisch:
“….mathematics and physics fall short of perfect scienza. Mathematics falls short because its objects are fictions. Physics falls short because the scope of our experiments can never encompass nature as a whole. Scienza of the world of nature….is therefore reserved for God, who made it.”
Joyce’s hubris far outreaches Vico’s. He says, “Let’s hear what science has to say, pundit-the-next-best-king. Splanck!”(505); he listens to what the scientists say about the “true tree”(505), the core of being. Taking Gödel and Heisenberg’s hint that even God cannot attain complete gnosis of all the particulars of his creation, Joyce attempts true scienza and total mimesis by including in his creation the Dice that even God cannot predict. {11D}
Putting the “AGNOSIS OF POSTCREATE DETERMINISM”(262) at the heart of Finnegans Wake overturns Joyce’s Aristotelian-Catholic love for rigorous taxonomy in favor of his Irish ‘deliberate pleasure in paradox’{22B}—he makes a bid for completeness by his inclusion of incompleteness.
F. By his refusal to submit Finnegans Wake to Occam’s razor of simplicity, he creates “a channel capable of conveying a great deal of information but with the risk of limited intelligibility.” In the Wake, “that sword of certainty which would indentifide the body never falls”(51), and we are left with a book that makes plain the limits of interpretation inherent in all books—though with the Wake it is almost impossible not to run up against those limits.
Difficulty has its rewards. We recall that, with the names of God, “Their intrinsic value is proportional to their degree of incomprehensibility.” {8D} Of any message, Eco says, “the larger the amount of information, the more difficult its communication…information and uncertainty find themselves to be partners.” In a book that intends to reiterate (and replace?!?) the universe and all the information therein {11E} {35G}, we should be more suspicious of simplicity than near incomprehensibility.
32
A.
“The danger is in the neatness of identifications.”
—Samuel Beckett, “Dante…Bruno…Vico…Joyce”
We must take Joyce’s declaration to Alessandro Francini with a grain of sand:
“Ideas, classifications, political terminologies leave me indifferent; they are things one has passed beyond. Intellectual anarchy, materialism, rationalism—as if they could get a spider out of his web!”
Old Jesuit habits never die; they just fade to the back of the shelf. Joyce never completely lost his passion for systematizing, and the above statement is therefore an incomplete representation of the truth. As all representations of the truth have been shown to be incomplete {31B}, we can forgive him his trespass. This much can be said: neat identifications and strict dualistic certainties could not extricate Joyce from the web of history and influence, and he desperately wanted out {25C}. And so it was that James Joyce included Aristotle’s Excluded Middle{31B(footnotes)}, washing out the ‘Or’ and wringing in the ‘And’. Joyce moved beyond the simple Single vision of Newton’s sleep, and conventional divisions.
B. To attempt to filter his work back through those divisions, therefore, is to run up against numerous contradictions. The Wake is a probability wave, defining not any single state of being, but all possible states; this leads to the dilemma that lies at the heart of the Schrödinger’s Cat paradox, with its cat that is both alive and dead until someone looks and ‘collapses the probability wave’ {31D}. Joyce’s characters are alive and dead and not-yet-born and just-sleeping-it-off. He sees with Blake’s fourfold vision.
We do not even have to open to the first page to be hit with one of these contradictions, as the mutually-exclusive states of life and death are simultaneously implied in the title. It is a trick he might have picked up from the title of Bruno the magician’s major work, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, in which the said beast manages to be both victorious and defeated all at once.
The forced contiguity of words with mutually exclusive significations within the same Joycean ‘lexeme’ often leads to what Eco calls “ambiguous deformation” on the level of the ‘etym’ {21B}. When we read that “Humme the Cheapner, Esc” is “humile, commune and ensectuous”(29), we are presented with the simultaneous suggestions of humility, puerility, vileness, communality, commonness, sectarianism, arthropodism, and incestuousness. Moving beyond the contradictory nature of these qualities, if we apply ourselves, we can probably still imagine a real person possessing several of them concurrently, if not all of them.
Like contradictions pop up in phrases such as “this is nat language at any sinse of the world….”(83), which needs no further explanation so long as we know that ‘nat’ is ‘night’ in Danish. In chapter fourteen, Shaun’s name becomes Jaun, suggesting Don Juan—yet he acts the role of father-confessor to Issy and the twenty-eight rainbow girls throughout the chapter. And of course, his true lasciviousness shines through when he threatens to “give it to you, hot, high and heavy”(439) if the girls do not obey his proscriptions. There and back again…Joyce contradicts himself? Very well. He contradicts himself. To turn a McLuhan phrase: “You don’t like those ideas? I got others.”
C. In Books at the Wake, James Atherton sets out on the task of “resolving contradictions” within the Wake. In doing so, he misses the point; or more accurately, he gets the point, but misses the points, which are more important in this instance. One small step to a brain {4B}:
“….thoughts which clash totally may be produced by a single brain, depending on the circumstances. And any high-level readout of the brain state which is worth its salt must contain all such conflicting versions.”
And one giant leap to networks of any kind:
“In order for the Global Semantic System to be able to produce creative utterances, it is necessary that it be self-contradictory and that no Form of content exist, only forms of content.”
The co-existence of contraries, which reach Joyce from Nicholas of Cusa via Bruno of Nola, is a necessary property of any system which is has reached the level of complexity required to say anything interesting about itself or the world it presumably exists to illuminate {4G}. Oxford philosopher J.R. Lucas, speaking in a tone of haughty disparagement about Cambridge mathematician and computer forefather Alan Turing, said:
“Turing is suggesting that it is only a matter of complexity, and that above a certain level of complexity a qualitative difference appears.”
The same thing that Turing suggested about computational devices such as calculators and brains I would suggest about the Wake; it is only upon reaching a critical mass of metaphoric density that the ‘etymic explosion’{29A} occurs which gives the reader license to release the vast storehouses of meaning that are locked into our language and rarely used {4D}. There is a point in complexification where quantitative difference becomes qualitative difference. And at that point complexity produces contradiction:
“Now let the centuple celves of my egourge….by the coincidance of their contraries reamalgamerge in that indentity of undiscernibles….”(49-50)
This centuple-celled complexity of any creative system walks the middle path between Epicurean pure randomness and Stoic fated order, the floating spectrum between simple, microscopic, more-or-less predictable units (such as words) and the macroscopic collections of such units that evade all efforts towards stratification and description (such as a language). With the constantly circulating dialectic between order and disorder, elements of disorder can increase the level of information produced in a complex system, bringing out a relationship between the elemental disorder of entropy and the ‘meaning’ of creativity.{31F} As Vico sees it, poetry’s role is “to perturb to excess, with a view to the end proposed”, namely, “to invent sublime fables.”
D. This puzzling intricacy by which the Wake operates to generate an endless “eeridreme”(342) is played out inside the book by the battle between Shem and Shaun, in which Shaun is the Order Principle. Whether it is the telegraph, first used to play chess and other games {15A}; the radio, the province of amateur ‘ham’ operators in its primary stage of development, who communicated for the love of communicating {17A}; or the internet, with its initial anarchic frontier atmosphere {23A}, Shaun will steal them all from Shem, appropriating the medium as he does the message, and use them to establish control and hierarchy.
Holding to the concept of order as it applies to information, we see Shaun taking a hard line against freedom of speech: “I am all of me for freedom of speed but who’ll disasperaguss Pope’s Avegnue or who’ll uproose the Opian Way?”(448) Unchanneled openness of information leads to the kind of disorder represented by the Great Schism in 1309, in which Pope Clement V moved the papacy to Rome—disorder that brings about a decline of Shaunian authority as it did for papal authority. Shaun notes that incest is only allowed “in Deuterogamy as in several places of Scripture (copyright) and excluded books (they should quite rightly verbanned be)”(537) putting himself on the side of censorship….
…and author’s rights. That the freedom of speech does not include the freedom to print someone else’s books and give them away for free is rarely mentioned, but interesting nonetheless. Shaun is right in thinking that nothing productive will be achieved in a state of complete anarchy. The unbridled explosion of disorder in information will only lead to white noise, static. {17D}
E. Shaun sees Shem’s/Joyce’s “root language” as “making act of oblivion”(424). In relation to himself, he is right; Shem is the Disorder Principle, as important as Shaun in the creation of the Wake, but not more so. Shem destroys Shaun’s stable order—linguistically, the linear, typographic order of official English, the language imposed on Celtic James. In its place, he puts the kind of network structure we have been trying to ‘grok’ here. As any departure from an established linguistic system of probability (often) leads to an increase in the signifying potential of the deviating message, Shem provides the chaos that gives birth to Zarathustra’s dancing star.
F. But the increase in meaning is in relation to the established system, as contingent upon it as student revolutionaries are on mean and nasty university administrators to give them something to rebel against. Shaun is the necessary background against which Shem’s noise becomes art. In time they become indistinguishable, as their contrary principles unite. Student revolutionaries major in education to kick out the jams from the inside, and twenty years and thirty pounds later they are the mean and nasty university administrators for the next generation of glass-smashing Shems.
I once thought that Shaun could be aligned with Freud’s thanatos or death principle, and Shem with eros or the urge towards life, but have since realized that these categories are too tidy. The most profound insight of Beckett’s “Dante….Bruno….Vico….Joyce” essay is that Joyce’s circular purgatory, in contrast to Dante’s teleological purgatory, is purgatorial “In the absolute absence of the Absolute”. There is no unrelieved viciousness (Hell), or unrelieved immaculation (Heaven). Either of these is stasis, and stasis is death. Purgatory is life, and life is in the fluctuation, the fecund proliferation of matter and meaning from the interaction of opposites whose roots intermingle in the soil of Totality. Beyond the stratosphere, in the biosphere, around the datasphere of Finnegans Wake.
33
A.
“The great fact emerges that after that historic date all holographs so far exhumed initialled by Haromphrey bear the sign H.C.E….”(32)
Normal photographs are made by using the ordinary light reflected from objects to burn patterns into photosensitive chemicals on a piece of film, and then enlarging and reversing that negative image, burning it into a piece of photosensitive paper, and chemically ‘fixing’ it. It is an explicit, or explicate representation; with differing degrees of accuracy, you can match up one square inch of the picture with a corresponding area of the object depicted, in a one-to-one isomorphism. {10A}
Holograms are different. Created with coherent laser light, they are the result of an interference pattern between the laser light that is bounced off an object (think Shem) and the laser light of the reference beam which is not (think Shaun). This pattern is burned into a holographic plate, in a process not unlike the regular photographic process—but holograms are three-dimensional, not two-dimensional, and in the compression of three dimensions into two dimensions, a holographic representation becomes implicate. There is no immediate, one-to-one correspondence between its explicit, two-dimensional pattern and the object it represents {4E}. Looked at from the wrong angle, a hologram is meaningless, appearing to be nothing but amorphous ripple patterns. The information corresponding to the original object is coded into the hologram, and needs to be decoded, or explicated, by light of the right kind being bounced off its surface at the right angle.
The buried, coded information of the “holocryptogram”(546) has interesting properties. It collapses three dimensions into two in such a manner that all three can be retrieved again by someone who understands the hologram’s ‘outer code’. Moreover, each portion of the hologram contains all the information necessary to recreate the entire 3-D image—as does each piece of a piece, and so on, in an exhibition of self-similarity {21D}. A broken hologram will show you the same picture as an unbroken one; the difference is in the resolution of the image, and the number of angles from which it can be seen. The whole hologram is in sharper focus than one of its parts; in the whole, the object is visible from many different perspectives. {3C}
B. The hologram is a global system—one in which information is stored evenly throughout the system, and in which any part of the system contains a condensation of the whole. The hologram may be the first man-made global system, but the global nature of many natural systems was clear to philosophers as far back as Anaxagoras (500-548 B.C.). Thanks to the archival efforts of Simplicitus (the Roman Jostein Gaardner), we have fragments of Anaxagoras’s thought:
“Together were all things, infinite both in quantity and in smallness—for the small too was infinite.”
“For in everything there is present a share in everything.”
Joyce knew of “Inexagoras”(155), as he knew of Bruno, who (in Bruno’s own words) “illuminated those who could not see their own image in the innumerable mirrors of reality which surround them on every side”. He also knew of fellow illuminator Blake’s Infinity in a Grain of Sand and Eternity in and Hour—spatial and temporal holography. Whether or not he knew of the apparent equipotentiality of the brain, he had a solid practical and historical understanding of the global distribution of knowledge around a complex network system—the only way to organize vast associational clusters of information for rapid access, and (in conjunction with sufficient redundancy) the best way to protect that information and insure its transmission {9E}. It is difficult to forget the omnipresent.
C.
“Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word.”(614)
Global dissemination of information appears before the Wake in Ulysses, where tiny details like Bloom’s potato, his cake of soap, Alf Bergan’s joke on Breen, and the Ascot horse race are thinly spread throughout Dublin on June 16, 1904. A piece of globally-present information like the occurrence of the Ascot race is always virtually present in the minds of the characters, and the reader; they are part of the semantic storehouse of the city on that day. It is only when they are unfolded from that implicate order that they appear in the text—that is to say, in ‘actuality’.
The repetition and variation mentioned elsewhere gives ample evidence of the global nature of Finnegans Wake. {9A} The most striking example, however, lies in one of Matthew Hodgart’s findings:
“Hodgart demonstrates that the Macbeth act five, scene five soliloquy…is echoed almost entire, as is Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ monologue, but each is scattered and strung out through the text of the Wake.”
If a Joycean version of the entire Macbeth soliloquy was localized on a single page, the reader who did not read through the Wake’s entire text (probably a very large majority of the set of Wake readers) would risk missing it. Not in a global system, though; anyone reading a significant portion of the Wake who is familiar with Macbeth will catch a reference, and note the presence of the play in the book’s microcosmic universe.
D. Following in Blake’s feetstoops, Joyce’s semantic hologram extends to four dimensions, asserting the embryonic presence of every historical moment in every other. This kind of globality or nonlocality comes closer to the nonlocality described by quantum physics {31B}, which depicts instantaneous action at a distance which seems like a violation of the “light barricade”(349) set up by Einstein (for complex reasons, it is not). Bell’s Theorem, named after Irish physicist John Bell, predicts that according to the precepts of quantum physics, two particles which come in contact continue to have an influence over one another, even when separated. The Alain Aspect experiment, conducted in 1981, verified Bell’s Theorem, as have several others.
Replace ‘particle’ with ‘lexeme’, and the above becomes a description of aspects of the Wake. The cross-book effects of one word on another many pages away are made without traveling respected narrative lines, violating the Special Relativity of literature. Without the annoying persistence of physical laws to trouble him in his creation, Joyce found a way to express 4-D space-time on the flat page. Careful consideration of the qualities of four dimensional space/space-time will lead to the conclusion that 4-D mobility allows one to get from point A to point B without covering the space in-between.
34
A.
“…the infinite is principle and element of the things that exist…it is neither water nor any of the other so-called elements but some different infinite nature, from which all the heavens and the worlds in them come into being. And the things from which existing things come into being are also the things into which they are destroyed, in accordance with what must be.”
—Anaximander of Miletus (610-540 B.C.) {4H}
The network is invoked approximately fifty-nine times between chapter 1 and this very point in the text, but there is a sense in which it is a misleading image. The networks depicted through word and image in these pages often give an impression of being comprised of discrete particulars connected to one another through one-dimensional ‘link’ pathways, like a beaded-seat-cover of Leibnizian monads. This is a reduction through which one can make a good deal more sense of Finnegans Wake than is possible with more traditional methods of interpretation, but it is still incomplete, like the physical description of the world as a collection of indivisible atoms. The atoms do not exist as indestructible islands, unrelated to one another; and neither do the words in the Wake. Their connection is really inextricable interpenetration, each participating in the (non)substance of the other.
B. Finnegans Wake actually possesses a quality of “unbroken wholeness” {10B}, a term David Bohm and B.J. Hiley use to describe the common ground of quantum mechanics and relativity, two systems that in other ways mutually exclude one another. Perhaps the term ‘field’ is a better one than ‘network’ to describe a continuous whole which contains various harmonizing and clashing domains within its boundaries.
The ‘field’ of General Number Theory (from which the ‘field’ concept in literary criticism was borrowed), which Kenner describes as “a collection of elements, and a system of laws for dealing with those elements” is almost what I am talking about, but not exactly. The infinitude of real numbers aside, the use of the term ‘elements’ connotes divisibility and separateness. It is unarguable, I admit, that a person can do what Clive Hart did in his Concordance, and break the Wakedown into its individual elements, its lexemes (even if some of them are a hundred letters long). But it is also possible for a person to separate every cell of an earthworm from every other cell; this will not necessarily uncover the ultimate substrata of the earthworm’s being. The ‘wormness’ of the worm is in the synergy of all its cells, working together. And so with the Wake. {1E}
The mathematical definition of ‘field’ can be salvaged, if we accept a level of uncertainty in each ‘element’ that we cannot penetrate beneath without branching out into other ‘elements’—an ‘unbroken wholeness’ on the lowest level of the Wake’s communication, in other words. The ‘laws’, in this case, are the various methodologies such as ‘AASB’ {10A}, ‘ABSA’ {10D}, variations on a theme {9C}, globality {33B}, etc., that we have been talking about.{1B}
C. The ‘field’ in which the Wake sits most compellingly, however, is the circulating ground of Anaximander’s infinite, from which all things are born and into which they all return. This is the swirling vortex at the heart of the Wake’s most difficult middle passages, from which a lone droplet of meaning will emerge occasionally, only to be sucked back into the darkness.
It took about 2400 years for physicist David Bohm to come into being and describe Anaximander’s “some different infinite nature” more fully. Bohm’s Implicate Order is his way of perceiving the fundament of the explicate or unfolded reality that is studied by particle physicists and chemists. It is an attempt to get to the “true tree”(505) of ontology that underlies quantum epistemology. {11D}
For Bohm, the field is the fundamental reality into which the explicate realities of electrons, protons, etc. are enfolded, like a drop of ink spread to superstring thinness in a circulating, viscous fluid. They can unfold into manifestation, and re-enfold into the Implicate Order. The Implicate Order is not a ‘hidden-variable’ reestablishing a comfortable certitude over Heisenberg’s Uncertainty {31B}; it is not deterministic, but it can be described. Bohm cites the hologram as the closest analogy to the implicate order on the macro scale, with its nonlocality, its enfolded information, and the way a light source can cause forms to emerge, and sink back into enfoldment again when it is removed. {33A}
If we are willing to accept a meta-analogy, the Wake might serve as an even better example. Its globality is four-dimensional, extending through time as well as space {10D}; in the Wake, distant ‘particles’ of information are connected over spans of hundreds of pages; and like a quote of a showtune standard in the midst of a free-jazz blowout, pockets of meaning bubble forth in liquid mixed metaphors, and then burst and return to ALP’s river.
D. Those who will be going directly from here onto the next chapter will surely appreciate the necessity for dramatic tensions in any fictional narrative, critical or otherwise. For their benefit, the next chapter will be a lengthy set of contradictions and qualifications of previous points, strategically inserted before the Grand Unifying Topics on which this dissertation will end, for the purpose of building a feeling of narrative suspense.
35
A. Contradiction is indispensable in the generation of creative utterances {32C}. The extent to which much Wake criticism is lacking this crucial component is alarming, and may account for its taxidermic quality. The mistake does not bear repeating. So, for those who think my fallacies are all wrong, I will now explore contradictory options for their reading pleasure.
Onward, then, to the curmudgeonly regions.
B.
“Letter, carried of Shaun, written of Shem, brother of Shaun, uttered for Alp, mother of Shem, for Hek, father of Shaun.”(420-21)
“Well, it is partly my own, isn’t it?”(422)
—Shaun, speaking of the Letter
That the Wake is a profoundly democratic work {2B} without any single ‘authoritative reading’ is too often taken as a license for anarchy and random behavior. The confusion of ‘democracy’ and ‘anarchy’ is common enough, especially among Americans; indeed, I myself might be accused of adding to the overall amount of critical entropy with this very essay. To counter such accusations, I will briefly explain what has been already hinted at {32D}; that hierarchy, personified by Shaun, is as important to the Wake as Shem’s freedom.
“The state is concentric, man is eccentric”, as Joyce said—but the Wake must represent both. It is concentric and eccentric, like a spider’s web. Speaking of linguistic and non-linguistic signs, Jacques Derrida says that all signs “can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable.” But to apply this dictum to the Wake would be a mistake, confusing an Open Work with a closed one.
A closed work is one whose creator has not taken into account the possibility of interpretation through different paradigms, and therefore a work that is ‘open’ to any interpretation whatsoever. Derrida neatly does away with this problem by doing away with the creator; but creators are not brushed aside so easily, and here the World’s Greatest Living Philosopher shows his own Anxiety of Influence. Openness is developed “within the specific limits of a given taste”. One of the best remarks relating this truth to the Wake comes from Clive Hart:
“Anything in Finnegans Wake is indeed about anything else—but only in the last of an infinite regress of planes of meaning. The all important question, in my view, is how to get those planes of meaning in the right order, and into the right perspective.”
I do not believe there is one right perspective for the Wake, or ten. All perspectives are created equal, but some are more equal than others. There is a deep structure to the Wake based upon Vico’s historical cycles; and a massive parallelism along Vico’s lines by which the third chapter in each of the four main quarters (chapters three, seven, eleven, fifteen) is a chapter of trial, and the fourth one of resurrection. Book I is a reflection of Book III in the mirror of Book II.
All of these things must be taken into account when considering the Wake as a whole. We wander freely in its maze—freely, that is, with the exception of the maze walls:
“You cannot use the text as you want, but only as the text wants you to use it. An open text, however ‘open’ it be, cannot afford whatever interpretation.”
C. ‘The death of the book’ is a phrase that has gained an increased currency of late, and suffers from concomitant inflation. It can be heard in conversations about the electronic word and hypertext, where it is often ritually recited. As a precursor to hypertext, the Wake is sometimes presented as the first shovel-full of dirt on the grave. But Donald Theall sees that:
“Joyce foresees the transformation (not the death) of the book—going beyond the book as it had historically evolved….[to] resituate the book within this new communicative cosmos.”
In response to Sven Birkerts’ premature obituary for literature, The Gutenberg Elegies, (ironically named) historian of the printed word Elizabeth Eisenstein notes in her essay “The End of the Book?” that film and TV were supposed to finish the book off in the sixties. It was one such prediction among many; she cites many past instances where individuals as noteworthy as Thomas Paine and Oswald Spengler predicted that newspapers would drum books out of business. They did not; the Wake did not; electronic media did not; more books were sold last year than in any previous year in mankind’s history. {12E}
“The feeling of being ‘in the midst of an epoch-making transition’ serves to link our generation with several that have gone before”, Eisenstein says. Or several thousand. As Before, So Again. {10D}
D. The death of the book is not apocalyptic to all; to some, it is a consummation devoutly to be wished for the betterment of mankind. Authors on hypertext {23A} “assume that the technology is essentially democratizing”, as Thomas Paine assumed of newspapers two hundred years ago. Utopian World’s Fair talk about the promise of the new, the non-hierarchical, the interactive stories where no domineering author pushes the reader around the narrative like a bully is widespread.
We would do well to remember what came of most of the futurist predictions made at the last World’s Fair. Human beings have always been hierarchical creatures; it is one of the only human qualities which manifests itself in every group of people, in every age. They like Shem’s freedom, but they also crave Shaun’s order—and nowhere more so than in the stories whose primary function is to forge a pattern of meaning from chaotic experience.
Without strict, dehumanizing hierarchies, multinational corporations {26B} would not exist—those legal-fictional entities which can afford to spend the several billion dollars it costs to build a state-of-the-art microchip factory whose output is the bedrock of hypertext. Without the sponsorship of Harriet Shaw Weaver, Finnegans Wake would not exist. And without hierarchy and order-imposed-from-outside in story-telling, stories would cease to fulfill their primary function. {11A}
Science fiction author Bruce Sterling, editor of the Mirrorshades cyberpunk anthology and author of The Difference Engine with William Gibson, is without a doubt one of the premier living traders in narrative futures. He has pole position in the race to write the Great Hypertext Novel—but he doesn’t want to. He believes that “basically, hypertext doesn’t work as entertainment, because a story with multiple possible endpoints lacks any thematic content or dramatic catharsis.” (I agree more with the second item than the first.) Of the Great Hypertext Novel, he says:
“Hypertext has been around for quite some time now and there has yet to be a truly significant artistic work created for this format. The way I figure it, it ain’t ever gonna happen.”
A naysayer? Yes—but also a man extremely knowledgeable in the fields of literature, technology and politics. His opinion merits consideration.
Joshua Wexler, a Hollywood producer and vocal advocate of technology, knows as well as anyone the role computers can play in creating Bruno’s infinite worlds for everyone to see. But as for the democratically chosen plot twists of interactive film:
“Don’t think it will ever work in movie theaters. You want to go to a movie where Gus the leper sitting next to you is going to be a part of the decisions behind the direction of the film you paid to see? I don’t think so.”
Perhaps these remarks douse the flame of tech-enthusiasm which threatens any discussion of future possibility. And perhaps they explain why almost nobody reads Finnegans Wake.
E.
“The death of the author is a trope, and a rather pernicious one; the life of the author is a quantifiable entity.”
—Harold Bloom
What may save Finnegans Wake from the obscurity and lack of readership augured in the section above is the expert control Joyce maintains over the text at all times. Openness and interactivity aside, if you think Joyce is really inviting you into an equal partnership with the ‘text’ of Finnegans Wake while he sits back and pairs his fingernails, you are sadly mistaken. “I overstand you, you understand”(444), he says through Shaun, never truly relinquishing control. You are in his maze.
G. In this section devoted to intra-essay contradiction, we now come to Joyce’s Project—the motivation behind the pained lengths to which he went to swallow reality intact. It is really nothing new, for the reader who has read uninterrupted to this point; the answer to the Why of the Wake is spread globally {33B} throughout this enquiry into the How, especially in the sections devoted to the Universal Isomorphism and the Anxiety of Influence. To say it bluntly:
Joyce (aka Herr Satan) aspired to a position of Godhood. He longed to replace the Creation with his own, and become an Unmoved Mover, the sole living figure who escaped the snares of Indra’s Net. {30B}
Joyce took Bruno’s haughtiness to heart: “Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God: for the like is not intelligible save to the like.” His first play, A Brilliant Career, is dedicated “To My own Soul”. The explanation of why he could never write a great play is tacit in Portrait of the Artist: a dramatist has to empty all of himself into his characters. The epic mode, in which the artist broods upon himself as center in relation to others, was Joyce’s domain. Atherton comes close to the Joycentric vision when he says that Joyce saw himself as “poet and prophet, and his work as the sacred book of a new religion”, but he is too cautious to take the final step.
I do not make these suggestions in the spirit of naive literalism; I present the God Complex as the unavoidable, half-hidden implication of all that Joyce was trying to do in Finnegans Wake. Cataloguing, encompassing, mirroring the world as it was according to the deepest descriptions of reality’s fabric—Joyce did not underestimate the Creator. He marveled in the intricacy of Creation.
But his distaste for servitude was extreme, even more extreme than his passion for complex patterns. How to wonder through mimetic castles of beauty and proportion, without being a vassal to the King of the castle? There was only one solution.
Unlike the last to cry ‘Non Serviam!’, Joyce would not make the mistake of storming Heaven. He was a trickster, he would pretend to empty himself from his works while ransacking Kabbalah {8A} and alchemy {10A} and modern physics {28A} {31A}, and taking snapshots of the Creator’s blueprints to use in the construction of own edifice. ‘Refining yourself out of existence’ was a ruse to get Shakespeare and Literature and God the Father to look the other way. When they all turned back around, it would be to find that Joyce the Creator had become King of the Castle than James Built on the rubble of Jehovah’s. They would have no choice but to concede that ‘that girl at the next table’ was a marionette, that Joyce was pulling her strings. And theirs. {24B}
In the end, Joyce fell into the archetypal story-arc of the Rebel that he knew all-too-well. He underestimated the power of God’s Creation— a creation which included duodenal ulcers—and was cast into heaven. Maybe, though, for at least a few moments before he died, he knew the lofty joy of the Man Who Scrawled the World. I would like to think so.
36
A. It exceedingly rare to find both Satan’s contumely and Jesus’s compassion for his fellow-traveler coexisting in the same human being with the mutual intensity with which they possessed James Joyce. Giordano Bruno may have come close; another Man Who Would Be God, he nevertheless sought to draw his opponents “in a subtly persuasive manner….as much as possible from their bigotry”, and stripped the Gospels down to their memetic essence by saying “All religious persecution and all war in the name of religion breaks the law of love.”
If one is going to say, as I did in the last section {35G}, that Joyce aspired to divinity, one has to follow it up with yet-another qualification: Joyce wanted to be the dictator of “mahamayability”(597), but only so he could wake everyone up from the nightmare. Maybe the best yardstick for his compassion is not Jesus, but the figure of the bodhishattva, who holds on to his self-hood in order that he might release all sentient beings from “Duhkha”(595), from suffering.
B. Joyce would carry this emancipation out through “The Resurrection of the Body”, to borrow the radical usage of a stock Christian phrase from scholar-seer Norman O. Brown. As is common, the Buddha put into plain language an idea that is vaguely hinted at between the words of the Bible:
“In this fathom-long carcass….I postulate the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world, and the path leading to the cessation of the world.”
The ego is a body ego; the battles fought amongst its senses recapitulate themselves up through rising expansions of scale, in conflicts between individuals and in wars between nations. Joyce’s aim was wholeness, a unification of the Two Warring Brothers that would radiate upwards and heal the shattered vessels on all levels. {8C}
But it starts with the body. The many-sided dialectic of the senses is ‘dialectical in Norman Brown’s sense of the word: “By ‘dialectical’ I mean an activity of consciousness struggling to circumvent the limitations imposed by the formal-logical law of contradiction.” Finnegans Wake is the progressive outstripping of limitations, an inward spiral whose terminus is a unified sensorium, an amalgamation of Shem and Shaun—who in the final analysis are the binary on/off yes/no thesis/antithesis more than any specific associations. Brought together in the same body, they are what McLuhan called “the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious”, and what Brown called “The human body…become polymorphously perverse, delighting in that full life of all the body which it now fears.”
Wholeness was Joyce’s preoccupation from early on; the first page of Portraitpresents a universal sensorium in incipient form:
“…his father looked at him through a glass…lemon platt…When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold…His mother had a nicer smell than his father…Uncle Charles and Dante clapped….”
In Ulysses, Bloom speaks for eros, the sublimated coming-together of heaven un-sublimated and brought back to the plain, the human, the efficient cause from which it came:
“— But it’s no use, says [Bloom]. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.
— What? says Alf.
— Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.”
Ikey Moses sees the Promised Land, and in the Wake his successor is granted entry as “Shaun Shemsen”(533), the all-in-one, “Great sinner, good sonner”(607).Beneath the multiplicity, behind the strife, at the bottom of the battle lies an implicate reintegration.
C. Harold Bloom argues that aesthetic value can be recognized, but not conveyed to those incapable of grasping it, and that “To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder.” The razor-tongue of literary criticism’s Henry VIII has sent many heads a-rolling, but I would venture to start a skirmish on Finnegans Wake’s behalf. Understanding and reveling in the Wake’s full field of frissions is understanding much else besides. And its wide-array ungulate vision has a survival-value on the predatory new-barbaric plain that might represent a ‘last chance to see’ for many jewels embedded in its network (to mix seven or eight metaphors). Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis and the illuminated manuscripts of Irish scribes {5A} served to pass on classical and biblical sources to the dark ages; Ulysses preserved a virtual 1904 Dublin for the world; is it too much to expect that Finnegans Wake may achieve similar feats of conservation with the years?
I will close this final page with a quote from Giraldus Cambrensis, the thirteenth century historian, describing the details of an illuminated manuscript he saw at Kildare circa 1185:
“If you look at them carelessly and casually and not too closely, you may judge them to be mere daubs rather than careful compositions. You will see nothing subtle where everything is subtle. But if you take the trouble to look very closely, and penetrate with your eyes to the secrets of the artistry, you will notice such intricacies, so delicate and subtle, so close together, and well-knitted, so involved and bound together, and so fresh still in their colourings that you will not hesitate to declare that all these things must have been the result of the work, not of men, but of angels.”
For the greater good of mankind, Joyce would have probably kicked the final term of Cambrensis’s commendation one rung up the Great Chain of Being in reference to Finnegans Wake. Otherwise, the description is apt.
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